For most of its history, Mechanics Grove was a quiet, unassuming community amid the rolling farmlands of Lancaster County. But things changed in 1935, when authorities went searching for a missing Maryland woman and uncovered a "hospital of horror" inside a farmhouse owned by a disreputable, drug-addicted physician known as as Doc Zimmerly.

For most of his 63 years on earth, Hugh Smith was a respected resident of Liberty Valley. Hugh owned 380 acres of land in Perry County, and he earned a handsome living renting out his lands to sawmill operators. And for 28 of those years, the respectable Hugh Smith may have carried with him the belief that he had gotten away with the perfect murder-- of a young "half-witted" woman known to locals as Crazy Lindy.

During the Great Depression, there lived in Fayette County a mountain man named Iley Tate who ruled the hill country between Haydentown to the West Virginia line like a feudal lord. Tate, a father of 20, had amassed considerable wealth as a livestock trader, and, because of his influence and steel-cold demeanor, he had a number of local lawmen and politicians in his hip pocket. Like many powerful men in similiar positions, Iley Tate came to think of himself as untouchable; but this was an illusion that came to a shattering end in the fall of 1932.

This is the story of Iley and the Tate family-- a family notorious for feuding, fighting, fornicating... and committing the occasional murder.