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Author Talk

"Solving the Maud Crawford Puzzle" by Beth Brickell

Beth Brickell, author, film director, and former actress from Los Angeles, will give a talk about the solved Maud Crawford mystery that occurred in Camden in 1957.

"All that is left unfinished is to excavate Maud's remains," Brickell said.

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Maud Crawford's disappearance in Camden on March 2, 1957 is the most widely publicized mystery in Arkansas history. Crawford was an attorney and prominent civic leader in Camden who had been an associate of U.S. Senator John McClellen before he was elected to the senate in 1942. She disappeared from her home on a cold, rainy, foggy Saturday night for no apparent reason. No body, clue, trace or motive was found by the original police investigation.

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At the time of Crawford's disappearance, Senator McClellan was the number one news story in newspapers and television screens throughout the world as chairman of a senate committee investigating alleged mob ties to organized labor. Senator McClellan and his general counsel Robert Kennedy were grilling labor leaders such as Jimmy Hoffa on a daily basis. The initial theory in the Maud Crawford case was that the Mafia had kidnapped Senator McClellan's former associate to intimidate him into backing off his investigation. But when no ransom note appeared and Senator McClellan assured law enforcement officers that the Mafia wouldn't dare try to intimidate him, the theory was dropped.

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Other theories about her disappearance were developed but none were proved and the case was declared "at a dead end" after two weeks.

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In 1985, Beth Brickell returned to her former hometown of Camden with the intention of writing a screenplay for a movie about the interesting mystery. She learned within a week that the case had not been properly investigated and that townspeople were frightened to talk about it.

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Having a journalism background, she spent the next 16 months investigating the case. She revealed her findings in a 19-article investigative series that was published on the front page of the Arkansas Gazette in 1986 over a five-month period. Especially sensational was her discovery that the wealthiest man in Camden who also was a state police commissioner had the only motive to murder Maud Crawford.

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Brickell has written four books about the case and will offer her newest book, "Solving the Maud Crawford Puzzle," at the talk.

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About the author:

Brickell, a former actress, starred in the popular CBS family series, "Gentle Ben," in the late 1960s opposite Dennis Weaver. In the 1970s, she guest-starred in many other series episodes, TV movies and motion pictures before entering film school to become a director. As a filmmaker she has filmed two TV movies in Arkansas, "Summer's End" in Clarendon and "Mr. Christmas" in Eureka Springs. Both films were initially broadcast on PBS and are now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. The two movies won a total of 18 film festival and television awards.

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