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AN ACT OF KINDNESS
by Chuck Hustmyre
Berkley, March 2007
320 pages
$7.99
ISBN: 0425213420


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

In the year 2000, Genore Guillory was a single woman working for BlueCross and BlueShield in Clinton, Louisiana. She lived alone five miles north of Clinton in a well-kept Arcadian-style home on a dead-end gravel road called Oakwood Lane. Genore’s boyfriend had recently been killed in a traffic accident on his way home from work, but she had family in nearby towns and was loved and admired by her friends at work.

Genore was known as a person who would do anything for a friend in need. She was also an animal lover who cared for thirty stray dogs in a kennel on her property along with two pastured horses. Genore’s life revolved around her family, her animals, and friends. It was only her friends who betrayed her.

A few years earlier, Phillip and Amy Skipper had moved into a beat-up old trailer across the road from Genore. The Skippers had a toddler son and a teenaged stepson named John Baillio. Genore and Amy became friends, with Genore doing favors for Amy, shopping for her, throwing a birthday party for her little boy, even giving Amy a key to her house so that the young wife, who was phoneless at home, could call her family whenever she wanted. Distressed by their living conditions, Genore even loaned the Skippers $8000 for a new mobile home. She later named them as beneficiaries on a life insurance policy.

In return for her kindness, Phillip Skipper mowed Genore’s lawn and occasionally fed her horses and dogs. Skipper was polite to Genore to her face, but behind her back, he called her “that nigger woman”. Skipper was certainly not the person Genore thought him to be. Raised by a father who was serving a life sentence for murder and a mother who thought little of the law, Skipper was a drug user and dealer who raped and tortured his stepson.

Skipper hung out with Johnny Hoyt, an equally cruel man married to Skipper’s sister Lisa, a woman who slept with anyone and everyone she knew. Skipper and Hoyt formed what they called The Brotherhood. Along with Lisa and John Baillio, the two men robbed graves for whiskey and drug money, dealt drugs to anyone who’d buy them, and generally broke every law in the book. It was after an evening of drug and alcohol use that the four of them broke into Genore Guillory’s house and shot, stabbed, and beat to the woman to death, after which they raped her.

Chuck Hustmyre chronicles the five-year struggle by Louisiana’s East Feliciana Parish police to bring Genore’s killers to justice. It’s a sad tale of greed, stupidity, and long-held racial hatred. Hustmyre recalls the past history of Louisiana, especially the 'piney woods' area of the state where poverty is as rampant as inbreeding and political shenanigans are not unusual. A predominantly white section of the state, this is the area where the KKK once ruled, and more recently, David Duke stirred up hatred with his talk of white supremacy.

Skipper and Hoyt are men who have little regard for human life of any kind and killed people with impunity. The murder of Genore Guillory was not their first, but it was horrendous due to the sheer brutality of the killing, the multiple wounds inflicted on the woman, and the lack of any contrition on the part of any of the four people involved.

Fortunately for all of us, justice was meted out to the quartet in 2005. Unfortunately, people who share their mentality still roam free in the piney woods – and in other areas of this country. They are the ones retired ATF agent Chuck Hustmyre tries to educate us about in this compelling and well-written tale of law and order in rural America.

Reviewed by Mary V. Welk, March 2007

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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