Bobo Marchant

Bobo Marchant was a hound-dog handler from Trapingus County, a man whose hands were the most educated part of him, according to Paul Edgecombe, who had known a few such men in his time and found them remarkably true to type. Marchant was called into the search for the missing Detterick twins by Deputy Rob McGee, who knew that Marchant kept dogs and could track. When McGee reached Marjorie Detterick by telephone, he told her to stay put and said, "I'll call Bobo Marchant. He's got dogs." Marchant arrived with six dogs in total: two bloodhounds, two bluetick hounds, and a couple of terrier-like mongrels that border Southerners call coon hounds. The dogs led the posse through two miles of scrub pine, always on the same rough northwest heading, until they came out on the edge of the Trapingus River. There, in a wide trampled patch of grass and low bushes so bloody that many of the men had to sprint back into the woods to relieve themselves of their breakfasts, the dogs had their first and only disagreement of the day. The coon hounds wanted to go northwest, upstream along the Trapingus; the rest wanted to go in the other direction, southeast. They got all tangled in their leads, and Marchant rained down curses on them as he used his hands to get them straightened around again. He short-leashed them into a pack, then ran Cora Detterick's torn nightgown under their noses to remind them what they were doing out on a day when the temperature would be in the mid-nineties by noon and the noseeums were already circling the heads of the possemen in clouds. The coon hounds took another sniff, decided to vote the straight ticket, and off they all went downstream in full cry. It was not ten minutes later when the men stopped, realizing they could hear more than just the dogs—a howling rather than a baying, a sound no dog had ever made, a sound that was a man. Marchant short-leashed his dogs again; they were valuable, and he had no intention of losing them to the psychopath howling and gibbering just down yonder. The men reloaded their guns and snapped them closed, and McGee led them forward. On the other side of a stand of alders, they found John Coffey sitting on the riverbank, holding the bodies of the two dead girls in his arms. The lunch that Coffey had been carrying, wrapped in newspaper and tied with butcher's twine, ended up with Marchant, who put it in his knapsack where he kept treats for his dogs and a few fishing lures. It was not introduced into evidence at the trial, though photographs of it were. The coon hounds' initial desire to go upstream, away from where Coffey was found, later became a key piece of evidence for Paul Edgecombe in his private investigation, suggesting that the real killer had fled in that direction and that Coffey had come upon the scene from downstream after the crime was committed.