Down by the Back River Light: The Sensational 1931 Murder Trial of Professor Kane

When the shadow of the Back River Light fell on Sash Kane, the scion of a Pennsylvania family, newspapers up and down the East Coast reported all the details of Elizabeth City County’s murder case of the century. The “other woman,” Kane’s autobiographical sketch, and the Dreiser novel, banned in Boston, found in Kane’s Roadster, was the stuff that sold papers. Had fiction mimicked life and, then, life mimicked fiction? Had this university professor held Jenny Kane’s “head beneath the waters of the Chesapeake Bay until she drowned,” Down by the Back River Light?