Beaten, Battered and Damned: The Drano Murder Trial, Robert B. French Jr., 2017, 344 pages, Blackstone Company, $20. ISBN:1548791237. Available on Amazon.

Fort Payne lawyer Bob French was leading the good life — fine home on the brow of Lookout Mountain, twin-engine Beechcraft and a Porsche — financed by a thriving law practice.

Then on an early fall morning in 1982, 13-year-old Lisa Millican, kidnapped and raped, was marched to the edge of Little River Canyon and injected six times with liquid Drano. She writhed in pain but didn’t die. A .38 slug in the back finished the job. She was dead before her body crashed on the rocks below.

French’s good life was about to end and be changed forever. The crime shocked the quiet community known for its scenic mountains, wild river and sock-knitting mills. French’s wife, Celeste, prayed that the killer would be caught, and soon.

The confessed killer was 18-year-old Judith Ann Neelley, wife of sadist Alvin, mother of twins and pregnant again.

“This story includes horribly explicit sadism, torture, rape, kidnapping, murder, attempted murder, arson, theft, robbery, burglary, embezzlement, and forgery, among other crimes,” writes French, who tells the story in first person. “And just when you think it can’t get any worse, it gets worse.”

French, a University of Alabama Law School graduate and father of three children, had been teaching Baraca Bible Class at First Baptist for 17 years when the call came from Circuit Judge Randall Cole. Judith Neelley was in jail, indigent and needed a free lawyer. French, who had recently been appointed to defend a murderer who had killed his parents, resisted. After all, Judge Cole had reported him to the Ethics Committee of the Alabama Bar. French was exonerated. No lawyer, especially a small- town practitioner in his right mind wants such a case. It can destroy him.

“If you can’t agree to take the case, I may have to order you to take it,” said Judge Cole.

Says French, “So I became counsel for Judith Ann Neelley, one of the most hated, notorious murderers in Alabama’s history.”

As he was to learn, the sadistic murder of Lisa Millican wasn’t her first.

French, a seasoned trial lawyer with 25 years courtroom experience, takes the reader inside the case, beginning with the initial interview, investigation, preparation, strategy and trial. Pitted against experienced prosecutor, Richard Igou, French struggles to save Neelley from “Yellow Mama,” Alabama’s electric chair.

French interweaves ongoing personal drama into his story as he prepares for trial. He develops a serious eye problem caused by stress. Nightriders rock his house, protesters picket in front of his law office and hate letters arrive. His children are harassed in school, and worst of all, vicious rumors are spread that he is in love with Neelley, is having sex with her and is the father of her son. Two members of his church — “Pharisees,” he calls them — ask him to stop teaching Sunday school. His world crashes and income plummets. He loses his airplane, someone steals and wrecks his Porsche, and he is forced into bankruptcy to save his home.

And how did pretty, little, redheaded Bobbie May Mooney, whom he met in the fourth grade at Decatur and who was later head cheerleader at Auburn University and First Lady of Alabama, play a role in the case 55 years later?

The only thing lacking in French’s story is a mob at his front door holding pine torches and swinging a noose. Atticus Finch (“To Kill a Mockingbird”) never had it so easy. French has written a page-turner. I couldn’t put it down. Raw and frightening, it’s true crime at its best.

Jerry Barksdale is a retired trial lawyer from Athens, Alabama, graduating from University of Alabama School of Law in 1967. He is a founding member of the Alabama Veterans Museum and Archives, and sits on the board of directors. He is a columnist for Athens News Courier and Athens Now. His first book, “When Duty Called,” is a collection of World War II stories. He is also author of “Cornbread Chronicles”; “Duty”; “The Fuhrer Document”; “Revolutionaries and Rebels”; a historical novel; and is currently writing “Trial Within.” www.jerrybarksdale.com.