The Shooter at Midnight: Murder, Corruption, and a Farming Town Divided

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The harrowing true story of a cold-blooded murder and its tragic aftermath-and the stunning revelations that would emerge decades later On a cold November night in 1990, an intruder entered Cathy and Lyndel Robertson's Missouri home while the couple and their children slept. Leaving the safe full of cash undisturbed, the person snuck into the main bedroom and fired at point-blank range, killing Cathy and injuring Lyndel. The investigation that followed swept up the entire region in a hunt for the killer. But police resources quickly ran low, and soon the Robertson case was in the hands of a private eye whose interests were dangerously wrapped up in a local business dispute and shady politics. In a town still recovering from the farming crisis of the 1980s, bonds were frayed and neighbors turned on each other. The wrong young man ended up with four life sentences, and the initial suspect-the boyfriend of Cathy and Lyndel's eldest daughter-would be largely forgotten. In a triumphant resolution that takes decades to arrive, the web of corruption and buried evidence is finally untangled when the seemingly unwinnable case is taken on by Robert Ramsey, an attorney with an independent streak and a powerful conscience. But even then, the successful appeal deepens the divides in the formerly close-knit town. The trauma left behind by the parallel tragedies of the farming crisis and the unsolved murder irreparably damages the community's way of life-and raises crucial questions about the moral code of conduct of our entire nation.

Author Bio

Sean Patrick Cooper is a journalist who has contributed narrative features and essays to The New Republic, n+1, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Baffler, Tablet, UnDark, The Atavist, The Daily Beast, Victory Journal, The Awl, and others. He received an MA in journalism at New York University, where he was a Department Fellow in the Literary Reportage Program, and a BA in English Literature from Rutgers University. This is his first book.