Plot
The miniseries is set in the fictional town of Delano, Georgia, which appears to be loosely based on Manchester, Georgia, situated at the base of Pine Mountain. The story begins in 1924 as town patriarch Hugh Holmes (Charlton Heston), whose character intermittently narrates the story, decides that the town has grown large enough to require a jail and a full-time police officer. Shortly after the town appoints failed farmer Will Henry Lee (Wayne Rogers) its first police chief, the townspeople become alarmed by a series of disappearances of young men and boys. The story follows three generations of Delano police chiefs - Will Henry Lee (Rogers), Sonny Butts (Brad Davis), and Tyler Watts (Billy Dee Williams) - as they investigate the crimes. Upright lawman Will Henry Lee is the first to discover that well-to-do loner "Foxy" Funderburke (Keith Carradine) is responsible for the crimes, but he is mistakenly shot by a delirious man before he can arrest the well-regarded local. Funderburke hovers in the background while the dying Lee tries to gasp out the truth about Funderburke's guilt, but Lee's wife fails to understand. Despite the feverish delirium that caused him to believe that the police chief was trying to kill his son, the man who shot Lee is executed because he is a black man.
Now again free from suspicion, Funderburke continues a decades long spree of sexually motivated murders. Shortly after World War II, crooked and violent police chief Sonny Butts, appointed to the post because he is a war hero, also figures out Funderburke's guilt, just as town father Holmes tells Butts he is about to take his badge due to a series of depredations culminating in Butts's murder of a Medgar Evers-like figure. Sure that solving the murder mystery will save his job, Butts goes to Funderburke's land and catches him in the very act of burying his latest victim. But as Butts chortles over his victory, letting down his guard, Funderburke strikes Butts with the shovel in his hands and buries his body on the spot—along with his police motorcycle. No one makes the connection between the disappearance of Butts and the long-unsolved murders.
Running parallel to the continual investigation is the story of Chief Lee's son, Billy. A young boy at the time of his father's death, Billy Lee becomes a lawyer and, boldly for the time and place, a liberal. He enters politics, and by the time Tyler Watts becomes Delano's chief, in 1962, Billy Lee is garnering national attention. He supports the controversial hiring of Watts, who he and everyone else assumes is a newcomer to Delano. Billy Lee does not recognize Watts as his boyhood friend, son of the man who shot his father, as the child fled the town following the shooting and assumed another name. Despite Lee's support, Watts is wary lest the increasingly powerful man discover his true identity. Yet Watts, too, uncovers the truth of Funderburke's guilt. On Funderburke's land, having looked in vain for evidence of the crimes, one of the men accompanying Watts trips over the jutting handlebar of Sonny's buried motorcycle. As the men begin digging up the dirt with their bare hands, Funderburke goes for his shotgun, wounds Watts, and then is immediately shot to death himself, thus escaping a public reckoning for four decades of murders. Aged town father Holmes grieves for his town as the bodies of young boy after young boy are unearthed from the ground surrounding Funderburke's house (evoking the discovery of the bodies of the victims of John Wayne Gacy). Watts, however, is now an acknowledged hero, and he decides to tell Billy Lee who he really is.
Warm Springs is the site of the vacation home of the late Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and a state park bearing his name is located on Pine Mountain. In this story, Foxy Funderburke resides on Pine Mountain, and presumably the name of the town of Delano alludes to President Roosevelt's nearby summer home.
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Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)