One cold February morning in 1913, a 64-year-old woman known as Nance Dude led her granddaughter, Roberta Putnam, out of their home in western North Carolina and up the side of a mountain. She returned without the child later that day. What could drive an old woman to murder her granddaughter? Maurice Stanley has reconstructed the sad, dark story of Nance Dude from newspaper articles, court and prison records, and talks with mountain people who either remember Nance's crime or learned of it from their elders.