The Arizona Love case, in chronological order.

Thursday, October 2, 1952

Sonny Marshall is killed in Bluefield, West Virginia.

Sonny Marshall, 69, a retired brakeman for the Norfolk & Western Railway, is murdered. He had been living quietly in Bluefield, employing the same housekeeper for eight years.

Friday, October 3, 1952

A cabbage sack is found in a vacant lot.

Marshall’s body is discovered concealed in a cabbage sack in a vacant lot in Bluefield. The head is not with the body. Despite an exhaustive search at the time and in the years that followed, Sonny Marshall’s head has never been recovered.

October 1952

Arizona Harris Love is brought in for questioning.

Arizona Harris Love, 49, a Black woman who had worked as Marshall’s housekeeper for eight years, is taken into custody and questioned. The interrogation runs nine hours. She has no lawyer present. There is no psychiatric evaluation. No request for continuance is made on her behalf.

The motive prosecutors will eventually present is a dispute over $56 in unpaid wages.

Monday, January 26, 1953

Arizona Love pleads guilty to first-degree murder.

Less than four months after Marshall’s body is found, Arizona Love enters a guilty plea to first-degree murder. She is sentenced to life and sent to the Pence Springs Women’s Prison in Summers County, West Virginia.

February 1953 — less than 30 days later

Transfer to Lakin State Hospital.

In under a month, Arizona Love is transferred from Pence Springs Women’s Prison to Lakin State Hospital in Mason County, West Virginia — the institution designated, at the time, for the “colored insane.”

The transfer is one of the most-discussed elements of the case. It moves her from the corrections system to the psychiatric system without a public competency hearing on the record.

1953 onward

Arizona Love remains at Lakin State Hospital.

For more than two decades, Arizona Love is held at Lakin. During the same years, the institution itself comes under federal scrutiny. West Virginia begins desegregating its psychiatric facilities. Patients held under Arizona’s circumstances become the subject of formal review.

Meanwhile, in Bluefield and the surrounding community of Crystal, West Virginia, the Harris family — Arizona’s blind sister Pearl, and her aging mother — remain. Most of the town keeps its distance. A small number of neighbors, including Mary Smith, do not.

Tuesday, October 7, 1975

Judge Jerome Katz signs her release order.

After 22 years at Lakin, Judge Jerome Katz signs the order releasing Arizona Love. By this point she is in her early seventies.

Arizona does not leave. She asks to remain at Lakin as a volunteer, helping with the patient population she has lived among for two decades. The request is granted.

Saturday, October 18, 1980

Arizona Love dies. She is buried in the Lakin cemetery.

Five years after her release, Arizona Love dies at the age of 77. She is buried in the cemetery on the Lakin grounds, on the same land where she spent more than a quarter of her life.

Sonny Marshall’s head has still never been found.