“Ghost of the Ozarks:

Murder and Memory

in the Upland South” by Brooks Blevins (University of Illinois Press, 296 pgs., $29.95)

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Most everyone from this part of the country knows the rugged beauty of the Ozarks.

But they probably don’t know a thing about Connie Franklin. Probably never heard of him.

Shame. Franklin may have served as the template for the Ozark hillbilly. How people think of one, anyway.

The media made Franklin such back in 1929. That fall, reporters from Kansas City, Memphis and other cities traveled to little Mountain View, Ark., to cover a trial of five men accused of murdering Franklin in nearby St. James. It was their stories, according to a history professor at Missouri State University, that helped forge a stereotype that still exists today of the Ozarks and the people who live “back in them hills.”

Illiterate, drunken, violent bunch of clodhoppers — the coverage stopped just short of squeal like a pig.

“Many of the stories were sensationalized, but wire services carried them across the country,” said Brooks Blevins about his book on the trial and its lasting legacy of how people view the Ozarks today.

“Of course, some of it didn’t need exaggeration. Like the fact that, uh, the murder victim came back from the dead and testified at the trial of his killers.”

There was that.

Two days before the trial of his killers was to begin, Franklin reappeared — or was it an imposter claiming to be Franklin? The verdict is still out on that. But the arrival of the “ghost of the Ozarks” stirred things up around the Stone County Courthouse.

The trial would hear every hillbilly cliche, including “down by the mudhole,” where Franklin had taken his gal, Tillar Ruminer, 16, to court her. Newspaper accounts touched on harmonica playing, a blue calico dress, moonshine and falling off a mule.

Could have been an Ozark Opry skit. But the proceedings descended from there into what sounds today like a Coen brothers remake of “Li’l Abner.”

Franklin, an illiterate woodcutter and drifter, reportedly had escaped from a mental hospital before arriving in St. James. A witness, identified at the time as a “deaf mute,” used finger twitches to say he’d seen the killers put Franklin, still alive, onto a big, log fire. Evidence included a box of charred bones.

Tillar, or “Tillie” as Franklin called her, said she’d been sexually assaulted by the men. “Wronged me,” as she told the court. One of the men charged: Bill “Straight Eye” Younger.

As this grisly tale played out in testimony, somebody opened a refreshment stand on the courthouse steps.

William Secrist, a reporter for the Kansas City Journal-Post, wrote four front-page stories that ran on consecutive days leading up to the trial. In those stories, Blevins said, Secrist weaved a tale of feudal oppression and privilege in a land of illiteracy and violence “where Christmas had no meaning and a cabal of baronial families ruled with the hickory switch and squirrel rifle.”

Picked up by wire services, the stories, particularly the new ones of Franklin back from the dead, brought more reporters to town.

Freda Cruse Phillips, granddaughter of one of the defendants, said much of the bad coverage was the town’s plan.

“If they thought we were stupid hillbillies, they would leave us alone and go away,” she said recently from her home in Mountain View. “We didn’t want strangers coming in here and still don’t.”

Big-city reporters, she said, were easily duped.

Blevins, whose book is “Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South,” thinks the man who claimed to be Franklin was indeed Connie Franklin.

As the story goes, men in town learned that Franklin, while courting young Tillar, had a wife and kids somewhere else. They beat him up and Franklin left town only to return when needed at the trial.

The events of 1929 in Mountain View didn’t create the hillbilly image, Blevins said. That already existed through other folklore, such as moonshining and the Hatfield-McCoy feud.

“But the national publicity certainly reinforced that image and expanded it across the country,” Blevins said.

Part of the reason was the extreme poverty of the region, said Steven Teske, an archivist for the Central Arkansas Library System.

“The Great Depression was already well under way in this part of the Ozarks,” Teske said in an interview last week. “Reporters were appalled at how these people lived. Throw in this sensational tale and these characters, and that’s why this image exists still.”