An Act of Kindness

by Chuck Hustmyre

Book Overview

Genore Guillory was one of the most generous souls in her Louisiana community. And she would pay for it. Her shocking mutilation and murder revealed a festering, small-town evil that betrayed the promise of a good life spent in God's country.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0425213420
• ISBN13: 9780425213421
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: Berkley Books
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 4.3" x 6.8"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

The Bubba Culture

Chuck Hustmyre's true crime book, AN ACT OF KINDNESS, has as its framework the impossibly savage murder in Clinton, LA, of a kind middle aged black woman, Genore Guillory, by four drugged out, mean, and totally useless young white acquaintances. Two of these animals, Phillip Skipper and his wife, Amy, lived across the rural road from Guillory's house. The "act of kindness" referred to in the title is that Guillory provided work for Skipper, gave presents to the family, and actually loaned them a few thousand dollars so they could by a better trailer than the mobile slum they had been living in. Hustmyre presents one of the main reasons for the murder as the tradition of racism in southeastern Louisiana, and while this doubtless made the killing easier, the main reason for the murder seems to have been outright greed. Genore Guillory had cared enough about the Skippers that she had named them as beneficiaries of a $25,000 life insurance policy she had at work. I refer to Guillory's murder as a framework, because the book is as least at much about what Hustmyre calls that area of the south's "Bubba culture". The Skippers and their cohorts - Johnny Hoyt; his wife Lisa, Phillip's sister; and John Baillio, a pathetic 16 year old who lived with the Skippers and who served as a victim of Phillip's sexual, mental, and physical abuse - were enthusiastic and continual abusers of any substance they could obtain. They were also drug dealers, thieves, murderers - and not only of Guillory - grave robbers, and in at least one instance when Phillip raped Genore Guillory's corpse, necrophiliacs. These were people who had sex with any and everybody, who left their spouses casually and temporarily to live with other partners, and who had random children whose paternity was not known or considered important. These were people so mean, violent, and stupid that they were a danger to everyone in the area including the large percentage of the population who were pretty much like them. Hustmyre depicts the region as a frightening hotbed of venal ignorance and casual cruelty, and ultimately the best way I can describe the murderers and their ilk - the Bubba culture - is that they are the kind of people whom average white trailer trash would consider abysmal contemptible white trailer trash. Besides Hustmyre's brilliant picture of this societal underbelly, AN ACT OF KINDNESS encompasses the investigation, capture, and trial of the killers. And along the way the reader gets an interesting look at the history of racism in southeast Louisiana. Hustmyre's research and writing ability are outstanding. The book is fast paced with no filler, padding, or repetition. And the pictures are great too, with one glaring inexplicable exception: there are NO pictures of the victim, Genore Guillory. This is the second of Hustmyre's books I have read recently, the other being MURDERER WITH A BADGE which is at least as good as this one. In my veteran true-crime-reading opinion, Hustmyre is

The Heart of Darkness

"No act of kindness goes unpunished" might be an alternative title for this explosive and meticulously researched book. It is a fast-paced indictment of the festering Bubba subculture in southeastern Louisiana, a subculture engulfed in ignorance, seething hatred and extreme violence. In the midst of one such backwoods garden of evil lived a woman who was virtually a paragon of goodness, Jane Nora Guillory, affectionately known as Genore. She was a professional woman of color with comfortable means who worked for a local insurance office. A loving and generous woman, Genore took into her heart and her care some thirty forgotten dogs, kenneling them along with the horses that she owned. She distinguished herself by many selfless acts, such as providing money and work for white neighbors who were struggling financially. It was all the more shocking that this lovely forty-two-year-old woman would be raped and murdered in an act of unthinkable cruelty. But who would do such a thing and why? The community was unprepared for the answer. Hustmyre, a writer with 22 years in law enforcement and retired federal agent, deftly takes the reader through the intimate twists and turns of the investigation. The reader can easily feel the frustrations of a dedicated sheriff's department that had solved the unsolvable, only to find that the DA that wanted to dismiss charges against the white supremacists responsible for her death.