Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press (November 30, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1611178266
ISBN-13: 978-1611178265
On October 20, 1999, thirty-eight-year-old Nell Crowley Davis was
bludgeoned, strangled, and stabbed to death in the backyard of her home
in Bluffton, South Carolina, near Hilton Head Island. In My Ghost Has a
Name: Memoir of a Murder, Rosalyn Rossignol tells the story of how
Davis’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Sarah Nickel, along with the two
teenage boys, came to be charged with the armed robbery and murder.
Since no physical evidence tied Nickel to the murder, she was convicted
of armed robbery and given the same sentence as the boys―thirty years.
In the months that followed, Nickel vehemently insisted that she was
innocent.
Torn by Nickel’s pleas, Rossignol, a childhood friend of
the murder victim, committed herself to answering the question that
perhaps the police detectives, the press, and the courts had not:
whether Sarah Nickel was indeed guilty of this crime.
During five
years of research, Rossignol read case files and transcripts, examined
evidence from the crime scene, listened to the 9-1-1 call, and watched
videotaped statements made by the accused in the hours following their
arrest. She also interviewed family members, detectives, the solicitor
who prosecuted the case, the lawyers who represented the defendants, and
the judge who tried the case, as well as Nickel.
What Rossignol
uncovers is a fascinating maze of twists and turns, replete with a
memorable cast of characters including a shotgun-toting grandma, a
self-avowed nihilist and Satan-worshipper, and a former Rice Queen of
Savannah, Georgia. Unlike all previous investigators, Rossignol has
uncovered the truth about what happened, and the reasons why, on that
fateful October day.