Earl W. Truitt, 48, male, was a deputy sheriff in Walker County who went out on May 20, 1919, near the small community of Empire, Alabama, following the kind of lead that was common in that era’s countryside: illicit liquor. In the area known as Drummond’s Switch, he was drawn toward property tied to a moonshine operation, and the trip turned into a trap.
He was shot and killed in the ambush, cut down in a rural place where help was distant and witnesses were few, and the people responsible had enough time and familiarity with the land to make his disappearance look like silence itself.
After the gunfire, the killing was hidden rather than explained. According to later reporting, Truitt’s body was placed in a shallow grave in the woods, where it stayed for years while suspicion drifted without proof and the case cooled in the open air. The man later identified as the killer was Monroe Hill, described as a farmer, and the motive in his confession was blunt: he said he killed the deputy sheriff because Truitt had revealed Hill’s moonshine still after promising protection to Hill and his sons. For a long stretch, no one was said to have seen the burial, and no one openly accused Hill, yet Hill carried the private weight of what he had done, haunted by the image of Truitt’s gold teeth.
The break did not come from a dramatic manhunt so much as a strange twist of fear and rumor. Hill learned that “gold seekers” with so-called divining rods had arrived in the county—people believed to be able to sense valuables beneath the ground. The idea that such a rod might pause over a hidden corpse because of dental gold unnerved him enough to act. He dug up the body, removed the teeth, and buried Truitt again, trying to erase the last glint that might betray the grave. Instead, that second concealment became the thread investigators could finally pull: the new grave was discovered, Hill was arrested, and he ultimately confessed.
The case, once a disappearance wrapped in brush and uncertainty, ended in court. Hill was tried for Truitt’s slaying and received a life sentence. Even after conviction, the account of the crime lingered in the details—an officer lured into danger, a body kept from daylight for years, and a killer undone not by a witness at the scene but by the creeping dread that the ground itself might give up its secret.
