Death in Briar Bottom: The True Story of Hippies, Mountain Lawmen, and the Search for Justice in the Early 1970s

On July 3, 1972, a group of about two dozen free-spirited hippies from Clearwater, Florida, driving to a Rolling Stones concert in Charlotte, N.C., camped for the night in the mountains of western North Carolina.

After dark, with most of the young people mellowing out on one substance or another, two pickup trucks pulled up to their campsite in an area known as Briar Bottom. A group of seven men, most dressed in SWAT gear and led by Yancey County Sheriff Kermit Banks, began rousting the campers, some of whom were already asleep in their tents.

A scuffle ensued and Banks’ single barreled, sawed off, 12-gauge shotgun discharged, fatally wounding a 20-year-old man named Stanley Altland, who had organized the trip. Altland, by all accounts a mellow, affable character, had recently opened the first health food store in the Clearwater area.

At the time of the killing, Timothy Silver, the author of Death in Briar Bottom, was a 17-year-old Baptist minister’s son living 240 miles away in Raleigh. His parents had forbidden him from going to the Stones concert, to his great regret. He recalls living “the paranoid double life of a preacher’s kid turned hippie,” being a vaguely disenchanted teen, faintly political, and counter cultural.

Now a retired history professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., Silver has been waiting 50 years to write this story. During his academic career, he writes, “I promised myself that one day I would put my historian’s skills to use and investigate the incident.” For him, the killing and the aftermath “remained a deeply personal story. I could not shake the notion that something similar might easily have happened to me or my friends.”

By now, there have been enough murders in the Great Smoky and Blue Ridge Mountains, often on or near the Appalachian Trail, to almost constitute their own category of true crime books.

A clear pattern to these crimes emerges: Young people from outside Appalachia, drawn to the mountains by recreation or altruism, run afoul of local men, who kill them. The women were often raped. (Except for gender, this template tracks the novel and film Deliverance, which has left deep scars on the psyche of mountain people.)

Their survivors, along with the authors, seeking justice, are ill-served by corrupt sheriffs and lazy prosecutors.

Death in Briar Bottom, a slender new book from the University of North Carolina Press, ticks many of these culture clash boxes and is a valuable addition to the Appalachian true crime shelf.

When those living in or visiting the South attempt to write stories like this there is often hesitancy in researching and telling them. Cognizant of the xenophobia in the area, they often soft-peddle their true motivations so as not to invite skepticism, suspicion, or hurt feelings. This is true of a book like The Tarboro Three: Rape, Race, and Secrecy by Brian Lampkin, who admits to pulling his punches because he was living in the eastern North Carolina town while writing it.

As any prospective author writing about a cold case killing in Appalachia—especially one from the outside—can attest, Silver knew that “I would look like an outsider stirring up unpleasant memories. Why court needless trouble?”

The reason to do so, Silver concluded, is that the killing and its aftermath “provided a case study in the violence between lawmen and young people that occurred in small communities across America . . . The killing in Briar Bottom has important implications for modern Americans mired in their own culture wars . . . Considering the tenor of our times, Stan Altland’s death and its aftermath are as relevant now as in 1972.”

Silver had extensive interviews with many of the surviving hippies and their legal team. However, as often happens with these books, the perpetrators of the violence declined to be interviewed, so its account is one-sided, dependent on their trial testimony.

At first, the Clearwater 20 were charged with disorderly conduct, on patently bogus claims of playing loud music after dark and drug use and were briefly jailed. Their commitment to getting justice for their slain friend, and themselves, led them to three rounds through the justice system.

Along the way, some familiar North Carolina names pop up.

In their legal effort, Silver writes, they hired Julius Chambers, who was African American, and Adam Stein, who is white, “two of the most celebrated civil rights lawyers in North Carolina.” Chambers, Stein, and James Ferguson constituted the first integrated law firm in the state. Stein’s son Josh was recently elected governor of North Carolina, after serving two terms as state attorney general. In the Briar Bottom case they were joined by a young, African American lawyer named Charles Becton, who would go on to a seat on the North Carolina court of appeals.

With this legal firepower, they were able to win an acquittal for most of the Florida hippies in the disorderly conduct criminal trial.

In the first criminal trial, Silver writes that the small Asheville courtroom, “embodied the cultural conflicts that had torn America apart for a decade; urban versus rural, counterculture versus establishment, Black versus white, individual rights versus law and order.”

However, the hippies lost the subsequent federal civil rights criminal trial and civil suit.

Roger Altland, younger brother of the slain man, told Silver, “We thought if we talked to the right people and took the cops to court it would all work out.”

Instead, Silver writes, “they got a hard lesson in the selective application of American justice, something countless other marginalized citizens encounter every day.”

Their journey in the courts in some ways mirrored another infamous, North Carolina case: The November 3, 1979, Greensboro Massacre, in which anti-racist leftists were ambushed by Ku Klux Klansmen and Neo-Nazis.

In the end, like most serious true crime writers,  Silver confesses that, when he set out to tell the story of Briar Bottom, “I had hoped to crack the case, to discover some unknown twist of new piece of evidence that would reveal a hidden truth about Stan Altland’s death—the kind of thing that often pops up in heavily edited true-crime television shows. As historians know all too well, real life is unscripted, unedited, and chaotic. It turns on peculiar circumstances and snap decisions that frequently bring unintended results.”

But he comes to no conclusion about the exact details of the killing, who fired the shot, and whether it was accidental or intentional.

What he comes up with is “an unsettling scenario for one of the sketchily explained hippie deaths and an even more disturbing explanation for why the courts held no one responsible.”

Even for so short a book, 163 pages, there is padding in parts.

For those who lived through the 1960s and 1970s in North Carolina, Silver’s material about the era’s politics and music will seem repetitive but is probably necessary for younger readers.