Thursday, Sep 11, 2025 6:30 PM

Location:
Auburn Avenue Research Library
101 Auburn Avenue NE
Atlanta, Georgia 30303

The riveting story of a 1985 double murder, a long-overdue investigation, and the fight to exonerate an innocent man.

A Cappella Books and the Auburn Avenue Research Library welcome author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Joshua Sharpe in honor of his new book, “The Man No One Believed: The Untold Story of the Georgia Church Murders.” The author will appear in conversation with the AJC's Ernie Suggs.

This event is free and open to the public; copies of “The Man No One Believed” will be available for purchase.

About the Book

In 1985, a white man walked into a South Georgia church and brutally murdered Harold and Thelma Swain, two pillars of the area’s Black community. The killer vanished into the night. For fifteen years, the case remained unsolved. Then authorities zeroed in on Dennis Perry, a carpenter who grew up nearby. Convicted with devastatingly flawed evidence, Perry received a double life sentence.

When award-winning journalist and South Georgia native Joshua Sharpe retraces the case, he discovers a winding path of corruption, devastating missteps, and secrets. Driven by the pursuit of the truth, Sharpe’s investigation takes him through dusty courthouse archives, down winding dirt roads, and into intense interviews. But he keeps knocking on doors—even after they’re slammed in his face. Sharpe uncovers explosive evidence that helps prove Dennis Perry’s innocence. And he confronts a long-ignored suspect: an alleged white supremacist who had bragged about committing the murders.

But the fight for the truth is not easily won. When a key figure in the investigation turns up dead under suspicious circumstances, Sharpe’s sources and editors insist that he could be in danger. And even as evidence mounts of Perry’s innocence, local officials work to keep him in prison—until Sharpe’s reporting forces the state to launch a new investigation—thirty-five years after the Swains’ murders. Driven by Sharpe’s tireless reporting, “The Man No One Believed” tells the unbelievable story of one of the most confounding cases in Georgia history, the extraordinary fight to free an innocent man, and how state officials worked against the odds to deliver justice for the Swains after all.

Both a riveting true crime story and a searing indictment of American injustice, “The Man No One Believed” is a gripping work of literary journalism—a moving examination of how we reckon with the sins of our past.

About the Author

Joshua Sharpe is a print and audio journalist and editor whose stories have helped free two innocent people from life in prison. He is a 2025 Type Media Center Fellow, a 2023–2024 Knight-Wallace Fellow, a Livingston Award winner, and a 2022 and 2023 Pulitzer Prize judge. A native of Waycross, Georgia, he lives in Detroit, Michigan.

About the Conversation Partner

Ernie Suggs has been a reporter at the AJC since 1997, currently covering race and culture, as well as a variety of breaking national news and investigative stories. A veteran of nearly 30 years as a newspaper reporter, he previously reported for newspapers in New York City and Durham, covering stories ranging from politics to civil rights to higher education. Since 2016, he has managed the AJC’s award-winning Black History Month project through AJC Sepia, the paper’s Black news curation site. He is the author of the book, "The Many Lives of Andrew Young," and the writer and producer of the Emmy-nominated hip-hop documentary, "The South Got Something to Say." A 1990 graduate of North Carolina Central University, with a degree in English Literature, Suggs was also a 2009 Harvard University Nieman Fellow. He is currently on the Nieman Foundation’s Board of Trustees and the former national vice president of the National Association of Black Journalists. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Rocky Mount, N.C., his obsession for Prince, Spike Lee movies, "Hamilton" and the New York Yankees is unmatched.