Violence and lawlessness plagued late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Virginia, and with no
bureau of investigation or state police force, the Old Dominion relied on the Baldwin-Felts
Detective Agency to solve a multitude of crimes. Formed by William G. Baldwin and Thomas L.
Felts, the agency, headquartered in Roanoke, was charged with investigating some of the state’s most
sensational murder cases. Among these were the brutal killing of Fannie McCue, wife of the former
mayor of Charlottesville; the slaughter of a mountain family in Buchanan County; the shot gunning
of Louise Beattie, the young wife of a wealthy Richmond playboy; and the unprecedented shootout
in the Carroll County courthouse that left five dead. Author and historian Phillip Andrew Gibbs
recounts how the Agency’s detectives who worked these cases succeeded in bringing some of the
state’s most heinous criminals to justice in his new book entitled Law and Order for Hire in Virginia.