The Shooter at Midnight: Murder, Corruption, and a Farming Town Divided

The harrowing true story of a cold-blooded murder and the campaign to bring justice to a suffering Midwestern town

On a November night in 1990, Cathy Robertson is murdered in her home outside Chillicothe, Missouri. After law enforcement conduct a haphazard investigation, the sheriff’s office puts the case in the hands of a Kansas City private eye with his own agenda. In a close-knit town still reeling from the aftereffects of the farming crisis, friends and neighbors abruptly fracture into opposing camps. Mark Woodworth, a Robertson family neighbor, eventually receives four life sentences for a crime that a growing group of local supporters believe he didn’t commit.

In a surprising, dramatic narrative that spans decades, Mark’s family turns to Robert Ramsey, an attorney willing to take on a corrupt political machine suppressing the truth. But the community’s way of life is irrevocably damaged by the parallel tragedies of the farming crisis and Cathy’s unsolved murder, in a gripping story about the fault-lines of a fracturing America that continue to cut across the farm belt today.

Sean Patrick Cooper is a journalist who has contributed narrative features and essays to The New Republic, n+1, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Baffler, Tablet, UnDark, The Atavist, The Daily Beast, Victory Journal, The Awl, and others. He received an MA in journalism at New York University, where he was a Department Fellow in the Literary Reportage Program, and a BA in English Literature from Rutgers University. This is his first book.