Redbone: Money, Malice, and Murder in Atlanta

In August 1996, Lance Herndon, a 41-year-old bachelor, and founder and CEO of the largest African-American computer consulting firm in the Southeast, was found dead, wrapped in a sheet on his waterbed with his head bashed in. His brutal murder rocked Atlanta's young black jet set, particularly when the sordid details of his personal life came to light. Was Herndon a sophisticated entrepreneur, fastidiously hygienic, extravagantly generous? Or was the dead man a schemer with a failing business empire who embodied a black "crisis of wasted intellectual and moral capital" and who was brought down by an insatiable appetite for deviant sex with women he called "redbones," petite, light-skinned black women? One redbone is now serving 10 years for killing him as he slept after they had sex: Dionne Baugh, a hotheaded Jamaican immigrant, was enraged that Herndon wasn't planning to appear in court to ask for charges against her to be dismissed in an earlier trespassing charge at his home. Stodghill, former editor-in-chief of Savoy magazine, spins an absorbing yarn, but while his analyses and social commentary about money and power in the black New South are cogent, they lack the immediacy and power of the best true crime works. Photos not seen by PW . (Mar.)