Wow... another "FURY" and "TRY & GET ME"... people have been trying to make something out of this story for years... I know three people who were there and witnessed the whole thing... this is the 3rd or 4th movie that has been made of this incident, plus at least three books written about it that I know of. Robert Conot, the guy who wrote "Judgement at Nuremberg" did a semi-fictional account of the Harts kidnapping & lynching called "Ministers of Vengeance" that never went anywhere. There are some that say the family paid a lot of bucks so that it wouldn't go anywhere, probably due to Conot's portrayal of the family members (think Peyton Place) but you'd have to ask someone from L Hart & Son, Inc. about that & I doubt you'd ever get an answer. What I am sure of is this... that "4 guys in a car" theory is absolute bullshit! They had nothing to do with the facts of the case, that has been proved, but some dingbat reporter got hold of that story and tried to make something out of it. Read the HarryFarrell book, "Swift Justice" too, it was somewhat accurate but still only got about half of the facts straight. One of my friends 95 years young & sharp as a tack, was a student at Santa Clara during this time.Some guy got up at a rally, a friend or roommate of Brooke Hart,he believes, and just incited the crowd of 700 to 1000 students to an absolute frenzy while the Jesuit brothers all stood in back smiling with their arms folded, nodding in approval as the screams of the mob echoed for miles... "KILL THEM! LYNCH THE MURDERERS!" TheCalifornia national guard regiment barracked at the Presidio in SF, or state militia as it was known back then, was dispatched that morning from San Francisco but took a 6- hour coffee break at Murphy's Corners (Sunnyvale today) and didn't arrive until the wee small hours of the next morning, by then Thurmond had been cut down & re- hung inside the building... he had to be taken back outside & re- strung so the newspapers could get all the pictures. My friend says he was one of over 6,000 men is attendance, by his count. He said it took his mother a month to wash the tear gas & smoky smell off his clothes. Josef Goebbels used the film and pictures shot that day in his anti-American spiel.
