Adam continues to work through the courts, filing and arguing motions for a stay of execution, including on the grounds that Sam was legally insane and unable to tell right from wrong, due to his indoctrination into the Ku Klux Klan. At the same time, Lee, faced with the unearthed ghosts of the family history and having lapsed back into full-blown alcoholism, reveals to Adam that in the early 1950s, as children, she and Adam's father had witnessed their father murder the family's African-American neighbor, Joe Lincoln, during a fight that had started because Adam's father, Eddie, had wrongly accused Lincoln's son of stealing a toy soldier. Eddie had blamed himself for the murder, as well as Lee, for failing to stop Sam, the guilt of which was a factor in Eddie's later suicide and Lee's alcoholism. Lee also reveals how their father had been indoctrinated into the Klan as a child, showing Adam a historic photograph of Sam as a young boy attending a Klan lynching (which Adam uses in his arguments before the courts).