In 1952, national attention was drawn to Live Oak and Suwannee County when a wealthy African American, Ruby McCollum, shot and killed Dr. Clifford Leroy Adams, Jr., a prominent, recently-elected state legislator, in his office across from the Suwannee County Courthouse. Originally thought to be a murder based upon an unpaid doctor's bill, it was soon revealed that the married Dr. Adams had fathered a child with McCollum (whose husband Sam oversaw the illegal "bolita" gaming). McCollum's murder conviction was overturned on a technicality in 1954 and she spent the next twenty years in the Florida State Mental Hospital in Chattahoochee after having been deemed mentally unfit to stand trial a second time. The murder and events surrounding it have become the source of many books and documentaries.