Hate hoax: Black woman charged in KKK terror letter mystery

A sinister monthslong mystery in a sleepy Georgia town may now be solved – but the bizarre explanation raises as many questions as it answers.

When African-American residents in Douglasville began receiving threatening letters late last year purportedly written by a six-foot-tall White man with a bushy red beard from out of of town, they had every reason to be concerned.

However, investigators now believe that menacing hairy Caucasian to be none other than a Black woman and fellow resident in the Atlanta suburb.

Terresha Lucas, 30, has been arrested for allegedly authoring a series of highly disturbing notes in which she posed as a Ku Klux Klan member and threatened to burn down her neighbors’ homes and kill their children.

She was charged this month with eight counts of making terroristic threats, according to an information release last week from the Douglasville Police Department.

Lucas first adopted the persona of a “six-feet-tall white male with a long, red beard who did not live in the neighborhood” back in December 2020, when two homes received letters, according to investigators.

The epistolary terror campaign made headlines in March this year when residents spoke publicly about the racist notes being left in their mailboxes.

“I received one two days ago and I was alarmed at what I read,” a local father told CBS46 News at the time.

“The letter is using the N-word, talking about the KKK, hanging people, killing kids, killing whole families, and setting houses on fire.”

Similar letters were reported on February 17, February 22, March 1, and March 3, with at least seven Black families targeted, police said.

The handwritten notes would be left in mailboxes at night and found the next day, according to Douglas Police Detective Nathan Shumaker.

Yet, despite media coverage and door-to-door checks on household security cameras, the investigation continued to draw a blank.

“By mid-March, we really didn’t have anything to go on,” Shumaker said.

It was then that the flow of bigoted mailbox bile appeared to have dried up – that is, until a final note in the same vein was reportedly received some six months later, on September 6.

That day – Labor Day – a break in the case finally arrived as police found evidence linking the notes to Lucas’s home.

The details of that evidence and a mugshot of the suspect are yet to be released.

Nor have police suggested a motive at this stage for this crankiest of crimes.  

Lucas was booked into jail on eight felony charges of terroristic threats and acts, online records show.

Each count is punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of $5,0000.