Two Lives Collide, and End, at an Elvis Shrine
HOLLY SPRINGS, Miss. — Late on Tuesday night, Dwight David Taylor Jr. walked past the stone lions, the grove of blue Christmas trees and the pillars topped by spray-painted basketballs and stood on the front porch of Graceland Too.
Showing up here late at night was not in itself unusual as Graceland Too, a deliriously baroque shrine to all things Elvis Presley and many things less obviously germane, was advertised as ready to give tours at any hour. Over the past 24 years, it has become a destination for drunk fraternity brothers in the middle of the night and international tourists on the Elvis pilgrimage from Tupelo (for the birthplace) to Memphis (for the other Graceland), while its resident, Paul McLeod, has gone from eccentric proprietor to main attraction.
It is still unclear what brought Mr. Taylor, 28, to the house on Tuesday, but by 10:45, he was dead, shot by Mr. McLeod in his front room, apparently after having forced his way in. Less than two days later, Mr. McLeod was dead, too, found around sunrise on Thursday in a chair on his front porch, apparently succumbing to natural causes, perhaps compounded by the traumas of the past 36 hours.
There were plenty of people here in Holly Springs who knew Mr. Taylor as someone almost perpetually down on his luck, living in an abandoned house and knocking on doors looking for odd jobs or a little money, and they feared a bad end.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/us/two-lives-collide-and-end-at-an-elvis-shrine.html