Published in 1973, Child of God followed a decade when lurid, sexually motivated murders captured the public imagination in the United States. The rape and murder of 13 women in Boston from 1962 to 1964 by a man dubbed the Boston Strangler, the murder and rape of eight student nurses by Richard Speck in Chicago in 1966, and the Tate-LaBianca murders committed by the Manson Family in 1969 all brought the psychology of serial murder to the public’s attention.

A lesser-known crime of the same era was the murder of a teenaged couple, Orville Steele and Carolyn Newell, near Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1963. Dubbed the Lula Lake Murders after the name of the popular lovers’ lane from which the couple disappeared, the search for and discovery of the couple dominated headlines in Tennessee, where Cormac McCarthy lived at the time. A known peeping Tom, 27-year-old husband and father James Blevins, was convicted of the murder of Steele and the murder and rape of Newell. However, Blevins was later acquitted. Like Blevins, McCarthy’s Lester Ballard is a 27-year-old voyeur who prowls a popular lovers’ lane in the Smoky Mountains. Though not directly stated, Child of God is likely based on these killings.