It remains unknown what these girls were thinking, if they were thinking, when they imprisoned another human being in a car trunk without food, water or medication. What is known is just who they had dismissed, apparently, as just another defenseless little old lady: Margaret E. Smith, the backbone of a dot in the center of Delaware, in the town of Lincoln, called Slaughter Neck.

Her father, Dalton Carroll, worked as an ice man, farmer and factory worker; her mother, Grace, was a domestic until the many children came, though some did not survive infancy. She inscribed their 12 names in a thumbed-through Bible held together now with gray duct tape.

There was Leon, then Dalton, then Clarence, then Thomas and then, on March 15, 1924: Margaret.

They grew up in Slaughter Neck, an African-American community so small and tight that all the world was right there on Slaughter Neck Road: their house, their farmland, their elementary school — even their white clapboard Methodist church, where the Carroll children cut boredom by singing in the choir, founded by their father. Margaret sang soprano.

After a couple of years of high school, she enrolled in the Apex College of Beauty Culture and Hairdressing, in Philadelphia. For her graduation in 1946, she wore white earrings to match the white gown and mortarboard. Then she returned to Delaware to open a beauty shop in a cottage, no larger than a tool shed, on Slaughter Neck Road.

The first marriage, to a rake named Gus, “didn’t stick,” as she’d politely say. The second was to Edward, who died young. The third was to George Smith, an Air Force veteran, an electrician and a good, good man. This marriage stuck — for 42 years, until his death in 2010.