 As a girl, Nell Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, supposedly knew about the man she later immortalized as Boo Radley. The actual facts of the story are brief and terrible because they represent the skeletal remains of a life's promise never fulfilled. Here are the facts. In 1928, Son Balawar and his friends Baggett and Sawyer were charged with the burglary of Foster's Drugstore.