Gut-wrenching account of a brutal 1988 rape/murder in Louisville, Ky., and the miscarriage of justice that resulted when killer's prosecution was botched. Louisville Courier-Journal feature writer Hill begins with the disappearance of Brenda Schaefer in September 1988. Her family and the police suspected that her fiancÇ, Mel Ignatow, was responsible, but no physical evidence linked him to the possible crime. After 16 months, Mary Ann Shore-Inlow, Ignatow's mistress, confessed to having been coerced into helping him bury Schaefer's body and led authorities to it. The FBI hastily set up a wiretap in which Shore- Inlow was to initiate a conversation about the burial, but the results were ambiguous and poorly recorded. The arrest was made despite these complications, but the jury refused to convict Ignatow based solely on Shore-Inlow's testimony. Community outrage prompted the authorities to retry the case on federal charges of perjury (since he could not be tried twice for murder). In the interim, Ignatow's house had been sold, and the new inhabitants discovered graphic photographs of the crime hidden under the carpet. This evidence was used to force him to plead guilty to the federal charges, and he received the maximum penalty: eight years and one month, of which he will serve five—about the same that Shore-Inlow received for her plea bargain. The author relates this tragic tale with an overly obsessive attention to detail (even providing the high school background of the rug installers who discovered the photographs) that prompts the uneasy feeling Hill is stalking rather than researching the story—an effect most pronounced when he details the type, color, and size of the socks and underwear worn by the victim on the day she was murdered. Effectively executed, but a repulsive story nonetheless.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-12910-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
A psychiatrist who meets the criminally insane tells all. Lewis, a professor at New York University and Yale, spends a good deal of time examining the most violent among us. Her specialty is violent children, but over the years she has also met with adults. Her subjects include Arthur Shawcross, who mutilated and ate his victims, and Ted Bundy, who kissed her goodbye shortly before his execution. Lewis has clearly seen and heard a great deal, and she’s unsparing in the details of what makes a child violent. As expected, she finds that poverty and abuse are strong indicators of a tendency toward violence, and she writes movingly of one little girl who became a murderer after her family repeatedly ignored her cries for help. Not every child in those situations becomes a law-breaker, but years of abuse combined with inattentive medical care can lead to serious behavioral problems and terrible violence. Lewis early on makes the point that she has often identified more with a killer waiting to be executed than with society, which she believes makes her more sensitive to those who kill. This approach has limited appeal, however, and the book often veers between overly long sections on Lewis’s background and and relationships with colleagues and her parents, and too little real analysis. The reader is left with excellent insights into Lewis’s own modus operandi, but not much in the way of a true understanding of what makes an abused child turn into a Ted Bundy. Like Barbara Kirwin’s The Mad, The Bad, and The Innocent, this book focuses too much on the analyst. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-449-00277-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
Yes, Deborah, there once were Jewish murderers who were part of organized crime in America. The story of their time, and especially of the syndicate known as Murder, Inc., based largely in Brownsville, Brooklyn, is told in this breezily anecdotal work. Cohen, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, focuses almost exclusively on New York from 1918 to 1945. He deftly portrays the personalities and the bloody deeds of such figures as Arnold Rothstein (who, contrary to myth and his fictional representation in The Great Gatsby, did not “fix” the 1919 World Series) and the killers Abe (“Kid Twist”) Reles and Louis Lepke. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and secondary sources, Cohen has done his homework, although he makes no reference to Jenna Weissman Joselit’s equally interesting if more scholarly Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community, 1900—1940. His book is filled with engrossing, vivid, violent anecdotes, and he is a fine teller of dark tales. Unfortunately, Cohen’s style sometimes yields flippant, hyperbolic claims, as in “The boys [of Murder, Inc.] had developed a system of killing as groundbreaking, as effective, as influential, as Henry Ford’s assembly line.” However, he does succeed admirably in explaining why even law-abiding Jewish men, including the author’s father and his friends, were fascinated by Jewish criminals, who defied the often tedious 9-to-5 work world and provided a countermyth to the Jew as victim. He also provides a satisfactory explanation as to why, for Jewish-Americans, violent crime was largely a one-generation phenomenon: By the postwar period, Jews had achieved enough upward mobility so that even criminal fathers encouraged their sons to “make it” in the professions and through legitimate businesses. For those who want to know about the dark underside of American Jewish life two and three generations ago, Cohen’s book, is a good place to begin. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (First serial to Rolling Stone; author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83115-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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