A passable evocation of an American nightmare.
True-crime veteran Stowers (To the Last Breath, 1998, etc.) relates the grisly tale of a Texas serial killer who dodged justice for too long.
The small city of Wichita Falls was an ordinary modern metropolis that in the winter of 1984–85, writes Stowers, had “come under assault from a nameless, faceless evil.” Terry Sims’s corpse was found in December 1984; the brutalized body of a nurse named Toni Gibbs turned up in a pasture a few weeks later. Both women had been horrifically raped, then beaten and fatally stabbed. Bar bouncer Danny Laughlin became obsessed with Gibbs’s death, making him a prime suspect to edgy local officials. Laughlin was indicted for Gibbs’s murder on the strength of his own contradictory statements and a jailhouse informant’s testimony. Before Laughlin’s trial began, however, authorities discovered a third victim: Ellen Blau, a recent arrival whose friendliness toward strangers proved her undoing. Laughlin’s jury deadlocked, resulting in a mistrial, but local police remained convinced of his guilt. So no one really noticed when high-strung drug addict Faryion Wardrip confessed to the murder of a woman named Tina Kimbrew and mentioned in his rambling statement that he’d also known Blau. Wardrip was paroled for Kimbrew’s murder in 1997, but improved DNA technologies finally implicated him in the other crimes. A neophyte DA investigator first connected Wardrip to the Blau killing, then memorably secured a DNA sample from him by requesting a “spit cup.” When confronted with the evidence, Wardrip capitulated, confessed to a fifth murder in Fort Worth, and ultimately received the death sentence. Two-time Edgar Award winner Stowers writes competently, though he’s not above larding on melodramatic, ain’t-it-awful asides and digressions typical of contemporary true crime. Still, he deftly portrays investigators’ increasing tenacity and Wardrip’s trail of deceit and violence, elements contributing to the tension as readers wait for the law to catch up with a bizarre and maddeningly fortunate murderer.
A passable evocation of an American nightmare.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-26688-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
"There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that." This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. "Deal me out, baby...I'm a normal." This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself. They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. A couple of days before they had bought a 100 foot rope to garrote them—enough for ten people if necessary. This small pogrom took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a lonesome town on a flat, limitless landscape: a depot, a store, a cafe, two filling stations, 270 inhabitants. The natives refer to it as "out there." It occurred in 1959 and Capote has spent five years, almost all of the time which has since elapsed, in following up this crime which made no sense, had no motive, left few clues—just a footprint and a remembered conversation. Capote's alternating dossier Shifts from the victims, the Clutter family, to the boy who had loved Nancy Clutter, and her best friend, to the neighbors, and to the recently paroled perpetrators: Perry, with a stunted child's legs and a changeling's face, and Dick, who had one squinting eye but a "smile that works." They had been cellmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary where another prisoner had told them about the Clutters—he'd hired out once on Mr. Clutter's farm and thought that Mr. Clutter was perhaps rich. And this is the lead which finally broke the case after Perry and Dick had drifted down to Mexico, back to the midwest, been seen in Kansas City, and were finally picked up in Las Vegas. The last, even more terrible chapters, deal with their confessions, the law man who wanted to see them hanged, back to back, the trial begun in 1960, the post-ponements of the execution, and finally the walk to "The Corner" and Perry's soft-spoken words—"It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize." It's a magnificent job—this American tragedy—with the incomparable Capote touches throughout. There may never have been a perfect crime, but if there ever has been a perfect reconstruction of one, surely this must be it.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1965
ISBN: 0375507906
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1965
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.
A former Justice Department lawyer, who now devotes her private practice to federal appeals, dissects some of the most politically contentious prosecutions of the last 15 years.
Powell assembles a stunning argument for the old adage, “nothing succeeds like failure,” as she traces the careers of a group of prosecutors who were part of the Enron Task Force. The Supreme Court overturned their most dramatic court victories, and some were even accused of systematic prosecutorial misconduct. Yet former task force members such as Kathryn Ruemmler, Matthew Friedrich and Andrew Weissman continued to climb upward through the ranks and currently hold high positions in the Justice Department, FBI and even the White House. Powell took up the appeal of a Merrill Lynch employee who was convicted in one of the subsidiary Enron cases, fighting for six years to clear his name. The pattern of abuse she found was repeated in other cases brought by the task force. Prosecutors of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen pieced together parts of different statutes to concoct a crime and eliminated criminal intent from the jury instructions, which required the Supreme Court to reverse the Andersen conviction 9-0; the company was forcibly closed with the loss of 85,000 jobs. In the corruption trial of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a key witness was intimidated into presenting false testimony, and as in the Merrill Lynch case, the prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, a violation of due process under the Supreme court’s 1963 Brady v. Maryland decision. Stevens’ conviction, which led to a narrow loss in his 2008 re-election campaign and impacted the majority makeup of the Senate, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back; the presiding judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate abuses. Confronted with the need to clean house as he came into office, writes Powell, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to take action.
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61254-149-5
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Brown Books
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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