A thoughtful, compelling reexamination of an intriguing story of fatal obsession and its enduring mysteries.
This true-crime book revisits Boston’s 1980s-era “professor and the prostitute” murder case, catnip to the media at the time.
Boston-based author Stradley focuses on a particularly attention-grabbing slaying in the city: the 1983 murder of 21-year-old sex worker Robin Benedict by Tufts professor William Douglas. The work early on details the discovery of a bloody hammer and clothing found in the trash by some bottle collectors after Benedict disappeared. The account then traces how overweight porn addict Douglas came to meet up with Benedict, recently jilted by her New England Patriots boyfriend, in Boston’s Combat Zone red-light district. The couple’s transactional relationship soon led to Douglas’ putting Benedict on the Tufts payroll and embezzling some $67,000 (over $215,000 today) in university funds, ultimately leading to his dismissal. Douglas ended up confessing to Benedict’s murder as part of a plea deal to serve time only for manslaughter. The deal followed investigations uncovering damning evidence, including brain matter on clothing in the professor’s home and a treasure trove of obsessive letters, turned over by Benedict’s pimp, that Douglas wrote to the sex worker. While a condition of Douglas’ plea was to tell investigators where he dumped Benedict’s body, his recollections were, intentionally or unintentionally, hazy, and her remains were never found.
This thorough book includes some recent interviews, including a 2021 conversation with the state trooper first assigned to the case, and concludes with the coda of Douglas’ rather surprising post-prison period and how “it is possible that he spent the last years of his life with no memory at all of Robin Benedict.” This ironic ending for Douglas, who died in 2015, is just one of the ways that Stradley weaves engrossing new details and dimensions into this account of a rather well-known true-crime story. The author acknowledges that the case has already been extensively covered, including in Linda Wolfe’s The Professor and the Prostitute (1986) and Teresa Carpenter’s Missing Beauty (1988) as well as a TV movie and several documentaries. Yet, as this volume also notes, “nothing quite captured the electricity of reading about it each morning.” Stradley’s story effectively conjures this kind of drama as it tracks the strange moments of the case, including when Douglas napped during the police search of his home, likely to hide in plain sight the bed where the slaying took place. The author convincingly argues that this event gave rise to the modern tabloid era: “Even the Boston Globe, that stuffy fortress of good taste, benefitted from articles about bloodstains and prostitutes.” The book also provides a striking sketch of Douglas’ childhood, making the murderer’s creepy, sneaky persona somewhat understandable. Sadly, Benedict remains more of an enigma, with her parents, for example, finding out only following her disappearance that their “good girl” student had become a sex worker as early as high school.
A thoughtful, compelling reexamination of an intriguing story of fatal obsession and its enduring mysteries.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-949590-55-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hamilcar Publications
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
"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
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