An uneven memoir better suited as source material for a deeper true-crime narrative.
A retired Los Angeles County homicide detective recounts his investigation to apprehend a serial killer who murdered at least six people by injecting them with insulin.
It’s 1966, and Harold W. White learns from a colleague that William Dale Archerd “has lost another wife.” The much-married con man has been on the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department’s radar since the death of wife No. 4 in 1956, when Archerd claimed that robbers had injected him and his wife with sedatives. Disgruntled wife No. 3 told police that Archerd, who worked briefly as an assistant in a hospital, had discussed with her how injecting someone with insulin would be the perfect crime; she believed that, years ago, he killed his new wife and a male acquaintance in just that fashion. There wasn’t enough evidence, so the case stalled until 1961, when Archerd’s nephew died under suspicious circumstances. White, who was now on the case with his partner, uncovered that Archerd had financial incentive to kill the nephew and likely also killed wife No. 5 as well as the ex-husband of wife No. 6, but again, he can’t make an arrest. The death of wife No. 7, perhaps the sixth time Archerd killed, becomes the last straw for White. He, a new partner and a district attorney travel the country to get more information from Archerd’s various cohorts and, most importantly, tap medical experts to prove how the deaths were caused. Their work leads to a landmark 1968 conviction, the first for murder by injecting insulin in this country. While White’s memoir has historical value as a first-person account of the police work on this case, it’s both overly detailed and incomplete. Most readers would probably rather know less about the height and weight of minor players and more about the psychology of the killer, the women who married him and the science that proved critical to the case. An at-times humorous, “just the facts, ma’am” police report, White’s account often lacks the contextual consideration readers might hope for in the evaluation of a decades-old case. Archerd’s ultimate fate, for example, gets the short shrift in favor of multiple congratulatory letters White received following the conviction.
An uneven memoir better suited as source material for a deeper true-crime narrative.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463706494
Page Count: 378
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered...
The inspirational and ultimately redemptive story of a teenage girl’s descent into hell, framed as a parable of faith.
The disappearance of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 made national headlines, turning an entire country into a search party; it seemed like something of a miracle when she reappeared, rescued almost by happenstance, nine months later. As the author suggests, it was something of a mystery that her ordeal lasted that long, since there were many times when she was close to being discovered. Her captors, a self-proclaimed religious prophet whose sacraments included alcohol, pornography and promiscuous sex, and his wife and accomplice, jealous of this “second wife” he had taken, weren’t exactly criminal masterminds. In fact, his master plan was for similar kidnappings to give him seven wives in all, though Elizabeth’s abduction was the only successful one. She didn’t write her account for another nine years, at which point she had a more mature perspective on the ordeal, and with what one suspects was considerable assistance from co-author Stewart, who helps frame her story and fill in some gaps. Though the account thankfully spares readers the graphic details, Smart tells of the abuse and degradation she suffered, of the fear for her family’s safety that kept her from escaping and of the faith that fueled her determination to survive. “Anyone who suggests that I became a victim of Stockholm syndrome by developing any feelings of sympathy for my captors simply has no idea what was going on inside my head,” she writes. “I never once—not for a single moment—developed a shred of affection or empathy for either of them….The only thing there ever was was fear.”
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered rather than how she recovered.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-04015-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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