A heart-stopping study of the infamous Stephanie Bryan murder trial, four decades after the crime. Farrell, an Edgar Award winner (Swift Justice, 1992), was a rewrite man at the San Jose Mercury News when word broke of the Bryan kidnapping, a case that shocked the sleepy Berkeley community. Stephanie was the pretty, brainy teenage daughter of a doctor who had recently moved to California from Massachusetts. Her mother had shown her a shortcut from school, and when Stephanie was walking home one September afternoon, tragedy struck in the form of Burton Abbott, a married 27-year-old studying to be an accountant. Stephanie apparently got into Abbott's car, and her family never saw her again. Farrell makes excellent use of newspaper accounts of the mounting horror throughout California as it became clear that Stephanie had been kidnapped. When her body was found in a shallow grave near Abbott's mountain home, the case was sealed against him. Farrell chooses to focus on the Abbott family and on Burton in particular, a man so emotionally distant that the doctor who administered a lie detector test to him said that of all the men he had ever examined, ``Herman Goering and Burton Abbott were the most self-centered.'' While Stephanie never fully comes alive to the reader, the description of the singular Abbott family and the trial is as compelling as it is unnerving. Abbott never admits his guilt, despite such evidence as Stephanie's purse and muddy bra buried in his basement. After little more than a year on death row, Abbott was put to death in the gas chamber. Two years later, emotionally devastated, Stephanie's father died of a sudden heart attack. A chilling look at an old crime that seems sadly modern; true-crime buffs won't want to miss it. (For another look at this case, as well as other kidnappings in America, see below, Paula S. Fass, Kidnapped.)
Pub Date: Nov. 13, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-17009-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
A memoir-cum-how-to-manual for the aspiring Dirty Harry of the family. Coulson, a retired FBI agent who founded the bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team, has little patience for soft courts and slimy lawyers. “My territory,” he writes, “was full of decent, hard-working folks whose rights were being denied, not by an oppressive government, as the Founding Fathers anticipated, but by criminals like that scum-sucking crack dealer we’d just busted.” The territory, it develops in his narrative, was also full of right-wing militia crazies and Middle Eastern bombers, who kept Coulson hopping—and hopping mad—throughout his career. To counter such illicit types, Coulson and his colleagues in the FBI’s special-weapons and tactics unit adopted an unpleasant but effective philosophy: “scare the shit out of them, and they’ll give up.” Coulson reserves a special disdain for paramilitary groups like the Montana Freemen, the Order, and the CSA (or Convenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord), groups responsible for hate crimes across the country. A good-guy player in some of the most newsworthy crimes of the last few decades, Coulson takes us inside events like the shootouts at Ruby Ridge and Waco, the “Dog Day Afternoon” bank robbery, and the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings. Without apparent irony, he relates how the FBI got into the SWAT-team business in the first place: because federal law prohibits the use of the military in domestic affairs without specific presidential order, police forces throughout the nation have militarized. Coulson examines where these forces have performed poorly, such as at Waco, and where they have performed well, such as in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. Despite the assistance of Time correspondent Shannon, Coulson’s prose is clichÇ-ridden and self-important, but the stories he has to tell offer an unusual inside look at how the FBI works. (16 pages b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02061-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
A solid re-creation of the rape-murder of Karen Gregory in Gulfport, Florida, and of the resulting trial, by the reporter who first covered the case for the St. Petersburg Times. On May 22, 1984, 36-year-old Karen, white, a graphic artist, had just finished moving her things to the house of her black boyfriend, David Mackey, an administrator of a counseling program for Vietnam veterans—and out of town at a conference. In small, conservative Gulfport, the interracial couple ``stood out.'' That night, a woman's scream was heard by a number of people as far as several blocks away; one man said, ``I'll never forget it,'' But no one called the police. Thirty-one hours later, roused by Mackey, who was unable to reach Karen by telephone, the Gulfport police broke in and found her bloody body, stabbed to death many times. So began a long, tedious, often dead-ended investigation led by Sergeant Larry Tosi. French takes the reader through it step by step, revealing what Tosi learned just as he learned it, bit by bit, with a frustrating lack of evidence at first, false suspects, unexplained details, and confusing polygraph tests. Finally, a suspect—ironically, a friend of Tosi's and known for his good works as ``the neighborhood helper''—was arrested; though never confessing to the crime, he was convicted and is currently doing time. Crisp and clear, with vivid characterizations and with the intricacies and frustrations of the police investigation and subsequent trial well explained.
Pub Date: May 27, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-05526-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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