A multilayered treat for crime buffs.
Crime-writer Neff (Unfinished Murder, 1995) chronicles the famous 1950s murder case with impressive depth and comes up with a convincing alternative to Dr. Sam Sheppard as the killer.
In the last hours of darkness on the morning of July 4, 1954, Marilyn Sheppard was brutally murdered in her northern Ohio home. Suspicion centered on the victim’s osteopath husband: handsome, wealthy, tight with the local mayor, and regarded with a mixture of envy and admiration by others. In detail, with pace and clarity, the author reconstructs the confusion of investigators and family who were at the scene after the body’s discovery. Short on hard evidence, the original investigators handed the matter over to the jurisdiction of the Cleveland police and coroner; by then the crime (mistakenly credited as the inspiration for The Fugitive television series) had galvanized the country, and widespread unfavorable media commentary made it impossible for Sam Sheppard to get a fair trial. Neff draws vivid major and minor characters and lucidly narrates the complex chain of events that allowed the coroner’s office and the prosecution to marshal circumstantial evidence while local pundits manipulated public opinion. Sheppard was charged and arraigned some four weeks after the crime and convicted of second-degree murder later that year. When Sheppard’s defense attorney had the evidence independently examined by a California expert on crime-scene analysis, he set in motion a series of appeals that led through the US Supreme Court to a 1966 retrial and acquittal for Sheppard. Neff’s own investigation persuasively identifies the actual killer and permits a plausible reconstruction of Marilyn’s final moments. The author works hard to maintain the drama in his carefully structured exposition, delivered in superior prose. There aren’t many heroes in the crowded cast, but Neff’s careful attention to character and detail is exemplary.
A multilayered treat for crime buffs.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-45719-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.
A powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story.
If a boy is not born a monster, how does he become one? Though Backderf (Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, 2008) was once an Ohio classmate of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn’t try to elicit sympathy for “Jeff.” Yet he walks an emotional tightrope here, for he recognizes that someone—maybe the other kids who laughed at and with him, certainly the adults who should have recognized aberration well beyond tortured adolescence—should have done something. “To you Dahmer was a depraved fiend but to me he was a kid I sat next to in study hall and hung out with in the band room,” writes the author, whose dark narrative proceeds to show how Dahmer’s behavior degenerated from fascination with roadkill and torture of animals to repressed homosexuality and high-school alcoholism to mass murder. It also shows how he was shaken by his parents’ troubled marriage and tempestuous divorce, by his emotionally disturbed mother’s decision to move away and leave her son alone, and by the encouragement of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club (with the author a charter member and ringleader) to turn the outcast into a freak show. The more that Dahmer drank to numb his life, the more oblivious adults seemed to be, letting him disappear between the cracks. “It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent,” writes Backderf. “Once Dahmer kills, however—and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends.”
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0216-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.
Godfrey reconstructs a horrific murder with a vividness found in the finest fiction, without ever sacrificing journalistic integrity.
The novel The Torn Skirt (2002) showed how well the author could capture the roiling inner life of a teenager. She brings that sensibility to bear in this account of the 1997 murder of a 14-year-old girl in British Columbia, a crime for which seven teenage girls and one boy were charged. While there’s no more over-tilled literary soil than that of the shocking murder in a small town, Godfrey manages to portray working-class View Royal in a fresh manner. The victim, Reena Virk, was a problematic kid. Rebelling against her Indian parents’ strict religiosity, she desperately mimicked the wannabe gangsta mannerisms of her female schoolmates, who repaid her idolization by ignoring her. The circumstances leading up to the murder seem completely trivial: a stolen address book, a crush on the wrong guy. But popular girls like Josephine and Kelly had created a vast, imaginary world (mostly stolen from mafia movies and hip-hop) in which they were wildly desired and feared. In this overheated milieu, reality was only a distant memory, and everything was allowed. The murder and cover-up are chilling. Godfrey parcels out details piecemeal in the words of the teens who took part or simply watched. None of them seemed to quite comprehend what was going on, why it happened or even—in a few cases—what the big deal was. The tone veers close to melodrama, but in this context it works, since the author is telling the story from the inside out, trying to approximate the relentlessly self-dramatizing world these kids inhabited. Given most readers’ preference for easily explained and neatly concluded crime narratives, Godfrey’s resolute refusal to impose false order on the chaos of a murder spawned by rumors and lies is commendable.
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-1091-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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