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
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
The Pulitzer Prizewinning team of Naifeh and Smith (Jackson Pollock, 1990, etc.) collaborate on this haunting, compulsively readable account of how a ``typical'' middle-class family produced a serial rapist and murderer. When 28-year-old nuclear engineer Danny Starrett was arrested in 1989 for kidnapping and rape, his family rallied reflexively to deny his guilt. Danny was their ``hero,'' a ``model child,'' the ``perfect son.'' Never mind his unsettling behavior of late: extended absences from work, a disheveled appearance, an unexplained estrangement from his Mormon wife and baby daughter. Not to mention a long history of odd behavior, some of it traceable to two childhood head injuries (paralyzing headaches, a tendency to black out), some of it not (a youthful obsession with drawing pictures of devices for chopping girls into dog meat). Naifeh and Smith produce long stretches of Danny's jailhouse journal, which chillingly describes how he concealed his mental illness and serial crimes from a doting family. These passages are deftly juxtaposed with an account of how Danny's mother, Gerry Starrett, finally awakened to her son's insanity, guiding him through the criminal justice system that demanded his death for the murder of a 15-year- old Georgia girl. (Danny was ultimately sentenced to 10 consecutive life sentences for crimes committed in South Carolina and Georgia.) But the book is too narrowly focused on Danny's indomitable mother: What of the other family members, to whom Danny was also a ``stranger''? And while the authors know how to make their story accessible to the general reader, they give short shrift to the law, dismissing complicated issues, such as the various state standards for mental competence, as mere ``legalese.'' A riveting though slightly simplistic story of crime and punishment, mental illness, and mother love. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 19, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93973-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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