A perturbing read that prods us to ponder guilt and innocence from new perspectives.
A suspenseful, well-researched account of the life of a Brooklyn lawyer Robert Rowe, who murdered his wife and three children and escaped prison with the insanity plea in 1978.
Does mental illness excuse one from murder? Salamon (The Christmas Tree, 1996, etc.) draws on court and hospital records, Rowe’s diaries, and her interviews with the people who knew him to explore the psychological dynamics of his crime from every angle. His marriage to his first wife, Mary, seemed idyllic until their second son, Christopher, was born with severe visual and neurological impairments. Eventually the Rowes joined the Industrial Home for the Blind (IHB)—a support group in which parents, mostly mothers, discussed the emotional challenges of raising disabled children. The author’s sympathetic portraits of IHB members reveal that homicidal thoughts were common among such parents, forcing readers to realize the personal pressures that contributed to Rowe’s madness. During the 1970s, Rowe began to suffer from an undetermined mental illness that prevented him from working. Heeding what he claimed to be the wishes of his late mother, he bludgeoned his wife and three children to death with a baseball bat. Charged with four counts of second-degree murder, he was sent to Creedmoor Psychiatric Center for ten years. Salamon devotes the second half of her investigation to Rowe’s second wife, Colleen, who—although aware of Rowe’s crime—gave birth to his fourth child. In the final chapter, after Rowe has died of cancer, Salamon allows the women of IHB (who once admired the magnetic murderer) and Colleen to debate Rowe’s right to evade punishment and create a new family. While Salamon concludes that Rowe believed himself to be a victim of mental disability and refused to accept responsibility for his actions, she encourages readers to make the final judgments.
A perturbing read that prods us to ponder guilt and innocence from new perspectives.Pub Date: April 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50022-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
