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MAMA'S BOY

Name: MAMA'S BOY
Author: Richard T. Pienciak
ISBN: 0-525-93851-6

THE TRUE STORY OF A SERIAL KILLER AND HIS MOTHER

by Richard T. Pienciak ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 10, 1996

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The freakish tale of wife-killer Eric Napoletano and the mother who protected him from the police. Napoletano was reared in New York City by his racist mother, Carolyn, and a smarmy hustler he referred to as ``Uncle Al.'' Al and Carolyn disliked each other but doted on Eric, a surly youth with a taste for Hispanic and black women, those his mother hated most. Napoletano's victims—a girlfriend, a mother-in-law, and his second wife—were murdered with great savagery, and it's clear from phone records and witnesses cited by Pienciak (Murder at 75 Birch, 1992, etc.) that Al and Carolyn knew about the killings. Napoletano, a onetime trucker, dumped the mutilated bodies of his girlfriend and wife along rural roads near New York. He simply shot his mother-in-law in the street. His mother worked for the NYPD and managed to destroy records and files pertaining to her son's crimes. The story is bizarre, and the players uniquely evil, but the narrative is curiously dry and frequently dull. The details of the crimes are vague since Pienciak gives only the most cursory explanations of how they were carried out. It's clear that Eric's sadism had something to do with events in his childhood, but no theories about its origins are offered, and the details given here of Eric's trial for the murder of his wife are hopelessly muddled. The book works best in the brief sections where we are given Carolyn's own corrosive words, which do tell us concretely about these hideous lives. Pienciak's sarcastic tone, from the book's title to his mockery of Carolyn's appearance, repeatedly disrupts the narrative, which never adequately explains what happened, or why. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: June 10, 1996

ISBN: 0-525-93851-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996

Categories:

TRUE CRIME

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O.J.: THE LAST WORD

by Gerry Spence ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1997

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Buried under windbag sermonizing and lofty moralizing lies a cogent analysis of how the prosecution lost the O.J. Simpson case. Celebrated defense attorney Spence (The Making of a Country Lawyer, 1996, etc.) devotes the first half of his book to establishing his bona fides as a man of the people: a country bumpkin in a buckskin jacket, a lawyer who scorns lawyers (who he witheringly says lack ``personhood'') and idealizes jurors (simple folks drenched in the wisdom of life experience). Spence can also be wildly inconsistent, at one moment saying, for instance, that Faye Resnick's account has a ring of truth, at another labeling it ``swill.'' But despite arrogant lawyers and dishonest cops, the real villain for Spence is the media and its ``rape of the judicial process''—invading the courtroom, corrupting the lawyers by making them celebrities, and offering endless punditry by commentators who, Spence claims, know nothing about trying a case. Of course, he admits, he was a media pundit himself. Still, he is a leading trial attorney (whom Simpson had wanted on his defense team), and he scores some illuminating points on why Marcia Clark and Chris Darden failed to make their case to the jury—and outlines the case they could have made. Most chilling is his retelling of two incidents: First, the events of January 1, 1989, when police responded to a battered Nicole Simpson's call for help—O.J.'s escape that night paralleled his escape after Nicole's and Ron Goldman's murder. Even more eerie is another incident never presented at the criminal trial: Right before the murders, Simpson was filming a scene for a TV show that also strangely prefigured the murders and in which, playing a former SEAL, he could have learned the slashing technique used to kill his ex-wife and her friend. Spence believes that O.J. was guilty but that the jury's acquittal was just. If his brief were less self-righteous, his legitimate arguments would be easier to swallow. (Literary Guild selection)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-312-18009-8

Page Count: 256

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997

Categories:

TRUE CRIME

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BLOODTHIRSTY BITCHES AND PIOUS PIMPS OF POWER
by Gerry Spence

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THE SMOKING GUN
by Gerry Spence

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HALF-MOON AND EMPTY STARS
by Gerry Spence

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CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE

DEATH, LIFE, AND JUSTICE IN A SMALL TOWN

by Pete Earley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1995

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Sex, prejudice, murder, and lies are the familiar hinges to this gripping investigation into the deaths of two Alabama teenagers. Earley (The Hot House, 1992, etc.) has perhaps written the right book at the wrong time. Though these events took place in the mid-1980s, the cold-blooded killing of a lovely white girl, the arrest of a black man who claims to have been across town at the time of the incident, lengthy judicial proceedings, and possible law enforcement bunglings and cover-ups cannot help but conjure the ghost of Nicole Brown Simpson. And that is unfortunate, since this story has many important lessons of its own. Two girls are killed in a short period of time, but the case involving the bad girl from the broken family gets little attention from the police. Earley, writing with a perfect journalistic temperament, records the actions of not only the stereotypically corrupt lawmen seeking quick answers and reelection, but of those who attempt to play by the book and help a black suspect in a town where it is still sociopolitical suicide for a white family to invite a black man home for supper. At the heart of this book is the question of truth and perspective. Over the course of seven years, the two murders are investigated and reinvestigated, suspects are arrested and released, lives are destroyed, questions go unanswered, and the county electric chair, nicknamed Yellow Mama, waits like a shark for a certain kind of justice to be carried out. In the profusion of protagonists and motives in an ultimately unsolved crime, a key witness in the drama says it all: ``What the hell is the truth? It is whatever damn well the person listening to you wants to hear.'' Death and capital punishment, southern style, and with all the trappings.