An effective exposé of the criminal justice system that casts convincing doubt on the guilt of a death row inmate.
An account of a woman’s four-year fight to save a convicted murderer from execution.
In 1993, at a crossroads in her life, St. John “needed, wanted desperately, to feel passionate about something.” She found what she was looking for when she volunteered for Centurion Ministries, an organization that works to vindicate wrongfully convicted prisoners. There, she learned of the case of Joseph Roger O’Dell, who had been sentenced to death in 1986 for the rape and murder of a woman in Virginia. She provides a dramatic account of the nearly four years she spent trying to save O’Dell from being executed, an effort that was ultimately unsuccessful despite the intervention of both the Italian and European parliaments. “I would learn that the justice system isn’t really about justice,” she recalls. O’Dell’s conviction was based largely on blood evidence and the testimony of a jailhouse informant, but St. John, using her insider knowledge of the case, makes a convincing argument that it was tainted by witness tampering and the suppression of evidence. “It was a defendant’s worst nightmare,” she writes. “Joe was not only fighting the state. He was also fighting his own lawyer.” While working with O’Dell’s appellate lawyers, the author uncovered evidence that was never presented to the jury, interviewed witnesses—including the informant, whom she and an investigator tracked down in West Virginia—and received threatening letters from one of the prosecutors. “I am fighting against ruthless, powerful figures of authority who are not interested in the truth,” she laments. The book also details her personal relationship with O’Dell, whom she visited regularly on death row and to whom she eventually became so close that they married on the day of his execution in July 1997. It was a “connection caused by the union of two people in an intense battle over a human life,” she explains. The author’s passion keeps the book from becoming bogged down in legal detail, and the countdown to O’Dell’s execution is almost as suspenseful to read as it must have been for her to experience. Although she was unable to save O’Dell, she believes she was “successful in bringing this injustice to the world’s attention.”
An effective exposé of the criminal justice system that casts convincing doubt on the guilt of a death row inmate.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9890401-2-9
Page Count: 495
Publisher: Creative Production Services Inc.
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
"There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that." This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. "Deal me out, baby...I'm a normal." This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself. They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. A couple of days before they had bought a 100 foot rope to garrote them—enough for ten people if necessary. This small pogrom took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a lonesome town on a flat, limitless landscape: a depot, a store, a cafe, two filling stations, 270 inhabitants. The natives refer to it as "out there." It occurred in 1959 and Capote has spent five years, almost all of the time which has since elapsed, in following up this crime which made no sense, had no motive, left few clues—just a footprint and a remembered conversation. Capote's alternating dossier Shifts from the victims, the Clutter family, to the boy who had loved Nancy Clutter, and her best friend, to the neighbors, and to the recently paroled perpetrators: Perry, with a stunted child's legs and a changeling's face, and Dick, who had one squinting eye but a "smile that works." They had been cellmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary where another prisoner had told them about the Clutters—he'd hired out once on Mr. Clutter's farm and thought that Mr. Clutter was perhaps rich. And this is the lead which finally broke the case after Perry and Dick had drifted down to Mexico, back to the midwest, been seen in Kansas City, and were finally picked up in Las Vegas. The last, even more terrible chapters, deal with their confessions, the law man who wanted to see them hanged, back to back, the trial begun in 1960, the post-ponements of the execution, and finally the walk to "The Corner" and Perry's soft-spoken words—"It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize." It's a magnificent job—this American tragedy—with the incomparable Capote touches throughout. There may never have been a perfect crime, but if there ever has been a perfect reconstruction of one, surely this must be it.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1965
ISBN: 0375507906
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1965
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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