In the 1960s, Edgar Smith, in prison and sentenced to death for the murder of teenager Victoria Zielinski, struck up a correspondence with William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review. Buckley began to advocate not only for Smith's life to be spared but also for his sentence to be overturned. So begins a bizarre and tragic tale of mid-century America. Scoundrel leads us through the twists of fate and fortune that brought Smith to freedom, book deals, fame, and eventually to attempting murder again.
... a riveting chronicle ... Weinman, who lays out the details with a prosecutor’s care, convincingly demonstrates Smith was the killer ... As a writer, she’s more interested in the lives of the victims than Smith’s psychology ... It’s hard to imagine anyone grasping the importance of [Knopf editor Sophie] Wilkins’s role as well as Weinman does ... The relationship between Wilkins and Smith is the surprising secret heart of this book, showing how a sensitive, intelligent person might fall for a con-man. It’s a mirror for all the others who believed his claims of innocence—the people who bought Smith’s books, his wives, his mother, his friends, and defenders ... Weinman is able to tell the story in vivid detail because of letters and their permanence ... Many of these letters are excerpted to lay out the story as it moves forward in granular detail.
... [a] powerful new book from Ottawa-born writer and editor Sarah Weinman ... Unlike many true crime accounts, Scoundrel isn’t a whodunnit, and doesn’t rely on twists or withholding information for its considerable power. It is, instead, an examination of relationships shaped and twisted by the words and actions of a master manipulator and killer ... Rooted in archival work and interviews, with extensive quoting from letters and other documents, Scoundrel demonstrates the full potential of the true crime genre: expansive and incisive, with deep attention (and respect) given to those affected by the crimes, rather than focusing on salacious detail. It makes for an unsettling, and enthralling, reading experience, and an important one.
In straightforward prose, Weinman diligently and chronologically recreates the judicial proceedings, literary lunches, letter exchanges, prison visits, stays of execution and romances (there were many!) that led from incarceration to exoneration and back again. Her research is meticulous and extensive, allowing us to witness step by shocking step how Buckley and Wilkins chose to believe and then hand a microphone to a murderer ... But in allowing her characters to self-incriminate, Weinman cedes a modicum of control. I found myself wishing she would indict those involved not just for being despicable but for being complicit ... Instead, Weinman makes Buckley out to be a well-meaning man duped by a cunning manipulator.
What did you think of Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free?
