Genre: Criminal Justice

A Death in White Bear Lake: The True Chronicle of an All-American Town

A Death in White Bear Lake: The True Chronicle of an All-American Town

A Death in White Bear Lake: The True Chronicle of an All-American Town by Barry Siegel
Published by Ballantine Books on November 28th 2000
Pages: 544
Genres: Criminal Justice, Nonfiction, Politics & Social Sciences
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Synopsis

"We want to talk to you about my brother who was murdered twenty-one years ago--can we come in?" The veneer of tranquility in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, began to crack the day Jerry Sherwood and her son showed up at the police station to inquire about her first-born son, Dennis--adopted by Lois and Harold Jurgens and dead before his fourth birthday. The autopsy report ruled peritonitis was the cause, but the startling photos of the boy suggested murder.
How could the Jurgens kill a small child and get away with it? Determined to find answers, detectives Ron Meehan and Greg Kindle tracked down old witnesses and rebuilt the case brick by brick until they exposed the demons that drove an adopted parent to torture and eventually murder a helpless child. Just as compelling, they investigated why so many people watched and did absolutely nothing. A vivid portrait of an all-American town that harbored a killer, A Death in White Bear Lake is also the absorbing story of two detectives who refused to give up until they had the killer cold.

Interesting book that encapsulates a national tragedy, child abuse was pretty well neglected by both the medical profession and law enforcement up until the 1960’s.  The attitude was who would do something like that and it’s really none of our business.  Once the scope of the abuse of children began to come to light both the medical profession and law enforcement stepped up to face the challenge.

What is so very sad about this book is that it is not about an isolated instance but rather it is just an example of what was going on through out the country.  Even in today’s world abuse of children continues, unabated.  The year Dennis Jurgen died, White Bear Lake became the All-American city of 1965.  The irony of this, is what makes this story so compelling.

 

Manifest Justice

Manifest Justice

Manifest Injustice: The True Story of a Convicted Murderer and the Lawyers Who Fought for His Freedom by Barry Siegel
Published by Henry Holt and Co. on January 22nd 2013
Pages: 400
Format: hardback
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Synopsis

In this remarkable legal page-turner, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Barry Siegel recounts the dramatic, decades-long saga of Bill Macumber, imprisoned for thirty-eight years for a double homicide he denies committing. In the spring of 1962, a school bus full of students stumbled across a mysterious crime scene on an isolated stretch of Arizona desert: an abandoned car and two bodies. This brutal murder of a young couple bewildered the sheriff 's department of Maricopa County for years. Despite a few promising leads—including several chilling confessions from Ernest Valenzuela, a violent repeat offender—the case went cold. More than a decade later, a clerk in the sheriff 's department, Carol Macumber, came forward to tell police that her estranged husband had confessed to the murders. Though the evidence linking Bill Macumber to the incident was questionable, he was arrested and charged with the crime. During his trial, the judge refused to allow the confession of now-deceased Ernest Valenzuela to be admitted as evidence in part because of the attorney-client privilege. Bill Macumber was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
The case, rife with extraordinary irregularities, attracted the sustained involvement of the Arizona Justice Project, one of the first and most respected of the non-profit groups that represent victims of manifest injustice across the country. With more twists and turns than a Hollywood movie, Macumber's story illuminates startling, upsetting truths about our justice system, which kept a possibly innocent man locked up for almost forty years, and introduces readers to the generations of dedicated lawyers who never stopped working on his behalf, lawyers who ultimately achieved stunning results. With precise journalistic detail, intimate access and masterly storytelling, Barry Siegel will change your understanding of American jurisprudence, police procedure, and what constitutes justice in our country today.

The first book I read by Barry Siegel was Claim of Privilege  , I was absolutely mesmerized by the book. Amazed that the government could withhold information from family members on the loss of their loved ones.

Manifest Injustice, like Just Mercy tells the story of a man caught in grips of a legal system gone awry. It is hard to understand exactly how our legal system gets so messed up. After reading Unfair I understand how juries are manipulated by lawyers,expert witnesses and judges that have agendas.

What interests me was it Bill Macumber who was the sociopath or was it his wife that lied? Nobody seemed to care that his wife lied. What was really going on between those two?

Obviously spending 37 years behind bars has to have an effect on one’s personality but it saddened me to find that Bill Macumber was found guilty of child sex abuse less than 12 months after he being released from prison, very sad indeed.

A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy

A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy

A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy by Sue Klebold
Published by Crown on February 15th 2016
Pages: 296
Format: ebook
Genres: Criminal Justice, Nonfiction, Politics & Social Sciences
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Synopsis

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill twelve students and a teacher and wound twenty-four others before taking their own lives. For the last sixteen years, Sue Klebold, Dylan’s mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day. How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised, be responsible for such horror? And how, as his mother, had she not known something was wrong? Were there subtle signs she had missed? What, if anything, could she have done differently? These are questions that Klebold has grappled with every day since the Columbine tragedy. In A Mother’s Reckoning, she chronicles with unflinching honesty her journey as a mother trying to come to terms with the incomprehensible. In the hope that the insights and understanding she has gained may help other families recognize when a child is in distress, she tells her story in full, drawing upon her personal journals, the videos and writings that Dylan left behind, and on countless interviews with mental health experts. Filled with hard-won wisdom and compassion, A Mother’s Reckoning is a powerful and haunting book that sheds light on one of the most pressing issues of our time. And with fresh wounds from the recent Newtown and Charleston shootings, never has the need for understanding been more urgent. Author profits from the book will be donated to research and to charitable foundations focusing on mental health issues

Sue Klebold is a brave woman and I have nothing but admiration for her.  She will always live with the fact that she missed something; something that was going terribly wrong with her son.

Simple truth is we really don’t know how one’s mind works, we don’t know what causes abnormalities in people’s minds.  There was something wrong with Dylan Klebold, we know that for sure. What we don’t know is if he had not met up with Eric Harris would he have done the things he did?  I believe that the chemistry between these two lead to this terrible tragedy.