Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, The Conservative Establishment. and the Courts to Set Him Free by Sarah Weinman

 Edgar Smith spent most of his adult life trying to game the criminal justice system.  He was determined, deliberate, canny, and manipulative.  For several years, he got what he wanted and more:  freedom, celebrity, a career as a best-selling author.  He had the friendship of William F. Buckley, who went against his own conservative ideology to champion and advocate for Smith's innocence.  But then he squandered it all.                                                                                                                                                                      -- Sarah Weinman, Scoundrel (HarperCollins, 2022)

In 1957 Edgar Smith was convicted of murdering fifteen-year-old Victoria Zielinski in Ramsey, N.J. and sentenced to death.  While he was in prison William F. Buckley, Jr. read that Smith was having trouble getting copies of the conservative National Review, of which Buckley was editor.  Smith and Buckley started a correspondence and Buckley became convinced Smith was innocent and helped him raise money for appeals and put him in touch with editor Sophie Wilkins, who helped him with his book Brief Against Death.  The appeals were eventually successful in convincing a district court that Smith's confession was coerced and ordered a new trial.  An agreement was made that if Smith would confess to the murder he would be freed for time served, 15 years on death row. Immediately when freed in 1971 Smith was driven to Manhattan to appear on Buckley's TV show Firing Line (the show was in two parts, both of which can now be seen on YouTube).  Smith moved to California as writing jobs dried up and in 1976 he stabbed Lefteriya Ozbun; she fought him off and escaped as Smith went on the lam and contacted Buckley, who contacted the FBI.  Smith was sentenced to life and died in prison in 2017 at the age of eighty-three.

Weinman tells this story in the same effective matter-of-fact way she did the story of The Real Lolita (see my blog entry of Oct. 7, 2018).  She quotes extensively from the triangular correspondence of Smith, Wilkins and Buckley, with Smith coming across as a clever manipulator of emotions, especially in his epistolary romance with Wilkins, who eventually caught on and spurned him.  Weinman lays out all the facts for us and lets us make up our own minds about the complex psychology of the relationships and whether there is any lesson to be learned here, other than that it is not always easy for justice to be well served.