Scoundrel
How a convicted murderer persuaded the women who loved him, the conservative establishment and the courts to set him free
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE CBC AND ESQUIRE
A true-crime masterpiece, this is a story of wrongful exoneration about killer Edgar Smith and the prominent crusaders who fell prey to his charm.
Having spent almost half his lifetime in California's state penitentiary system, convicted killer Edgar Smith died in obscurity in 2017 at the age of eighty-three—a miracle, really, as he was meant to be executed nearly six decades earlier. Tried and convicted in the state of New Jersey for the 1957 murder of fifteen-year-old Victoria Zielinski, Smith was once the most famous convict in America.
Scoundrel tells the true, almost-too-bizarre story of a man saved from Death Row by way of an unlikely friendship—developed in…
SARAH WEINMAN is the editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America) and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Penguin). She covers book publishing for Publishers Marketplace, and has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, the Guardian, Buzzfeed, the National Post (where she was the "Crime Wave" columnist) the Globe and Mail, Maclean's and Hazlitt, where the story that inspired this book appeared. Her Hazlitt features have twice been nominated for National Magazine Awards. A native of Ottawa and a graduate of McGill University, as well as of John Jay College of Criminal Justice's forensic science graduate program, Weinman lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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