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How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free
Ecco
March 2022
On Sale: February 22, 2022
Featuring: Edgar Smith
464 pages
ISBN: 0062899767
EAN: 9780062899767
Kindle: B094JM8YFW
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography | Non-Fiction Memoir
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, who refused to believe
that a man who supported the neoconservative movement could
have committed such a heinous crime, 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. Sarah Weinman’s Scoundrel leads us
through the twists of fate and fortune that brought Smith to
freedom, book deals, fame, and eventually to attempting
murder again. In Smith, Weinman has uncovered a psychopath
who slipped his way into public acclaim and acceptance
before crashing down to earth once again.
From the people Smith deceived—Buckley, the book
editor who published his work, friends from back home, and
the women who loved him—to Americans who were willing
to buy into his lies, Weinman explores who in our world is
accorded innocence, and how the public becomes complicit in
the stories we tell one another.
Scoundrel shows, with clear eyes and sympathy for
all those who entered Smith’s orbit, how and why he
was able to manipulate, obfuscate, and make a mockery of
both well-meaning people and the American criminal justice
system. It tells a forgotten part of American history at the
nexus of justice, prison reform, and civil rights, and
exposes how one man’s ill-conceived plan to set
another man free came at the great expense of Edgar
Smith’s victims.
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