Slaughter on a Snowy Morn: A Tale of Murder, Corruption and the Death Penalty Case that Revolutionised the American Courtroom (TRADE PAPERBACK)

Colin Evans

UK £12.99,
UK Publication July 2010
ISBN 9781848311657
Paperback
Page Extent 304

Buy: | Amazon UK| Waterstones| Book Depository

 

Sing Sing Prison, New York, July 1916.

Charles Frederick Stielow, a 37-year-old farmhand with the mind of an infant, is just minutes away from the electric chair for a double murder he didn’t commit. With a vengeful legal system baying for blood, his situation looks hopeless. Eight blocks away, Stielow’s wife sobs helplessly in her hotel room, certain she will never see her husband alive again ...

Slaughter on a Snowy Morn is the first full account of how Charles Stielow, convicted of murdering a wealthy landowner and his housekeeper, became the central figure in one of the most fascinating yet little-known stories in criminal history.

The cast list includes New York State governor Charles Seymour Whitman – ambitious for the White House – and his nemesis, Sing Sing warden Thomas Mott Osborne, a passionate opponent of the death penalty, convinced of Stielow’s innocence. 

The crooked ‘expert’ testimony of Albert H. Hamilton, a jumped-up druggist, condemns Stielow to death row, where the battle to save his life is led by America’s most celebrated female lawyer, Grace Humiston.

But the story’s unsung hero is the obsessively secretive, quietly spoken Charles E. Waite – the great mystery man of American forensic science – whose experts tear Hamilton’s testimony to shreds.

Colin Evans presents a nail-biting true story of wrongful conviction and a fight for redemption in an age of bare-knuckle politics and cynical courtroom manoeuvring that changed for ever the face of American justice.

 

--------------

Colin Evans is a veteran writer specialising in forensics. His books include The Casebook of Forensic Detection: How Science Solved 100 of the World's Most Baffling Crimes, and A Question of Evidence: The Casebook of Great Forensic Controversies from Napoleon to O.J. He lives in Trowbridge, Wiltshire.

See more books by: Colin Evans


--------------

Tags: crime