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.
A mother’s search for the son she gave up uncovers terrifying secrets in a Minnesota town in this “masterfully depicted true-crime tale” (Publishers Weekly). In 1962, Jerry Sherwood gave up her newborn son, Dennis, for adoption. Twenty years later, she set out to find him—only to discover he had died before his fourth birthday. The immediate cause was peritonitis, but the coroner had never decided the mode of death, writing “deferred” rather than indicate accident, natural causes, or homicide. This he did even though the autopsy photos showed Dennis covered from head to toe in ugly bruises, his clenched fists and twisted facial expression suggesting he had died writhing in pain. Harold and Lois Jurgens, a middle-class, churchgoing couple in picturesque White Bear Lake, Minnesota, had adopted Dennis and five other foster children. To all appearances, they were a normal midwestern family, but Jerry suspected that something sinister had happened in the Jurgens household. She demanded to know the truth about her son’s death. Why did authorities dismiss evidence that marked Dennis as an endangered child? Could Lois Jurgens’s brother, a local police lieutenant, have interfered in the investigation? And most disturbing of all, why had so many people who’d witnessed Lois’s brutal treatment of her children stay silent for so long? Determined to find answers, local detectives and prosecutors rebuilt the case brick by brick, finally exposing the shocking truth behind a nightmare in suburbia. A finalist for the Edgar Award, A Death in White Bear Lake is “a distinguished entry in the annals of crime documentary,” and a vivid portrait of the all-American town that harbored a sadistic killer (The Washington Post).
On October 6, 1948, a U.S. Air Force B-29 Superfortress crashed soon after takeoff, killing three civilian engineers and six crew members. In June 1949, the engineers' widows filed suit against the government, determined to find out what exactly had happened to their husbands and why the three civilians had been on board the airplane in the first place. But it was the dawn of the Cold War and the Air Force refused to hand over any documents, claiming they contained classified information. The legal battle ultimately reached the Supreme Court, which in 1953 handed down a landmark decision that would, in later years, enable the government to conceal gross negligence and misconduct, block troublesome litigation, and detain criminal suspects without due-process protections. Claim of Privilege is a mesmerizing true account of a shameful incident and its lasting impact on our nation—the gripping story of a courageous fight to right a past wrong and a powerful indictment of governmental abuse in the name of national security.
They used to be partners--Greg Monarch and Ira Sullivan, a couple of do-good lawyers in central California. But it all went bad for Ira. Bad enough that he wakes up in jail one day staring at a death sentence for murder. Only Greg Monarch has a prayer of getting him off--if he's willing to cross certain ethical lines. Layer by layer, Greg peels back a tissue of lies--and at the rotten core he comes to Sandy Polson. Sandy says she was with Ira the night of the murder, says she saw the whole thing. The prosecution believes she's the perfect witness. But what if Monarch could persuade Sandy to tell the truth? Wouldn't Sandy then become the perfect witness for the defense?
To clear the name of his former lover, Sarah Trant, a convicted murderer on death row, attorney Greg Monarch journeys to a seemingly idyllic California community where his investigations uncover an evil web of long-hidden deception and secrets. By the author of The Perfect Witness. Reprint.
Doug Bard has been a detective with the sheriff’s department in La Graciosa, California, long enough to know the score. Now that an influx of upscale chain stores and luxury housing has turned sleepy Chumash County into a boom town, the last thing anyone wants is crime casting a shadow over the prosperity. But Bard also knows he’s not the kind of man who can write off a double fatality as a tragic accident—especially when all his instincts tell him it was murder. When a devastating housefire claims the lives of a kindly local retiree and his eleven-year-old piano student, District Attorney Angela Stark wastes no time declaring the blaze a mishap. But the verdict just doesn’t sit right with Bard. Inconclusive but troubling clues—marks on the dead girl’s neck, a strange bootprint on a kicked-in door—are enough to make the veteran detective buck the party line and fight to keep the case open. It’s a stand that puts the renegade Bard at odds yet again with his superiors. Until a suspect surfaces. Placed at the scene of the deadly fire by an eyewitness, Jed Jeremiah is a backwoods loner with a homicide conviction in his past. But even as the sensational murder trial gets under way, the same instincts that told Bard there was foul play afoot now convince him that the wrong man may face the death penalty—and a calculating killer is still at large. Defying the sheriff and the D.A. and putting his job on the line, Bard begins to dig for the truth. What he discovers is a shocking link to his own past—one that will put the people he loves most in deadly jeopardy. From crime scene to courtroom, Lines of Defense unravels a cunningly plotted tale of detection and justice. Michael Connelly has declared, “with Barry Siegel you don’t read a story. You feel it. You live it. And you always want more.” The third novel by the acclaimed author of Actual Innocence and The Perfect Witness brilliantly proves him right, on all counts.
How one man brought the Olympics to Los Angeles, fueling the city's urban transformation. Dreamers and Schemers chronicles how Los Angeles’s pursuit and staging of the 1932 Olympic Games during the depths of the Great Depression helped fuel the city’s transformation from a seedy frontier village to a world-famous metropolis. Leading that pursuit was the “Prince of Realtors,” William May (Billy) Garland, a prominent figure in early Los Angeles. In important respects, the story of Billy Garland is the story of Los Angeles. After arriving in Southern California in 1890, he and his allies drove much of the city’s historic expansion in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Then, from 1920 to 1932, he directed the city’s bid for the 1932 Olympic Games. Garland’s quest to host the Olympics provides an unusually revealing window onto a particular time, place, and way of life. Reconstructing the narrative from Garland’s visionary notion to its consequential aftermath, Barry Siegel shows how one man’s grit and imagination made California history.
Money, Banking, and the Economy: A Monetarist View presents a systematic "monetarist" approach to money, banking, and the economy. The monetarist approach is a blend of the pre-Keynesian quantity theory, the tradition represented by D. H. Robertson, and the modern monetarist school, represented by Milton Friedman and his followers. A systematic development of a model of nominal income, based upon the Cambridge equation and the loanable funds theory of interest, is presented. This model is applied to the business cycle; inflation and stagflation; balance of payments and foreign exchange rates; and monetary and fiscal policy theories. Comprised of 20 chapters, this book begins with an introduction to the concept of money and its functions and how it contributes to economic instability. The discussion then turns to the new and old definitions of the things that serve as money, the structure and institutions of financial markets and financial instruments; banks, banking markets, and banking regulations; and the money supply process. Subsequent chapters explore the structure and functions of the Federal Reserve System; the problem of implementing monetary policy; the Clower-Leijonhufvud idea of Say's Principle; the quantity theory of money as described by the equation of exchange or the Cambridge equation; and the connection between money and business cycles. The book concludes by describing a monetarist-public choice perspective on the efficacy of monetary and fiscal policies. This monograph will be of value to undergraduate students and economists.
Beat the Blues is an instructional manual and tool kit that provides a sound recipe to increase productivity and improve lives. Barry Sea Siegel has gathered some of the finest success achievement principles formulated over the past four thousand years, updated them to include computer terminology, generated his own original theories, and added the unusual element of blues music. Beat the Blues provides a soundtrack of original music with specific lyrics created to help us learn and remember the lucky seven components of the program, while reprogramming a section of our subconscious minds Siegel metaphorically identifies as the success GPS. The process of reading the book, filling out the forms in the First Will and Testament of the appendix, and listening to the music is enjoyable and uplifting. More importantly, it may just help us identify purposeful goals and map out the most efficient route to achieve them.
This provocative volume addresses the problem of alcohol and drug abuse among the affluent. Experts explore the prevalence and patterns of abuse among the "privileged." Important and revealing data is examined concerning the appropriateness of existing forms of treatment and the effectiveness of the therapeutic process. Topics of particular interest and timeliness include drug use among affluent adolescents, cocaine use and abuse, and the increasing incidence of substance abuse among physicians.
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