The Innocent Man
Murder and Injustice in a Small Town
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4.3 • 49 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LOOK FOR THE NETFLIX ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY SERIES • “Both an American tragedy and [Grisham’s] strongest legal thriller yet, all the more gripping because it happens to be true.”—Entertainment Weekly
John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction: a true crime masterpiece that tells the story of small town justice gone terribly awry.
In the Major League draft of 1971, the first player chosen from the state of Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with the Oakland A’s, he said goodbye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big league glory. Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits. He began to show signs of mental illness. Unable to keep a job, he moved in with his mother and slept twenty hours a day on her sofa.
In 1982, a twenty-one-year-old cocktail waitress in Ada named Debra Sue Carter was raped and murdered, and for five years the police could not solve the crime. For reasons that were never clear, they suspected Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz. The two were finally arrested in 1987 and charged with capital murder. With no physical evidence, the prosecution’s case was built on junk science and the testimony of jailhouse snitches and convicts. Dennis Fritz was found guilty and given a life sentence. Ron Williamson was sent to death row.
If you believe that in America you are innocent until proven guilty, this book will shock you. If you believe in the death penalty, this book will disturb you. If you believe the criminal justice system is fair, this book will infuriate you.
Don’t miss Framed, John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction since The Innocent Man, co-authored with Centurion Ministries founder Jim McCloskey.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction looks at the chilling true-crime story of two murders that rocked the sleepy town of Ada, Oklahoma in the ’80s—and examines the tragic injustice that ensued. Grisham unravels the case in methodical detail, introducing us to the two men who were wrongfully convicted while the real killer roamed free. Even with all we know about the fallibility of the criminal justice system today, The Innocent Man is still shocking. Grisham himself has said that if he had written this book as fiction, it would have seemed totally unbelievable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Grisham's first work of nonfiction focuses on the tragedy of Ron Williamson, a baseball hero from a small town in Oklahoma who winds up a dissolute, mentally unstable Major League washout railroaded onto death row for a hometown rape and murder he did not commit. Judging by this author-approved abridgment, Grisham has chosen to present Williamson's painful story (and that of his equally innocent "co-conspirator," Dennis Fritz) as straightforward journalism, eschewing the more familiar "nonfiction novel" approach with its reconstructed dialogues and other adjustments for dramatic purpose. This has resulted in a book that, while it includes such intriguing elements as murder, rape, detection and judicial injustice, consists primarily of objective reportage, albeit shaded by the now-proven fact of Williamson's innocence. The absence of dialogue or character point of view could make for a rather bland audio. Boutsikaris avoids that by reverting to what might be called old-fashioned round-the-campfire storytelling, treating the lengthy exposition to vocal interpretations, subtle and substantial. He narrates the events leading up to the 1982 rape and murder of a young cocktail waitress with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity, moving on to astonishment at the prosecution's use of deceit and false testimony to convict Williamson and Fritz and, eventually, elation at the exoneration of the two innocent men. Throughout, he maintains an appealing conversational tone, an effect made all the more remarkable by the book's nearly total absence of conversation. Simultaneous release with the Doubleday hardcover.
Customer Reviews
Caught and held me the whole way
I really enjoyed the story and am still gob-smacked at the truth of the tale.
A Great Story
A very interesting look into a shaky court and prison system. Captivating read.