**
Originally published in 1966 and written by a reporter who covered the case, this book deals with the crime and subsequent trial of Gertrude Baniszewski, her three oldest children (aged 12, 15, and 17), and two teenage neighbor boys who beat, tortured, and abused a 16-year-old female boarder in the woman's home for several months in 1965 until the girl succumbed at last to her injuries and died. Because so many of the eyewitnesses to the crime were involved in it and since the others were children themselves with their own individual loyalties, Dean is forced to reconstruct the events leading to the girl's death from often unreliable and contradictory testimony. Though this was unavoidable, it makes for a convoluted and confusing summary, the power of which isn't in the details but rather the accumulated weight of so much cruelty. The larger trial portion of the book (the judge ruled against separate trials for the defendants, though these were later granted on appeal), is much more straightforward, but also much less interesting, and adds neither insight to the trial procedure itself nor anything of substance to the earlier reconstruction. (It does, however, contain one memorable line of testimony. When asked whether he'd ever seen the victim doing anything "unusual" in the woman's house, a neighbor boy replied, "I seen her studying a few times.") A truly tragic case, but as for this book it isn't entirly immaterial to its quality to mention (as Dean does himself in a new preface for the 2008 edition) that it was commissioned by Bee-Line, a publisher of pornographic novels, in an attempt to go mainstream.
Originally published in 1966 and written by a reporter who covered the case, this book deals with the crime and subsequent trial of Gertrude Baniszewski, her three oldest children (aged 12, 15, and 17), and two teenage neighbor boys who beat, tortured, and abused a 16-year-old female boarder in the woman's home for several months in 1965 until the girl succumbed at last to her injuries and died. Because so many of the eyewitnesses to the crime were involved in it and since the others were children themselves with their own individual loyalties, Dean is forced to reconstruct the events leading to the girl's death from often unreliable and contradictory testimony. Though this was unavoidable, it makes for a convoluted and confusing summary, the power of which isn't in the details but rather the accumulated weight of so much cruelty. The larger trial portion of the book (the judge ruled against separate trials for the defendants, though these were later granted on appeal), is much more straightforward, but also much less interesting, and adds neither insight to the trial procedure itself nor anything of substance to the earlier reconstruction. (It does, however, contain one memorable line of testimony. When asked whether he'd ever seen the victim doing anything "unusual" in the woman's house, a neighbor boy replied, "I seen her studying a few times.") A truly tragic case, but as for this book it isn't entirly immaterial to its quality to mention (as Dean does himself in a new preface for the 2008 edition) that it was commissioned by Bee-Line, a publisher of pornographic novels, in an attempt to go mainstream.
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