ALMOST MIDNIGHT An American Story of Murder and Redemption

Hardback. In 1990 an outlaw named Darrell Mease was sentenced to die by lethal injection after brutally murdering three people deep in the heart of the Ozark Mountains. In a bizarre twist of fate, his life was saved by the intervention of none other than Pope John Paul II. On May 15, 1988, 69yr old Lloyd Lawrence was gunned down in rural Missouri. The shooter also turned his twelve-gauge shotgun on Lawrence's wife and their paraplegic 19yr old grandson. The crime took place in a region known mostly for Pentecostal fervor, country music, and family-friendly tourism. But soon the murders would expose a dark underbelly in the Ozarks: Lloyd Lawrence was a notoriously violent crystal-meth kingpin, killed by an aspiring drug dealer named Darrell Mease. Capturing the raw circumstances that took Mease from his clean-cut youth to the front lines of Vietnam and an aftermath of drug use, the author unites an unforgettable range of characters in some of America's most peculiar locales. After Mease's conviction, he claimed to receive a religious revelation guaranteeing that his life would be saved by miraculous intervention, a long-shot prediction that came true. A bizarre twist of fate brought Pope John II to St. Louis, where he pleaded with Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan to commute the sentence just months before Carnahan's fatal plane crash. 340pp. lge 8vo. h/back. From the library of true crime writer, Wilfred Gregg, with his personal b/plate. F. in f. dw. A review copy with loosely inserted slip.