MURDER STORY A Tragedy of Our Time

Hardback. In 1980, Eleanor Prouty's first born bent over the battered and violated body of his mother. "Good-bye, Ellie," he said. "I love you." So begins the story of a murder. Eleanor Prouty, elegant magazine editor, is found brutally bludgeoned and strangled. Her bedridden husband lies bloodied but breathing in an upstairs bedroom. their "big house" in the Prouty family compound is ransacked, but nothing, seemingly has been taken. Who killed Eleanor Prouty? A jealous lover? A member of the family? Police search for the killer or killers for weeks while, only a mile down the road, several dozen reform school inmates share a guilty secret: The plot against the Prouty home was hatched in the reform school. The author takes you behind the scenes of life in a reform school where the reform cure worsens the disease. You shuttle between 13 foster homes and institutions with a killer who has never known his "real people". You witness the wrenching drama of courtroom and jury room scenes as adults agonise over the fate of the youngest murder defendants in their county's history. And you listen to the intimate details of life in a maximum security prison - from the lips of two teenage lifers, Terrence Losicco and David Hollis. Here is a tragedy of the time - random violence by the young. Illus. + Epilogue. 289pp. 8vo. h/back. From the library of true crime writer, Wilfred Gregg, with his personal b/plate. Vg+ in Vg. sl. faded dw. Review copy which also includes a photograph of the author.