This gripping story about the first woman executed in Texas in over one hundred years draws on accounts from family, prisoners, government officials, and friends to show how God used a remarkable woman to reach countless lives with a message of redemption and joy. Linda Strom, Tucker's spiritual advisor and close friend for eleven years, includes photographs as well as excerpts from Tucker's letters and interviews.
This gripping story about the first woman executed in Texas in over one hundred years draws on accounts from family, prisoners, government officials, and friends to show how God used a remarkable woman to reach countless lives with a message of redemption and joy. Linda Strom, Tucker's spiritual advisor and close friend for eleven years, includes photographs as well as excerpts from Tucker's letters and interviews.
One mother's son is killed in a tragic accident; another's daughter murders two people in a wild rage. From these bitter facts, Beverly Lowry--the first child's mother and an acclaimed novelist--has fashioned a memoir in which the objectivity of true-crime reportage resonates with acute feeling and even, ultimately, with redemption. In Houston, in the early morning hours of June 13, 1983, twenty-three-year-old Karla Faye Tucker showed up with two friends at the apartment of a man they hated, Jerry Lynn Dean. Fired by a lost weekend of drugs and bravado, during which their grievances against Jerry Lynn became magnified out of all proportion, they had it in mind to steal motorcycle parts. Maybe to scare him a little. But by the time they left, both Dean and his chance, one-night companion had been murdered with such thorough wickedness as to ensure Karla's place among the handful of young white women on Death Row in this country. The next fall, outside of Austin, Beverly Lowry's son Peter, after an increasingly troubled adolescence, was back in high school and back living at home when he was killed--an unsolved hit-and-run. He was eighteen. The despair that descended into Lowry's life seemed without end, but eventually and almost inevitably she became obsessed by the beautiful young killer whose photograph she'd seen in a Houston newspaper. "If Peter hadn't been killed," she writes, "I would not have made that first trip up to see Karla Faye." In Crossed Over, Beverly Lowry reveals how Tucker, a full-time addict and part-time prostitute, had been dealt this fate as a child--only to pursue it relentlessly herself in Houston's violent subculture of bikers and outlaws. Working backward from the murders, Lowry delves into character and motive, looking for reasons that might explain these unthinkable acts. But this is also an account of the unlikely and powerful friendship between a writer--a mother--coming to terms with her loss and a young woman who, even under the sentence of death, begins the life she'd never before had a chance to lead. Crossed Over is a story of crime and punishment, but more importantly it explores the connection between grief and hope, and between different kinds of victims. In the end, what Beverly Lowry uncovers is the unexpected ability of life, however blighted the circumstances, to assert its best, most urgent claim upon us.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the governor of Maryland, the “compassionate” (People), “startling” (Baltimore Sun), “moving” (Chicago Tribune) true story of two kids with the same name: One went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison. The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his. In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship. The same paper also ran a series of articles about four young men who had allegedly killed a police officer in a spectacularly botched armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers. One was named Wes Moore. Wes just couldn’t shake off the unsettling coincidence, or the inkling that the two shared much more than space in the same newspaper. After following the story of the robbery, the manhunt, and the trial to its conclusion, he wrote a letter to the other Wes, now a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. His letter tentatively asked the questions that had been haunting him: Who are you? How did this happen? That letter led to a correspondence and relationship that have lasted for several years. Over dozens of letters and prison visits, Wes discovered that the other Wes had had a life not unlike his own: Both had had difficult childhoods, both were fatherless; they’d hung out on similar corners with similar crews, and both had run into trouble with the police. At each stage of their young lives they had come across similar moments of decision, yet their choices would lead them to astonishingly different destinies. Told in alternating dramatic narratives that take readers from heart-wrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world.
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A deeply reported, searingly honest portrait of the death penalty in Texas—and what it tells us about crime and punishment in America “If you’re one of those people who despair that nothing changes, and dream that something can, this is a story of how it does.”—Anand Giridharadas, The New York Times Book Review WINNER OF THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS AWARD In 1972, the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: the country’s death penalty system violated the Constitution. The backlash was swift, especially in Texas, where executions were considered part of the cultural fabric, and a dark history of lynching was masked by gauzy visions of a tough-on-crime frontier. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment. Then, amid a larger wave of criminal justice reform, came the death penalty’s decline, a trend so durable that even in Texas the punishment appears again close to extinction. In Let the Lord Sort Them, Maurice Chammah charts the rise and fall of capital punishment through the eyes of those it touched. We meet Elsa Alcala, the orphaned daughter of a Mexican American family who found her calling as a prosecutor in the nation’s death penalty capital, before becoming a judge on the state’s highest court. We meet Danalynn Recer, a lawyer who became obsessively devoted to unearthing the life stories of men who committed terrible crimes, and fought for mercy in courtrooms across the state. We meet death row prisoners—many of them once-famous figures like Henry Lee Lucas, Gary Graham, and Karla Faye Tucker—along with their families and the families of their victims. And we meet the executioners, who struggle openly with what society has asked them to do. In tracing these interconnected lives against the rise of mass incarceration in Texas and the country as a whole, Chammah explores what the persistence of the death penalty tells us about forgiveness and retribution, fairness and justice, history and myth. Written with intimacy and grace, Let the Lord Sort Them is the definitive portrait of a particularly American institution.
A vivid history of America's biggest, baddest prison system and how it came to lead the nation's punitive revolution In the prison business, all roads lead to Texas. The most locked-down state in the nation has led the way in criminal justice severity, from assembly-line executions to isolation supermaxes, from prison privatization to sentencing juveniles as adults. Texas Tough, a sweeping history of American imprisonment from the days of slavery to the present, shows how a plantation-based penal system once dismissed as barbaric became the national template. Drawing on convict accounts, official records, and interviews with prisoners, guards, and lawmakers, historian Robert Perkinson reveals the Southern roots of our present-day prison colossus. While conventional histories emphasize the North's rehabilitative approach, he shows how the retributive and profit-driven regime of the South ultimately triumphed. Most provocatively, he argues that just as convict leasing and segregation emerged in response to Reconstruction, so today's mass incarceration, with its vast racial disparities, must be seen as a backlash against civil rights. Illuminating for the first time the origins of America's prison juggernaut, Texas Tough points toward a more just and humane future.
“I am a woman that came from the cotton fields of the South; I was promoted from there to the wash-tub; then I was promoted to the cook kitchen, and from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations.” --Madam C. J. Walker, National Negro Business League Convention, 1912 Now, from a writer acclaimed for her novels and the memoir Crossed Over, a remarkable biography of a truly heroic figure. Madam C. J. Walker created a cosmetics empire and became known as the first female self-made millionaire in this nation’s history, a noted philanthropist and champion of women’s rights and economic freedom. These achievements seem nothing less than miraculous given that she was born, in 1867, to former slaves in a hamlet on the Mississippi River. How she came to live on another river, the Hudson, in a Westchester County mansion, and in a New York City town house, is at once inspirational and mysterious, because for all that is known about the famous entrepreneur, much that occurred before her magnificent transformation—years that trace a circuitous route across the country—remains obscure. By breathing life into scattered clues and dry facts, and with a deep understanding of the times and places through which Madam Walker moved, Beverly Lowry tells a story that stretches from the antebellum South to the Harlem Renaissance and bridges nearly a century of our history in her search for the distant truths of a woman who defied all odds and redefined conventional expectations. “Wherever there was one colored person, whether it was a city, a town, or a puddle by the railroad tracks, everybody knew her name.” --Violet Davis Reynolds, Stenographer, Madam C. J. Walker Co
"Some true stories move us. Pamela's story changes us." - Dale S.Recinella, Chaplain for Florida's Death Row and author of Now I Walk on Death Row Pamela Perillo was set to die on March 24, 1996. Convicted of capital murder in 1980, Pamela sat on Texas's Death Row awaiting lethal injection. But less than two days before her scheduled execution, she was given a second chance, and in 2000, she was resentenced: from death to life in prison with the possibility of parole. Her first chance at new life had come shortly after her arrest, when Pamela embraced the Christian faith and began bringing her fellow inmates to redemption in Christ. That's why although Pamela's story is one of imprisonment--first by abuse and addiction and ultimately behind the locked doors of the criminal justice system--it's also a story of hope--of finding a new path in faith, of taking courage from the promise of salvation, and now, of praying for parole in 2019 after nearly forty years of incarceration. Salvation on Death Row combines true-crime reporting with a powerful spiritual memoir, reminding us that every life is a journey, every person is capable of change, and every individual can make a positive impact on the world. "This is a great story with a wonderful conclusion: The only good answer is the Lord!"- -Bill Glass, founder of Bill Glass Ministries The author's proceeds from Salvation on Death Row will benefit Patriot PAWS service dogs.
