Blind Justice: A Murder, a Scandal, and a Brother's Search to Avenge His Sister's Death - Hardcover

Gibson, Ray; Gibson, Edie; Turner, Randall

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312063067 ISBN 13: 9780312063061

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1991

Synopsis

Discusses the murder of the wife of a well-to-do Chicago attorney, and the corruption behind it

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

A lackluster account of the murder of a swinging Illinois housewife/community activist, by a pair of Chicago Tribune reporters writing with the victim's brother. Thirty-five-year-old Dianne Masters was unhappily married to Alan Masters, a highly successful lawyer with few scruples and many connections with members of the underworld, bent cops, bribable judges, and corrupt politicos. For three months, Dianne had been having a torrid affair--steamy assignations in seamy motels, hurried couplings in parked cars--with a college professor. Then, on March 19, 1982, two days before she was scheduled to file for divorce, she disappeared. Six months later, Dianne's Cadillac was pulled from the waters of a Chicago canal; her body, beaten and shot, was found crammed into the trunk. The subsequent investigation was desultory at best; leads were not followed up, the people involved were only cursorily questioned. To Dianne's brother, it was apparent that Masters, fearing that Dianne would reveal his shady dealings during divorce testimony, had masterminded the killing and that his connections were engaged in a cover-up. It wasn't until the FBI was called in and several honest investigators assigned that progress was made in unraveling the case. Seven years after the murder, Masters and two accomplices were charged with the crime. The jury found Masters guilty of conspiracy to murder and sentenced him to 40 years in prison, his co-defendants to lesser sentences. Although the Gibsons and Turner attempt to portray Dianne sympathetically, from the bald evidence here she comes across as shallow, headstrong, and self-destructive. With greater objectivity, the authors might have produced a devastating portrait of a woman whose skewed vision of ``liberation'' led her not to the fulfillment she imagined but to violence and death. As it is, they have come up with a merely tepid true-crime tale. (Eight pages of b&w photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Dianne Masters, wife of Chicago lawyer Alan Masters, disappeared in March 1982; her husband and police maintained that she had run off because she had a lover, planned to divorce Masters and remarry. Her brother, Turner, however, convinced that she had been killed, kept up pressure on local and county police. As the investigation revealed that Alan Masters was involved in questionable dealings and paid off lawyers and judges to fix court cases, the scope of a plot became clear, contend the authors: Masters evidently arranged to have his wife killed with the connivance of Michael Corbitt, police chief of Willow Springs, Ill., and James Keating, a lieutenant in the Cook County Sheriff's Police Department. All three were found guilty of various counts but not of murder. The book, by staffers of the Chicago Tribune , is remarkable mainly in its depiction of corruption in and around the Second City. And the cast of characters is so extensive that the lack of an index is sorely felt. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0312063067
• ISBN 13: 9780312063061
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 370