Shallow Grave in Trinity County

The award-winning author of

YA?Did Burton Abbott really kidnap and kill 12-year-old Stephanie Bryan in the spring of 1955? Although the truth will never be known, Farrell shows the frustration and lack of clues that the police and FBI encountered after the child disappeared on her way home from school. Three months later, Abbott and his wife found several of the girl's belongings in their cellar. When they called the police, they never imagined that Abbott would become the main suspect in this grizzly crime, but layer by layer, the investigation pointed to him as the guilty party. As the numerous clues and witnesses are presented in the text, the author footnotes names, dates, and events, reminding readers who these people are and how they are interrelated. Photographs from the investigation and trial are included. Much of the evidence would not be admissible in court today. This is also noted and explained in relation to modern laws and technology. Using old police and court files, Farrell re-creates this chilling crime while leaving his readers to judge for themselves whether Abbott was guilty as charged or innocent as he proclaimed right up until his execution. YAs will find picking apart the pieces of evidence a challenge as they try to construct their own theories.?Anita Short, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A heart-stopping study of the infamous Stephanie Bryan murder trial, four decades after the crime. Farrell, an Edgar Award winner (Swift Justice, 1992), was a rewrite man at the San Jose Mercury News when word broke of the Bryan kidnapping, a case that shocked the sleepy Berkeley community. Stephanie was the pretty, brainy teenage daughter of a doctor who had recently moved to California from Massachusetts. Her mother had shown her a shortcut from school, and when Stephanie was walking home one September afternoon, tragedy struck in the form of Burton Abbott, a married 27-year-old studying to be an accountant. Stephanie apparently got into Abbott's car, and her family never saw her again. Farrell makes excellent use of newspaper accounts of the mounting horror throughout California as it became clear that Stephanie had been kidnapped. When her body was found in a shallow grave near Abbott's mountain home, the case was sealed against him. Farrell chooses to focus on the Abbott family and on Burton in particular, a man so emotionally distant that the doctor who administered a lie detector test to him said that of all the men he had ever examined, ``Herman Goering and Burton Abbott were the most self-centered.'' While Stephanie never fully comes alive to the reader, the description of the singular Abbott family and the trial is as compelling as it is unnerving. Abbott never admits his guilt, despite such evidence as Stephanie's purse and muddy bra buried in his basement. After little more than a year on death row, Abbott was put to death in the gas chamber. Two years later, emotionally devastated, Stephanie's father died of a sudden heart attack. A chilling look at an old crime that seems sadly modern; true-crime buffs won't want to miss it. (For another look at this case, as well as other kidnappings in America, see below, Paula S. Fass, Kidnapped.) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In light of recent headlines (Polly Klaas, JonBenet Ramsey), this account of the 1955 kidnapping and murder of l4-year-old Stephanie Bryan is a cold reminder that today's headlines are, unfortunately, nothing new. Stephanie vanished while walking home from school, and three months later her purse and glasses were found in the basement of 27-year-old Burton Abbott. Abbott was subsequently executed for killing her and burying her body near his secluded cabin in the woods. The author first covered the Bryan case for the San Jose Mercury News; 40 years later, his account is taut and well paced, filled with details culled from the Alameda County District Attorney's files. A riveting account of crime in suburbia; for all true-crime collections.?Christine A. Moesch, Buffalo & Erie Cty P.L., N.Y.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.