The Price of Fame

■ Convicted of murder at 22 after a botched 1953 robbery of a Chicago meatpacking plant left a security guard dead, Paul Crump wrote the while on death row. He became a celebrity, befriended by Gwendolyn Brooks and a young William Friedkin (who later directed ). The latter made the documentary in which Crump asserted his innocence and detailed abuse at the hands of police. Governor Otto Kerner saw the film and, in 1962, 35 hours before Crump was to be executed, commuted his sentence to 199 years in prison without parole. At the time, Crump was the only prisoner in the state ineligible for parole; that provision was dropped in 1976. Crump, who eventually admitted his guilt, saw his appeals for release denied repeatedly, as Alfredo S. Lanier detailed in the 1983 article “A Lifetime of Waiting.”