Scoundrel: How a convicted murderer persuaded the women who loved him, the conservative establishment and the courts to set him free

By Sarah Weinman

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE CBC AND ESQUIRE

A true-crime masterpiece, this is a story of wrongful exoneration about killer Edgar Smith and the prominent crusaders who fell prey to his charm.

Having spent almost half his lifetime in California's state penitentiary system, convicted killer Edgar Smith died in obscurity in 2017 at the age of eighty-three—a miracle, really, as he was meant to be executed nearly six decades earlier. Tried and convicted in the state of New Jersey for the 1957 murder of fifteen-year-old Victoria Zielinski, Smith was once the most famous convict in America.
    Scoundrel tells the true, almost-too-bizarre story of a man saved from Death Row by way of an unlikely friendship—developed in nearly 2000 pages of prison correspondence—with National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr., one of the most famous figures in the neo-conservative movement. Buckley wrote articles, fundraised and hired lawyers to fight for a new trial, eventually enlisting the help of Sophie Wilkins, a book editor with whom Smith would have a torrid epistolary affair. As a result of these friends' advocacy, Smith not only gained his freedom, he vaulted to the highest intellectual echelons as a bestselling author, an expert on prison reform, and a minor celebrity—only to fall, spectacularly, back to earth, when his murderous impulses once more prevailed.
     Weinman's Scoundrel is a gripping investigation into a case where crime and culture intersect, where recent memory begins to slide into history and where the darkest of violent impulses meet literary ambition, human ego and hunger for fame.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9780735272781

Sarah Weinman

Sarah Weinman is the author of Scoundrel and The Real Lolita and the editor, most recently, of Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit & Obsession. She was a 2020 National Magazine Award finalist for reporting and a Calderwood Journalism Fellow at MacDowell, and her work has appeared in New York magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and the Washington Post. Weinman writes the crime column for the New York Times Book Review and lives in New York City and Northampton, MA.

Reviews for Scoundrel

[nx74defiant · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The story of a death row prisoner who gets support from well known people. He convinces William F. Buckley to support him. He becomes a best selling author. A difficult person to read about.

[akblanchard_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In this rather dry true crime tale, convicted murderer Edgar Smith's jailhouse devotion to the National Review magazine attracts the attention of its publisher, William F. Buckley. The conservative icon and his friend, emotionally deprived editor Sophie Wilkins, encourage Smith’s latent literary gifts, and the convict publishes a few self-serving tomes. Once he obtains his freedom, Smith continues his pattern of developing relationships with needy women. Ultimately, however, his baser impulses catch up with him.Author Sarah Weinman quotes extensively from Buckley’s, Wilkins's, and Smith’s letters to each other. This feature lends the book an air of authenticity, but also bogs down the pace of the story. The man at the heart of the narrative, Edgar Smith, isn't all that interesting, and the reader never gets a sense of the conditions that made him a sociopath.Without all the quotes, this might have made a good article for a magazine.