In Scoundrel, journalist Sarah Weinman once again introduces a generation of true crime readers to a sensational case that has largely faded from cultural memory. While a bare-bones retelling would be fascinating in itself--how, exactly, did the late conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. find himself successfully lobbying for the release of a convicted murderer?--Weinman probes beyond the bizarre facts of the Edgar Smith saga to highlight the debris left in his wake. Smith, she argues, did not simply take the lives of the women he victimized, but took also their right and ability to narrate their own stories, a project in which Buckley Jr. and other enablers gladly participated. This thoughtful and thorough journalistic account is a must for true crime readers interested in the re-centering of victims in the genre, especially those who are fans of Weinman's acclaimed The Real Lolita.In the 1960s, Edgar Smith, in prison and sentenced to death for the murder of teenager Victoria Zielinski, struck up a correspondence with William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review. Buckley, who refused to believe that a man who supported the neoconservative movement could have committed such a heinous crime, began to advocate not only for Smith’s life to be spared but also for his sentence to be overturned. So begins a bizarre and tragic tale of mid-century America. Sarah Weinman leads us through the twists of fate and fortune that brought Smith to freedom, book deals, fame, and eventually to attempting murder again. In Smith, Weinman has uncovered a psychopath who slipped his way into public acclaim and acceptance before crashing down to earth once again. From the people Smith deceived—Buckley, the book editor who published his work, friends from back home, and the women who loved him—to Americans who were willing to buy into his lies, Weinman explores who in our world is accorded innocence, and how the public becomes complicit in the stories we tell one another. Scoundrel shows, with clear eyes and sympathy for all those who entered Smith’s orbit, how and why he was able to manipulate, obfuscate, and make a mockery of both well-meaning people and the American criminal justice system. It tells a forgotten part of American history at the nexus of justice, prison reform, and civil rights, and exposes how one man’s ill-conceived plan to set another man free came at the great expense of Edgar Smith’s victims.