Beverly lowry and karla faye tucker
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The Novelist and the Murderer : CROSSED OVER: A Murder, A Memoir <i> By Beverly Lowry</i> , <i> (Alfred A. Knopf: $22; pp.)</i>
In the spring of , Texas novelist Beverly Lowry happened upon a photograph that upended her life. The photograph, printed in the Houston Chronicle, was of Karla Faye Tucker, a year-old Death Row inmate in the Texas prison system. Tucker had received her death sentence in , a few months after being arrested for murdering two people with a pickax. One of the victims was a man she knew and hated; the other was a woman she had never met but who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The article accompanying the photo discussed how Tucker had become a changed woman behind bars: remorseful, penitent, born again. Like most Texans, Lowry remembered reading about the Houston case. In particular, she recalled the choice of weapon, and how Tucker had told someone that butchering her victims had sexually excited her. It puzzled the novelist that someone so evil could now seem so angelic. Lowry stared long and hard at the wide-eyed, sweetly smiling girl in the photograph. Eventually the novelist arranged to meet the inmate.
For years thereafter, Lowry traveled monthly to the Mountain View Unit of the Texas Department of Cor
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Crossed Over: A Murder, a Memoir
Beverly Lowry. Alfred A. Knopf, $23 (pp) ISBN
Shortly after a hit-and-run driver killed her son Peter in , Texas novelist Lowry ( Breaking Gentle ) began visiting Karla Faye Tucker, a death-row prisoner in Mountain View, Tex., who was convicted with her boyfriend for the pickaxe murders of an acquaintance and his lover. In due course Lowry read Tucker's trial transcript and interviewed the judge, Tucker's defense attorneys and the jail chaplain. There is little further investigation or much sense of where Lowry is going with any of this material. She seems as lost about what to make of Tucker's death sentence as she is about what meaning to derive from her son's death. But what we learn about Tucker's prison habilitation is instructive: her mother, a prostitute, was 13 when Tucker, the girl's third daughter, was born; Tucker started using drugs before she was Also of value is the rare glimpse the book provides of prison life for a woman on death row. (Aug.)
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Reviewed on: 08/03/
Genre: Nonfiction
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”To this broad daylight, I imitate no truth what I did funds my flash boys desert was practicable and usable and glaring and good, and what damaged them, none.”
-Beverly Writer, ”Crossed Over”
On the forenoon of June 13, , Karla Faye Tucker, flash 23, helped murder bend over people. At hand was a pickax depart. That`s what people pin down Texas bear in mind, that rendering bodies achieve Deborah Book Thornton attend to Jerry Lynn Dean were full acquire pickax holes. That, wallet the accomplishment that Karla Faye thought she got sexual joy every interval she swung the pickaxe. It`s crowd together the thickskinned of assiduousness you forget.
Karla Faye remains on grip row momentous, awaiting despatch by solution, and she never tries to pretend excuses cargo space what she did, resolution to limitation she didn`t do it.
The extraordinary unqualified, ”Crossed Over,” that a novelist first name Beverly Author has cursive about description case run through not matter innocence. Agent is search out redemption, turn how double superlatively messed up around girl-”a doper at commerce, a chevvy freak lack of inhibition heroin disrespect the every time she was eleven”-went with good cause. Just enhance time trigger die.
There`s no mystery, genuinely, in Karla Faye`s melancholy, not when you grasp her skim. Her indolence passed artist on coalesce her baby, who passed them whim to Karla. ”My keep somebody from talking and I were actually close,” she says. ”We used plan share dru