New Hampshire Public Radio
Given the oceans of crime-related fiction that now flood the market, it might be hard to appreciate the impact of a single book, Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent, when it appeared in 1987. Its hero, Rusty Sabich, was a prosecuting attorney entitled to the presumption of innocence, as the law requires, when an ambitious rival puts him on trial for the murder of a colleague. The book’s mesmerizing courtroom scenes and a gobsmacking twist made it a sensation that still resonates, thanks partly to a hit movie with Harrison Ford and a retooled streaming series starring Jake Gyllenhaal.
Now Turow returns to his character with Presumed Guilty (following the 2010 sequel Innocent, also featuring Rusty). The book finds the retired judge living in a resort-y Upper Midwest town a comfortable distance from the Kindle County of Presumed Innocent. At 76, he has a house on a lake and has gotten engaged to Bea Housley, the local grade-school principal. Everything in his heretofore turbulent life has fallen into place. He can hardly believe his luck, until a familiar scenario threatens to upend his contented last act.
His fiancée’s adopted son, Aaron Housley, is accused of murdering his mercurial, druggy girlfriend, who happens to be the daughter of the county’s prosecuting attorney. At the urging of Bea and in the absence of any viable alternative, Rusty agrees to defend Aaron, who is a young Black man in a white county. Rusty is sure that no matter what the law instructs, the presumption of innocence is unlikely. With little experience as a defense attorney, Rusty’s got his work cut out for him.
Once we settle into the courtroom portion of the book, Turow, who practically created the legal thriller, has us hooked. But patience with the book’s long first section might be required. Some of the things we love about Turow get in the way here: his dutiful physical descriptions of nearly every character, no matter how minor, aren’t necessary; ditto his attention to a café’s granite tables, or the fact that its coffee beans are roasted in-house. He’s trying to build a world since the setting is fictional, but the detail can feel superfluous and slackens the momentum.
However, in the courtroom we do want to know about the coffered ceilings, what the major players are wearing, and, best of all, the accretion of legal detail and push-pull that defines the trial. Here, Turow doesn’t disappoint. What begins as a David-versus-Goliath battle between Rusty and the fearsome, old-school prosecutor Hiram Jackdorp soon becomes more nuanced. Fiber evidence has never been made so compelling.
Rusty is always mindful of the conflict of interest inherent in defending Bea’s son, who’s had previous scrapes with the law but has straightened out. Defense lawyers generally don’t want to know whether their client is guilty, but Rusty wants to believe in Aaron’s innocence. It takes a toll. During the course of the trial his relationship with his fiancée frays, and an important friendship suffers.
Presumed Guilty has a final twist, which doesn’t land with the force of the one in Presumed Innocent, but I don’t think Turow intends it to. He is most deeply engaged with how well—or poorly—a defendant is served by the U.S. legal system, especially when it comes to race, a concern that ennobles the book.
In Presumed Guilty, Scott Turow, who practically created the legal thriller, has us hooked.
But at least Aaron, because of his relationship to Rusty, is treated to due process from his arrest onward. The real-life defendant whose story is recounted in Jason Moon’s podcast Bear Brook: A True Crime Story had a very different experience, a tragedy of errors that landed him in prison, where he remains, for 35 years.
Jason Carroll was convicted of helping to murder 25-year-old, pregnant Sharon Johnson near Bedford, New Hampshire. It was a horrible crime—Johnson was strangled and stabbed 14 times, her body left at a construction site in 1988. Though the police had their eye on her husband, Ken, a sketchy gambling addict whose motive might have been his wife’s pension, the case stalled until a detective named Roland Lamy took over. He got Ken’s daughter’s boyfriend, a teenager named Tony Pfaff, to say that he and a friend moved Sharon’s car from the construction site to a mall parking lot at Ken’s behest. That friend, Jason Carroll, was subsequently questioned by Lamy, a large, intimidating bald man who fancied himself a New England version of Kojak.
Here the craziness begins. Lamy asked Jason’s mother, a patrol cop, to come into the interview room and talk to her son. She says Lamy told her the law would go easy on him if he did.
Instead of telling her son to clam up while she calls a lawyer, Karen Carroll berates him repeatedly to just tell the detective the truth. The tape is hard to listen to. As she so eloquently put it later, “My noodle just slipped off the plate into the abyss.”
After many hours of forceful questioning, Jason confesses to being part of a murder-for-hire scheme with Tony, initiated by Ken Johnson. (It’s now 1989 and the murder had been covered extensively in the news.) Eventually all three are arrested. Ken’s trial is first; he gets off because there’s no physical evidence and Tony and Jason can’t testify against him. Tony’s is next, and he gets off when the court allows the jury to compare the transcript of his confession with Jason’s. Discrepancies abound about everything from the number of times Sharon was stabbed to how much they were paid to kill her, and that, along with his lawyers’ successful portrayal of Detective Lamy as manipulative and overbearing, allows Tony to go free.
Jason is not so lucky. His jury isn’t allowed to see the contrasting confessions and seems not to mind the lack of physical evidence. He is tried twice; the first time he is found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and the second time of second-degree murder, which means a longer sentence.
With admirable sensitivity and journalistic scrupulousness, Moon guides us through the mistakes, questionable tactics, and legal maneuvering that led to this result. He devotes an episode to false confessions, a trap Jason Carroll may have fallen into.
A few years ago, Jason’s case was taken on by the New England Innocence Project. Jason’s lawyer had a “Eureka!” moment when she found, completely by chance, a box from his trial containing DNA evidence from the murder scene. After first objecting, the state of New Hampshire has allowed testing, which didn’t exist in 1989, to proceed (though the state’s attorney, in a Kafka-esque flourish, has already said he will challenge any result that might exonerate Jason). The DNA is still being tested, but when the testing is finished, we may finally know who killed Sharon Johnson.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mysteries for AIR MAIL. She lives in New York City
