Sarah Weinman - Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free

EDGAR SMITH died on March 20, 2017, just over a month after his eighty-third birthday. He spent almost forty years in Californias state penitentiary system, much of his last decade in health so poor that it was a surprise he survived so long. He was hard of hearing and barely able to walk more than a quarter mile, and even that short distance required a cane. A weak heart necessitating six bypass surgeries didnt kill him, either.

That Smith lived into his eighties is all the more remarkable because he was supposed to die nearly six decades earlier, executed by the state of New Jersey for the 1957 murder of fifteen-year-old Victoria Zielinski. At one time Smith was perhaps the most famous convict in America, counting William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of National Review and one of the key architects of the neoconservative movement, as his closest friend.

Scoundrel tells the true, almost too bizarre tale of a man saved from death row thanks to the years-long advocacy, through financial and creative means, of a most unlikely source. When police brutality and mass incarceration are perennially under a national microscope, when the lives of countless Black and Brown boys and men are permanently altered by the criminal justice system, the transformation of Edgar Smith into a national cause more than half a century ago raises uncomfortable questions about who merits such a spotlight and who does not. His story, and the involvement of the many people who helped fashion it, complicates the larger narrative of incarcerated people who proclaim their innocence and of prisonerson death row and elsewhereexonerated and freed thanks to newly discovered or long-suppressed evidence.

This book is, in effect, a story of a wrongful conviction in reverse.

As a result of Buckleys advocacy, Edgar Smith vaulted from prison to the countrys highest intellectual echelons as a best-selling author, an expert on prison reform, and a minor celebrityonly to fall, spectacularly, to earth when his murderous impulses prevailed again. Though the relationship between Norman Mailer and the convict and author Jack Henry Abbott is well known, the comparable one between Buckley and Smith has received far less attention despite the resulting heinous fallout.

Buckley at first took up the Edgar Smith case out of righteous indignation on behalf of Smith, a man whom he believed to be wrongfully convicted and whose literary gifts, which transformed him from underachieving blue-collar worker to curious intellectual, made him worth saving. As Buckley came to regard Smith as a genuine friend, he also operated out of loyalty. As the lawyer and former National Review correspondent Donald G. M. Coxe told me, We were taken in, I suspect, in part by our unwillingness to believe that anyone who loved NR could be a savage killer.

Even after it was clear that his faith in Edgar was severely misguided, Buckley concluded, Edgar Smith has done enough damage in his lifetime without underwriting the doctrine that the verdict of a court is infallible. That unshakable belief exonerated a psychopath, elevating Smith to prominence and some power at the expense of the women he harmed, injured, and murdered. Buckley fell into the trap described in Fyodor Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment: An honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business listens and goes on eatingand then he eats you up.

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IN MARCH 1957, Edgar Smith seemed like a typical young man living in New Jerseys Bergen County: married, the father of a newborn baby, a veteran of the marines, discharged because of partial deafness in his left ear, in between jobs. Victoria Zielinski, fifteen years old at the time, was murdered in the small town of Mahwah, her head bashed in by a baseball bat and a couple of large rocks. It didnt take long for authorities to find and arrest Smith: Zielinskis blood was on a pair of his pants and in the car hed borrowed that day. He also admitted to the police that he had given her a ride, though he claimed that she was still alive when they had parted.

The trial lasted two weeks and was a standing-room-only sensation. (Mary Higgins Clark, years before writing the novels that immortalized her as the Queen of Suspense, attended every day and dated the beginning of her career as a crime writer to the case.) Smith testified in his own defense, and the resulting inconsistencies were noticed even by trial attendees as young as ten years old. It took less than two hours for the jury to convict him and the judge to sentence him to death. Smith kept appealing his execution and avoiding the electric chair. And since he was staying alive, he decided to better himself, enrolling in college classes, reading history books, and keeping up with current affairs through magazines.

Fate played a hand when William F. Buckley learned of a 1962 newspaper story about Smith in which the convict praised National Review as one of his favorite periodicals. Buckley and the National Reviews intellectual stock were rising among conservatives, but he had only just begun to write his syndicated newspaper column, On the Right, and he was still several years away from his quixotic run for New York City mayor and the first broadcast of his interview show, Firing Line.

Buckley would later learn that Smiths access to National Review had been cut off after the prison official who lent him copies had been transferred away from the Death House. Sensing a story, feeling some pang of sympathy, or both, Buckley wrote Smith to ensure the prisoner would always receive a copy of National Review. Over the next nine years, through an exchange of more than 1,500 pages of correspondence, the two men became friendsand Buckley became convinced that Smith was not Zielinskis killer.

Buckley wrote about the case, and his belief in Edgar Smiths innocence, in several columns and in a 1965 story for Esquire; he used the fee he earned for the story to seed the Death House inmates defense fund. Smith had been acting as his own jailhouse lawyer; now Buckley found Smith several lawyers to work on his appeals. Buckley also set Smith up with Sophie Wilkins, a dynamic and vivacious editor at the New Yorkbased book-publishing firm Alfred A. Knopf. She worked closely with Smith on his 1968 book, Brief Against Death, which argued that the state of New Jerseys case against him was riddled with holes and attempted, above all, to persuade the reader that he had not killed Vickie Zielinski.

Wilkins, as I discovered while working in her archives at Columbia University, became more than Smiths editor. Their correspondence, which she preserved nearly in full, began in strictly professional fashion, with her recommending books to read and offering encouragement on the manuscript that became Brief Against Death. Then it devolved into something more.

They exchanged declarations of love, gifts and artwork, and mutual pornographic fantasies, his smuggled out through third parties to avoid the prying eyes of the Death House censors. He called her Red; she called him Ilya. Their fights about editorial changes quickly spiraled out of control, and then they made up, lovers quarrel style. Wilkins would, in subsequent correspondence with Buckley, express rage and embarrassment at how besotted she had become with Smith and how foolishly shed behaved.