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Title details for The Trials of Walter Ogrod by Thomas Lowenstein - Available

The Trials of Walter Ogrod

The Shocking Murder, So-Called Confessions, and Notorious Snitch That Sent a Man to Death Row

by Thomas Lowenstein
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The horrific 1988 murder of four-year-old Barbara Jean Horn shocked the citizens of Philadelphia. Plucked from her own front yard, Barbara Jean was found dead less than two and a half hours later in a cardboard TV box dragged to a nearby street curb. After months of investigation with no strong leads, the case went cold. Four years later it was reopened, and Walter Ogrod, a young man with autism spectrum disorder who had lived across the street from the family at the time of the murder, was brought in as a suspect.
Ogrod bears no resemblance to the composite police sketch based on eyewitness accounts of the man carrying the box, and there is no physical evidence linking him to the crime. His conviction was based solely on a confession he signed after thirty-six hours without sleep. "They said I could go home if I signed it," Ogrod told his brother from the jailhouse. The case was so weak that the jury voted unanimously to acquit him, but at the last second—in a dramatic courtroom declaration—one juror changed his mind. As he waited for a retrial, Ogrod's fate was sealed when a notorious jailhouse snitch was planted in his cell block and supplied the prosecution with a second supposed confession. As a result, Walter Ogrod sits on death row for the murder today.
Informed by police records, court transcripts, interviews, letters, journals, and more, award-winning journalist Thomas Lowenstein leads readers through the facts of the infamous Horn murder case in compelling, compassionate, and riveting fashion. He reveals explosive new evidence that points to a condemned man's innocence and exposes a larger underlying pattern of prosecutorial misconduct in Philadelphia.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 1, 2017

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781613738047
      • File size: 2605 KB

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781613738047
      • File size: 2605 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Booklist

      March 15, 2017
      When he was 10 years old, journalist Lowenstein's father was murdered. To try to understand the mind of a murderer, Lowenstein decided to write a book about the death penalty from all angles: the victim's family, the defendant, lawyers on both sides, and the investigating detectives. A tip leads him to Walter Ogrod, a man jailed for the murder of a four-year-old girl in Philadelphia. As Lowenstein wades through the court records, interviews the girl's family, talks to lawyers, and finally speaks to Ogrod, he begins to believe that the defendant is innocent. Lowenstein is thorough as he analyses the evidence and passionate about trying to get justice for Ogrod. He re-creates the court scenes, profiles all the key figures, and speculates on why the defendant would confess to a crime when all the evidence against him was circumstantial. Ogrod's low intelligence and dysfunctional family life are brought into play. True-crime stories are always popular, and fans of the Making a Murderer series will be especially outraged by this unjust case.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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