How an innocent 37 year old farmhand with the mind of an infant came within minutes of being executed at Sing Sing Prison in New York in 1916, only to be spared at the last moment, is one of the most fascinating yet little-known stories in criminal history. Slaughter on a Snowy Morn is the first full account of the case that turned Charles Stielow, accused of murdering a wealthy landowner and his housekeeper, into the American Dreyfus and changed the face of forensic science around the globe.
The colourful cast includes New York state Governor Charles Seymour Whitman, keen to follow previous incumbents of his job Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt into the White House, and his nemesis, Sing Sing warden Thomas Mott Osborne, a passionate opponent of the death penalty, convinced of Stielow's innocence. Stielow was convicted on the crooked 'expert' testimonies procured by a fussy, jumped-up druggist named Albert H. Hamilton, and freed by Grace Humiston, America's most celebrated female lawyer. But the story's real hero is the obsessively secretive, quietly spoken Charles E. Waite, the great mystery man of American forensic science, whose experts tore Hamilton's testimony to shreds, finding that Stielow's pistol had not been fired in years.
A thrilling account of wrongful conviction, redemption, an age of bare-knuckle politics and cynical courtroom manoeuvring - and American forensic science's baptism of fire.
