SPRINGTIME FOR SOPHIE

The year was 1909, the setting a decaying New England mill town. A saloonkeeper was left for dead, shot a dozen times, his throat slashed for good measure, yet still babbling that a winsome music teacher and her young beau, the victim’s rival in love, had done the deed. The two murder trials that followed drew curious hordes and the attention of a nation. With meticulous archival work and rare narrative gifts, Professor Richard Underwood unearths this lost tale of death, duplicity, and personal ruin. In retelling a grisly true-life crime story, Underwood delivers a rich ethnography of Naugatuck, Connecticut, and a law school seminar on evidence, criminal procedure, trial strategy, and lawyers’ ethics. It is a lesson too in the gnawing uncertainty of true-life crime stories, where some witnesses lie and others honestly forget, and crafty lawyers win fame by torturing the truth into submission to their designs.