About this item
In this remarkable legal page-turner, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barry Siegel recounts the dramatic, decades-long saga of Bill Macumber, imprisoned for thirty-eight years for a double homicide he denies committing. In the spring of 1962, a school bus full of students stumbled across a mysterious crime scene on an isolated stretch of Arizona desert: an abandoned car and two bodies. This brutal murder of a young couple bewildered the sheriff 's department of Maricopa County for years. Despite a few promising leads -- including several chilling confessions from Ernest Valenzuela, a violent repeat offender -- the case went cold. More than a decade later, a clerk in the sheriff 's department, Carol Macumber, came forward to tell police that her estranged husband had confessed to the murders.
About the Author
Barry Siegel, winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, is a former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. He now directs the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine. His latest book, the widely-acclaimed Dreamers and Schemers (University of California Press, 2019) , chronicles how Los Angeles' pursuit and staging of the 1932 Olympics during the depths of the Great Depression helped fuel the city's transformation from a seedy frontier village to a world-famous metropolis. Siegel began at the Los Angeles Times in 1976 as a staff writer in the feature section and in 1980 became a national correspondent, pursuing a self-created assignment that involved no fixed beat, no relation to breaking news, and no time or space constraints. The unconventional narratives he wrote for The Times, many about communities struggling with moral dilemmas, took him all over the world. In 2003, Siegel left The Times to become the founding director of the Literary Journalism Program at UC Irvine.Siegel is the author of eight books - five volumes of literary journalism and three novels of legal suspense, including the Chumash County series. His narratives have garnered dozens of honors, among them two PEN Center West Literary Awards in Journalism, the Livingston Award, and the American Bar Association Silver Gavel AwardSiegel has a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University and a bachelor's degree in English literature from Pomona College. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Marti Devore. He can be reached via email at barry@barry-siegel.com and bsiegel@uci.edu. Visit his website at www.barry-siegel.com
