The Whole Truth?: A Case of Murder on the Appalachian Trail

On May 13, 1988, Stephen Roy Carr, a so-called mountain man living in Michaux State Forest in south central Pennsylvania, shot two female hikers while they were making love at a campsite near the Appalachian Trail. Rebecca Wight died at the scene. Claudia Brenner, despite five bullet wounds, survived to testify against her attacker.
In this book, H. L. Pohlman reconstructs the dramatic story of this murder case and traces its disposition through the criminal justice system. Drawing on interviews with participants as well as court records, he closely examines competing interpretations of the evidence. Was the attack a hate crime? A sex crime? A class crime? At the same time, he shows how a broad range of substantive and procedural issues―from the rights of the accused to evaluation of potential mitigating circumstances―can influence the assessment of culpability in homicide cases.

• Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District
• America's Courts and the Criminal Justice System
• Essentials of Criminal Justice
• Eight Bullets: One Woman's Story of Surviving Anti-Gay Violence
• The Judicial Process: Law, Courts, and Judicial Politics
• A Civil Action
• Gideon's Trumpet: How One Man, a Poor Prisoner, Took His Case to the Supreme Court-and Changed the Law of the United States
• Judicial Process and Judicial Policymaking
• How Democracies Die
• The Vendetta Defense