Review | Sarah Weinman’s ‘Scoundrel’ is an enthralling story ‘of a wrongful conviction in reverse’

Victoria Zielinski, a 15-year-old student, was brutally murdered on the night of March 4, 1957 in Bergen County, New Jersey. Within hours, police arrested Edgar Smith, a married former Marine in his early 20s, with a young daughter and a spotty employment history.

Smith’s trial, in May 1957, drew wide attention and resulted in a guilty verdict after less than two hours of jury deliberation. Smith was sentenced to death, his execution possible as early as two months later.

Smith did not, however, die in the electric chair in the mid-1950s; he died almost exactly 60 years after Zielinski’s murder, an old man in ill health in a California prison.

What happened in those six decades is the subject of “Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment and the Courts to Set Him Free,” the powerful new book from Ottawa-born writer and editor Sarah Weinman.

It’s easy to see why Weinman has been fixated on Smith’s story for more than seven years: like her last book, “The Real Lolita,” which drew together the kidnapping in 1948 of 11-year-old Sally Horner and Vladimir Nabokov’s celebrated novel in a feat of true crime reportage and literary archeology, Smith’s story also bridges the criminal and literary worlds, with tragic effects.

While awaiting execution, Smith began corresponding with William F. Buckley Jr., founder of the National Review and a leader of the new conservative movement in the U.S. Believing in his innocence, Buckley took Smith on as a cause, fundraising legal fees, hiring lawyers and writing articles on Smith’s behalf. Why Buckley believed in Smith so fervently, despite so many warning signs and his own staunch and starchy beliefs, is one of the most fascinating aspects of the book.

Buckley wasn’t alone. Sophie Wilkins, an editor at Knopf, entered into a torrid affair — via letters — with Smith while working with him on his book “Brief Against Death,” which was published shortly before he won a new trial. Smith pleaded guilty on a reduced charge and was released from prison in 1971.

Smith, who Weinman writes “was perhaps the most famous convict in America,” became a media figure, appearing on talk shows and in profiles, and writing pieces himself.

Five years after his release, however, Smith kidnapped 33-year-old seamstress Lisa Ozbun at knifepoint outside her workplace in San Diego. Forcing her into the passenger seat of a 1966 Pontiac Tempest — registered under his second wife’s name — Smith threatened to kill her as he drove them away. Ozbun fought back, kicking out the windshield and forcing the car off the freeway. Ozbun escaped but suffered a near-fatal wound: “the tip of the knife had missed her heart by half an inch.” Smith was arrested by the FBI weeks later, acting on a tip from Buckley, whom Smith had called to ask for money.

“The book is, in effect,” as Weinman writes in her introduction, “a story of a wrongful conviction in reverse.”

Unlike many true crime accounts, “Scoundrel” isn’t a whodunnit, and doesn’t rely on twists or withholding information for its considerable power. It is, instead, an examination of relationships shaped and twisted by the words and actions of a master manipulator and killer.

The book focuses on the victims, even as it keeps Smith always in view, chronicling the lives of Zielinski’s family in the wake of her murder; Smith’s mother and first wife; his second wife Paige (20 years younger than Smith) and Lisa Ozbun. Buckley and Wilkins are victims as well, though it takes them longer to recognize the fact, their lives scarred by their involvement with — and advocacy for — Smith.

Rooted in archival work and interviews, with extensive quoting from letters and other documents, “Scoundrel” demonstrates the full potential of the true crime genre: expansive and incisive, with deep attention (and respect) given to those affected by the crimes, rather than focusing on salacious detail.

It makes for an unsettling, and enthralling, reading experience, and an important one. Its analysis of a fundamental failure of the legal system leaves the reader with two persistent and pressing questions: What is the true nature of justice and just who benefits from the benefit of the doubt?