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Shallow Grave in Trinity County

3.79 of 5 stars 3.79 · rating details · 34 ratings · 7 reviews

Greeted with unqualified raves upon its hardcover publication, Shallow Grave in Trinity County is the story of how a suburban dream morphed into a murderous nightmare. The story starts with two characters: Stephanie Bryan, a pretty 14-year-old from Berkeley, and Burton Abbott, a lanky 27-year-old student who lives nearby. One day, Stephanie vanishes. Three months later her...more

Paperback, 336 pages

Published July 30th 1999 by St. Martin's Press (first published November 1st 1997)

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Jan 21, 2013 Roger rated it 1 of 5 stars

The extremely controversial Abbott case fair bids to go down along side the Borden case as a classic American study in ambiguity,hysteria,and lurking hints of subsurface malevolence which suggest far more appalling evil than evan the original crime.
As in the Borden case,we have the situation of a well-liked young person of some intellectual ability(Lizzie was the first woman to ever sit on the board of an American hospital)caught in a web of circumstances,all of which(with a bit of perhaps exce...more The extremely controversial Abbott case fair bids to go down along side the Borden case as a classic American study in ambiguity,hysteria,and lurking hints of subsurface malevolence which suggest far more appalling evil than evan the original crime.
As in the Borden case,we have the situation of a well-liked young person of some intellectual ability(Lizzie was the first woman to ever sit on the board of an American hospital)caught in a web of circumstances,all of which(with a bit of perhaps excessive ingenuity)can be logically explained.Moreover,Abbott, like Lizzie,was backed by independent witnesses (with absolutely no axe to grind) who,if believed, (and they had no conceivable incentive for lying) provided him and his automobile with an iron clad alibi.Both defendants had,and still have,a surprising and almost inexplicable charisma which s continues both to attract, and repel, quite intelligent people these long generations after their deaths
Much of the genuine fascination which both their almost unique cases hold,lies,of course, in the absolute certainty that if either defendant were innocent the jurors must, inevitably, have met the real killer-or, at least, one other person who knew the truth of what happened very precisely indeed.
As in the Borden case,despite its international notoriety,the Abbott case remained without its historian for nearly fifty years;as in the Borden case at the very last possible moment the prosecution has opened its files,for the first time and handed them to an already like minded crime reporter of literary credit to prepare the definitive account(or rather the definitive account of the prosecution) for posterity,all packaged in three hundred pages.As in the Borden case it is inevitable that another equally gifted(and less biased) investigative reporter will come along within the next thirty years, review the files, and debunk Mr.Farrell's book,just as Edward Radin mercilessly reduced the efforts of hostile Lizzie "biographer" Edmund Pearson to a heap of little pieces in the early sixties.
The anti-Lizzie forces skulked for about fifteen years and then came back swinging.Who won? Check out your internet.There have been four mock trials of the Borden case held since then (one presided over by a chief justice of the United States Supreme Court) and all four have ended in acquittals as did the original trial in 1893.Does this ever convince the losers? Of course not,they will write more books and eventually get yet another posthumous trial.
Fortunately for posterity,Mr. Farrell's book was,almost simultaneously, balanced by an even more comprehensive treatment of the defense case,"A Trail of Corn" by Keith Walker,who likewise spent some thirty-five years on the case starting from near day one.He is a professional court room reporter who has incorporated what must be thousands of pages of original interviews with now deceased individuals and trial transcripts into his text.
Unfortunately,Mr. Walker has chosen to publish his massive notes in the form of conversations between the interrogators and the witnesses without indexed references to his original sources. Farrell doesn't give his specific sources for quotes either but he professes(and I am sure that he is)largely citing otherwise unavailable interviews(however biased) with people whom he specifically names and which caan be found(next time the State of California decides to open them up)in the government archives.His accuracy can and will ,eventually,be checked out.
Mr. Walker is dealing with private people(he was the confidant for many years of the late Elsie Abbott,Burton's mother) unless he deposits his raw materials in a museum archive posterity will have no way of fairly appraising his efforts.He is the nearly last survivor of one of the most bitterly fought cases of its time.He owes it to his friends to see that their position is correctly represented.(I will post a separate review of "A Trail of Corn" shortly).
One thing is certain Mr.Walker is a professional stenographer who reproduces the already known testimony in painstaking(nearly agonizing) detail.He regularly serves as a corrective to Mr. Farrell's quite consistent hit and run techniques.
Let's take an elementary example of how the two authors handle a single indisputable fact.The jurors after eight days deliberation found Abbott guilty and, knowing that they would be judged most unfavorably by a large minority of the public,one of them immediately issued an extremely detailed statement(Walker,pp.613-615 ) explaining exactly what part(by no means all) of the prosecution evidence they believed and why they were rejecting the alibi witnesses even though they believed them to be honest.
Farrell,incredibly,not only fails to print this but fails to indicate that it even exists.Probably because it is highly skeptical of two of the three identification witnesses called by the prosecution.What is more it specifically state that they did not convict on the basis of the forensic evidence, on which most subsequent writers including reviewers here, justly, lay most of their emphasis
On the other hand Walker has probably crafted most of his book by following up the juror's statement, and he systematically ,and effectively, attacks the credibility of each witness on whom the jurors relied .This reviewer checked every indexed citation of these witnesses in both books and it is obvious that Farrell as well as Walker knows exactly what the game is.He owed it to his readers to make plain that the jury that convicted found key parts of the police case to be unbelievable or barely believable.
Or to take just one other example.The jurors certainly did believe the third and last identification witness called by the prosecution during its direct case,a woman named Reva Leidecker.No question,if Reva is to be believed,she takes them the whole way,and they did believe her.She swore that she saw Burton beating Stephanie Bryant in his 1949 Chevy at a very precise place and time.But Farrell mentions her only three times in his entire book.He has Reva being called to the stand then cuts,omitting all of the examination -and the cross-examination(pp.208-209). She is mentioned only once more in the book.We never find out, from him , what she said.
Now Walker spends pages on this witness and with equally good reason.She was the last of fifteen alleged eyewitnesses to come forward,a mere few days before trial.Hundreds of thousands of words had been written describing an altercation which may,or may not,have involved Abbott,or Stephanie,or the Chevy.Thousands of pictures of both suspect and victim had been printed and featured on television.And Reva rushes in at the last minute to say she is the only one in the world to identify all three.In these more enlightened days her testimony would be thrown as scientifically incredible, and legally inadmissible as she was sprung on the defense at the last minute.Nevertheless she was the only eye witness called by the prosecution on whom the jurors in the end relied,not upon the eminent Paul Kirk(Kirk was the equivalent of to-day's Henry Lee) who gave the odds as 125,000 to one that certain hairs found in the Abbott car came from Stephanie.
But just a minute. 125,000 in a city of several million means there were over a dozen local women who could have supplied the hairs and Mrs.Abbott was professional beautician and Kirk didn't find those hairs till months after he started his investigation and his pupil Lowell Bradford,who testified reluctantly for the defense,said he agreed on Kirk's analysis on everything except one of those hairs.It appeared to have been dyed.In which case it definitely came from the beauty parlor,not from the head of the victim.
The defense has repeated moved to have all these items retested in the light of modern DNA discoveries.So far the state has successfully stone walled the motions.
But why should it? if DNA can prove the hairs and the blood and the fibers came from Stephanie so much the better for people who are as positive as Mr.Farrell.If not,"Let some amends be made to a most gallant gentleman who was in quicklime laid."
But,of course,to cite just this one example(there are hundreds of other possibilities) should it someday turn out that the hair did originally come from Stephanie BUT that it has been dyed,the case will,as in the Borden case,be right back in the fascinating limbo of perhaps permanently irresolvable historical mysteries.
I have singled out a number more in my review of "A Trail of Corn".(less)

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Mar 06, 2009 Meaghan rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: true crime buffs

Shelves: true-crime, history, favorites, historical-crime

Shallow Grave is an incredibly detailed, day-by-day account of the disappearance of fourteen-year-old Stephanie Bryan in 1955, and the subsequent search for her and the trial and execution of her presumed murderer, a young accounting student named Burton Abbott. Methods to find missing children were very primitive back then compared to now; if Stephanie had been kidnapped today, an Amber Alert would probably have been issued and while it might not have saved her, it certainly would have lead pol...more

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Sep 15, 2011 Jim rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: american-history, california, san-francisco

on page 125 or so the author suggests a flaw in the defendant's alibi, says it is impossible to get lost in sacramento because the streets are laid out so well. HA i've done it three times. of course i can get lost following a straight line. maybe i shouldn't be bragging about that...
interesting read. knowing the places, roads talked about makes for a good and uncomfortable read.

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Jun 29, 2010 Mary rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is the non-fiction story of a fourteen year old girl who was kidnapped and murdered in Berkeley, California in 1955. My oldest brother was in the same grade in school as this girl's brother so I was aware of this tragedy during my childhood.

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Jun 30, 2010 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars

I love this book for the slice of very local history it provides. The actual subject matter is horrifying. But the glimpse of my neighborhood 50 years before I moved here is fascinating.

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Mar 25, 2009 Sheehan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book was really well written true crime. It also does a nice job of placing the East Bay in its historical context.

Really an awesome and creepy book.

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Jun 06, 2013 Jessica Rosner rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book was a little too distant. I never felt like I knew the victim, or the alleged murderer for that matter. The most interesting aspect was the way laws have improved to protect the accused, and also the difficulty in gathering evidence before DNA testing.

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May 19, 2013 Birdsinger rated it 4 of 5 stars

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