Review: Lachman, Footsteps in the Snow

Footsteps in the Snow by Charles Lachman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


True crime about the murder of Maria Ridulph in 1957 and the seeming solution to the cold case in 2012. I say "seeming" because Jack McCullough's conviction was overturned and the case is as unsolved today as it was the day Maria was abducted.

Lachman does not offer any meta-analysis, but it's pretty clear he thinks McCullough did it. On the evidence he presents, mostly things coming out of McCullough's own mouth, it's hard NOT to think McCullough did it. The other evidence--the deathbed confession of McCullough's mother, the identification by the only witness--is really really shaky, even though Lachman doesn't ever acknowledge just how shaky. Eyewitness testimony at a distance of 55 years from a woman who was 7 years old in 1957? the deathbed confession of a woman who was drugged to the eyeballs on morphine and Haldol and only intermittently lucid? No mention is made of the studies on eyewitness testimony and just how unreliable it is or any other acknowledgment that the defense attorney had all kinds of reasonable doubt to work with. He puts the reader in the position of a believer rather than a skeptic, which is common in true crime, but I would argue, not good.



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