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Steve Vogel | Author of The New York Times Best-Selling book Reasonable Doubt

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He’s not a true crime fan?

This seems like a weird spot to admit I’m not a fan of true crime. But I am a close observer of human nature and of how well or not we are served by our system of justice. That’s what led me to write these two true crime books, Reasonable Doubt and The Unforgiven (the latter with co-author Edith Brady-Lunny).  

Reasonable Doubt digs deep into the tragic slaying of a young woman and her three children and offers readers the opportunity to weigh all the evidence about whether the husband and father was the killer. I’m proud of the fact St. Martin’s Press made it part of its “True Crime Classics” library and that it’s used in criminal justice classes to illustrate the legal concept of “reasonable doubt.” Readers have also been fascinated by the “interesting intersections” I write about in the updated version of Reasonable Doubt.

In The Unforgiven, we know who did it. The question is how and why. In the preface, we write, “Our society demands we place responsibility where it belongs, insisting on accountability and consequences for errant acts. Yet our culture also embraces forgiveness, as thorny and complicated as it may be.”  

For all the many reasons true crime is popular as a genre, I think you’ll find both of these books rich in detail and notable for their insight.  What makes them all the more interesting is the large amount of supplemental material (video, audio, letters, etc.) available free in the “Clippings” section of this website.  Feel free to sample it right now, perhaps beginning with this item about the non-existent epitaph on the murder victims’ headstone, or this video of a defense reenactment of a death car rolling into a lake.   

The advice I read from Keith Morrison, the “Dateline” TV correspondent who has reported on so many bad guys, is chilling:  Remember these are human beings, “…you know they were probably just like you and me, a regular person, up until the moment when suddenly they weren’t.”

NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK, E-BOOK AND AUDIOBOOK

Available Now!

The Unforgiven

By Edith Brady-Lunny and Steve Vogel

It’s a case reminiscent of the explosive story of Susan Smith, convicted in the drownings of her two young sons in South Carolina. But in “The Unforgiven”, three young children are in the back seat of a car driven by Amanda Hamm’s boyfriend as it slips into an Illinois lake. Amanda and her boyfriend survive. […]

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Early Praise

for The Unforgiven, The Untold Story of One Woman’s Search for Love and Justice by Edith Brady-Lunny and Steve Vogel

… a true-life drama of an extraordinary, unspeakable event never to be undone or forgotten, told with telling insight and fascinating detail

-Joe Domanick, author and Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

… a richly-told true story by award-winning journalists…remarkable tale of the tragic deaths of three children that forever changed a central Illinois community and raised deeply troubling questions about the criminal justice system.

-Maurice Possley, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author

… a harrowing journey into a tangled web of love, infidelity, suspicion, and tragedy.

-Dave Kindred, award-winning columnist and author

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SteveVogelAuthor.com

Steve Vogel is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist, columnist, and talk show host who covered every minute of the original murder trial described in the New York Times best-seller Reasonable Doubt.

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  • About Steve Vogel
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    • The Unforgiven
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