Spoken in Darkness: Small-Town Murder and a Friendship Beyond Death

by Ann E. Imbrie

Overview

A mesmerizing re-creation of a lost life: that of the author's junior-high school best friend, murdered by a psychotic serial killer. The story combines the crime with personal journey.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781562828424
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	05/14/1993
Edition description:	1st ed
Pages:	259
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 - 17 Years

About the Author

Ann E. Imbrie lives in Manhattan and Poughkeepsie, New York, where she is a professor of English at Vassar College. She is currently at work on a novel.

Editorial Reviews

Lee Snavely, a 24-year-old heroin addict and prostitute, was murdered in Michigan in 1974 by a serial killer. Imbrie, an English professor at Vassar College, was a friend of Snavely's in junior high school in Ohio during the '60s; they last saw each other in 1971. In an overwritten account padded with her dull memories of growing up, Imbrie recreates her erstwhile friend's decline. Both of Snavely's parents had died by the time she was 12; she careened from foster homes into marriage to an abusive Vietnam veteran, also a junkie. Her killer, Gary Taylor, a wily psychopath and fan of Hitler and Rudolph Hess, was earlier arrested for serial killings, declared insane and institutionalized. Set free in 1972, he married his lawyer's secretary and went on to commit more murders, including the brutal slaying of Snavely. He is now serving a 99-year prison term. Marred by literary posturing, this is an all-too-familiar indictment of an inept judicial and penal system. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Author Imbrie was shocked to learn that Lee Snavely, her childhood best friend, was the victim of a serial killer whom she had apparently mistaken for an easy hustle. Imbrie still considered Lee ``the only difference'' in her own more predictable world. In this hard-to-put-down narrative, she documents Lee's erratic life, from the death of her doctor-father to her murder. Somehow all the pieces fall together. Pretty, intelligent Lee had a restless spirit that made her an outsider from an early age. Her rebelliousness, exacerbated by the confines of the small Ohio town and the lack of support from family, put her on a direct line to another outsider, killer Gary Taylor. Although it is often lacking in depth, Imbrie's book is absorbing and revealing. Recommended for true crime collections.-- Frances Sandiford, Green Haven Correctional Facility Lib., Stormville, N.Y.

Library Journal

A Vassar college professor explores the tragic murder of her former childhood friend in this combination memoir and true-crime examination. During their junior high years in the early 1960s, Imbrie and flamboyant Lee Snavely were inseparable, but the duo drifted apart in high school. While Imbrie's life took a traditional course, Snavely became a heroin addict and prostitute who was convicted for attempted murder by age 23. Soon after she was released from prison in 1974, Snavely and a runaway teenager accompanied an unstable man they met in a bar to his rural Michigan home. The bodies of the two women were found buried on the Michigan property some time later. This book starts out strong, but when Imbrie is forced to rely on newspaper accounts and other remote sources to trace Snavely's stormy life, its credibility breaks down because of all the speculation and contrived conversations. Still, the book's well written and should prove popular with true-crime fans.

Sue