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Next Meeting: Monday, October 13, 2025 Upper Level Program Room Plainfield Area Public Library (YES--we are meeting back at the Library!) Questions? Comments? Have a future Thrill Seekers suggestion? Contact Lisa K. at lkoeller@papl.info or Carmela at cfurio@papl.info |
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September's True Crime Title: Genealogy of a Murder by Lisa Belkin
Independence Day weekend, 1960: A young cop is murdered, shocking his close-knit community in Stamford, Connecticut. The killer remains at large, his identity still unknown. But on a beach not far away, a young Army doctor, on vacation from his post at a research lab in a maximum-security prison, faces a chilling realization: He knows who the shooter is. In fact, the man―a prisoner on parole―had called him only days before. By helping his former charge and trainee, the doctor, a believer in second chances, may have inadvertently helped set the murder into motion and with that one phone call, may have sealed a police officer's fate.
Alvin Tarlov, David Troy, and Joseph DeSalvo were all born during the Great Depression, all with grandparents who’d left different homelands for the same American Dream. How did one become a doctor, one a cop, and one a convict? Journalist Lisa Belkin traces the paths of each of these three men. Following these threads to their tragic outcome in July 1960, and beyond, Belkin examines the coincidences and choices that led to one fateful night. |
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Ancestor Trouble by Maud Newton Maud Newton’s ancestors have fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother’s father was said to have married thirteen times. Her mother’s grandfather killed a man with a hay hook. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated through Maud’s maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Newton’s family inspired in her a desire to understand family patterns: what we are destined to replicate and what we can leave behind. She set out to research her genealogy—her grandfather’s marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors’ roles in slavery and other harms. Her journey took her into the realms of genetics, epigenetics, and debates over intergenerational trauma. She mulled over modernity’s dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them. Searching and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy to make peace with the secrets and contradictions of her family’s past and face its reverberations in the present. |
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Plainfield Area Public Library
15025 S. Illinois St.
Plainfield, Illinois 60544
815.436.6639papl.info |
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