Bluegrass: A True Story of Murder in Kentucky
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Customer Review
Teenage Wasteland
Few titles are published in the True Crime every year but new voices are rare. Anyone who cares about the genre has to wonder when the next Ted Olsen or Darcy O'Brien or Shana Alexander is going to arrive. Or wonder is they'll ever arrive at all. A new voice has arrived with Bluegrass.The lives of three young people, all barely out of their teens, intersect as a typical college frat party. The girl gets her heart broken, gets drunk, acts out and then gets tossed out. One of the boys has spent the party passed out in a pickup truck after an all too successful pre-party. The second boy is unimpressed by his first frat party. By morning the girl is in ICU suffering horrific injuries. The investigation and murder trial that follow leave many questions unanswered.William Van Meter tells this story with nary a trace of hysteria and what's even more impressive is that he also does it without an ounce of condescension. Life in semi-rural Kentucky would be filled with...
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Exceptional Book
This is hands down one of the best books I have ever read. The author, William Van Meter, returns to his hometown to investigate the brutal murder of Katie Autry and the people involved.What benefits this book so much is the fact that Van Meter has no agenda; he's not here to preach against college drinking or rant about the breakdown of family values. No judgment is passed; he simply tells the story and allows you to draw your own conclusions- that makes for excellent investigative writing.It is clear Van Meter is a journalist through his writing style, he is descriptive enough that the readers can place themselves there, but he avoids being long-winded and rambling. This skill is especially effective in his descriptions of Kentucky; I've never been there but I felt as if I were sitting next to Van Meter as he talked about the landscape, culture and people.The outline of the book mirrors a Greek tragedy- the beginning of the story follows three...
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a literary rollercoaster
When you first get into the book, you feel like you know who committed the crime and it seems like an open and shut case, but then the author lets a second story unfold just when you think you have your mind made up and it takes you on a back and forth ride of who committed the crime. Beyond being a true crime book, it is also a great study of a small southern town and the relationships within. You feel connected to the victim in this book and the story is shocking. Great read!
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Product Description
By the lights of absolutely everyone who ever knew her, Katie Autry never harmed a hair on a dog's head.
She came from a tiny village in Kentucky. The State moved her as a child into a foster home in a town so small it had one stoplight. New to her own beauty and a little awkward, Katie had the biggest smile on her high school cheerleading squad. In September 2002, she matriculated as a freshman at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. She majored in the dental program, but as it was for many college students her age, partying was of equal priority. She worked days at the smoothie shop, nights at the local strip club, and fell in love with a football player who wouldn't date her.
Five feet two in heels and without a bad word to say about anyone, Katie Autry was sweet, kind, and utterly naïve. She was making the clumsy strides of a newborn colt, discovering what the world was like and learning to be her own person. And on the morning of May 4, 2003, Katie Autry was raped, stabbed, sprayed with hairspray, and set on fire in her own dormitory room.
In telling the true story of this shocking crime, Bluegrass describes the devastation of not one but three families. Two young men, whose lives seem preordained to intertwine, are jailed for the crime: DNA evidence places Stephen Soules, an unemployed, mixed-race high school dropout, atthe scene, and Lucas Goodrum, a twenty-one-year-old pot dealer with an ex-wife, a girlfriend still in high school, and an inauspicious history of domestic abuse, is held by an ever-changing confession. The friends of the suspects and the foster and birth families of the victim form complex and warring social nets that are cast across town. And a small southern community, populated by eccentrics of every socioeconomic class, from dirt-poor to millionaire, responds to the horror. Like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, this tale is redolent with atmosphere, dark tension, and lush landscapes.
With the keen eye of a talented young journalist returning to his southern roots, Van Meter paints a vivid portrait of the town, the characters who fill it, and the simmering class conflicts that made an injustice like this not only possible, but inevitable. Top to learn more
