Overview

A shocking investigation into a true crime that tore a town apart--the violent murder of a young coed in Kentucky, the innocent boy who was jailed for the crime, and a small Southern community filled with haunting, unforgettable characters. Katie Autry was a foster child from a tiny village in Kentucky; a little awkward, but always with the biggest smile on her high school cheerleading squad. In September 2002, she matriculated as a freshman at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, majoring in the dental program. 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. 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, William Van Meter describes the devastation of not one but three families. Two young men are jailed for the crime: DNA evidence places Stephen Soules, an unemployed, mixed-race high school dropout, at the scene; and Lucas Goodrum, a twenty-one-year-old pot dealer with an ex-wife, a girlfriend still in high school, and a 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. 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. Like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Bluegrass is redolent with atmosphere, dark tension, and lush landscapes.

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9781416538691

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Reviews

William Van Meter's Bluegrass is not just a story of murder but of race, class, gender, region, etc...there are many layers of moral universality in this small-town murder case that far outreach the suburbs of Southern Kentucky in their magnitude. Van Meter resists all the easy traps of the expose-chronicler with his elegantly interwoven investigation of Bowling Green's harrowing homicide triangle, involving an unforgettably winsome young college co-ed and the two young men--economically and culturally worlds apart and yet historically and socially bound--who are implicated in her baffling murder....This is narrative non-fiction packed with the overpowering magnetism of a sensationalist page-turner, yet Van Meter infuses it with a literary astuteness in the vein of the best of our New Journalism forefathers. Plus, he picks a story to tell that too many of us missed; the Katie Autry case is so mind-blowingly chilling it's evidence once again that real life hands-down surpasses fiction in enormity. It took me to a universe I had never been, and yet one I know I won't be able to shake off soon. -- Porochista Khakpour, author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects: A Novel William Van Meter's Bluegrass is not just a story of murder but of race, class, gender, region, etc...there are many layers of moral universality in this small-town murder case that far outreach the suburbs of Southern Kentucky in their magnitude. Van Meter resists all the easy traps of the expose-chronicler with his elegantly interwoven investigation of Bowling Green's harrowing homicide triangle, involving an unforgettably winsome young college co-ed and the two young men--economically and culturally worlds apart and yet historically and socially bound--who are implicated in her baffling murder....This is narrative non-fiction packed with the overpowering magnetism of a sensationalist page-turner, yet Van Meter infuses it with a literary astuteness in the vein of the best of our New Journalism forefathers. Plus, he picks a story to tell that too many of us missed; the Katie Autry case is so mind-blowingly chilling it's evidence once again that real life hands-down surpasses fiction in enormity. It took me to a universe I had never been, and yet one I know I won't be able to shake off soon. -- Porochista Khakpour, author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects: A Novel Characters and events alike in Van Meter's harrowing and mesmerizing account of a Kentucky co-ed's murder are etched with photographic clarity, as the narrative moves toward its end with a sort of doomed inevitability. -- William Gay, author of I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down

""William Van Meter's ""Bluegrass"" is not just a story of ""murder"" but of race, class, gender, region, etc...there are many layers of moral universality in this small-town murder case that far outreach the suburbs of Southern Kentucky in their magnitude. Van Meter resists all the easy traps of the expose-chronicler with his elegantly interwoven investigation of Bowling Green's harrowing homicide triangle, involving an unforgettably winsome young college co-ed and the two young men--economically and culturally worlds apart and yet historically and socially bound--who are implicated in her baffling murder....This is narrative non-fiction packed with the overpowering magnetism of a sensationalist page-turner, yet Van Meter infuses it with a literary astuteness in the vein of the best of our New Journalism forefathers. Plus, he picks a story to tell that too many of us missed; the Katie Autry case is so mind-blowingly chilling it's evidence once again that real life hands-down surpasses fiction in enormity. It took me to a universe I had never been, and yet one I know I won't be able to shake off soon."" -- Porochista Khakpour, author of"" Sons and Other Flammable Objects: A Novel"""" ""William Van Meter's Bluegrass is not just a story of ""murder"" but of race, class, gender, region, etc...there are many layers of moral universality in this small-town murder case that far outreach the suburbs of Southern Kentucky in their magnitude. Van Meter resists all the easy traps of the expose-chronicler with his elegantly interwoven investigation of Bowling Green's harrowing homicide triangle, involving an unforgettably winsome young college co-ed and the two young men--economically and culturally worlds apart and yet historically and socially bound--who are implicated in her baffling murder....This is narrative non-fiction packed with the overpowering magnetism of a sensationalist page-turner, yet Van Meter infuses it with a literary astuteness in the vein of the best of our New Journalism forefathers. Plus, he picks a story to tell that too many of us missed; the Katie Autry case is so mind-blowingly chilling it's evidence once again that real life hands-down surpasses fiction in enormity. It took me to a universe I had never been, and yet one I know I won't be able to shake off soon."" -- Porochista Khakpour, author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects: A Novel ""Characters and events alike in Van Meter's harrowing and mesmerizing account of a Kentucky co-ed's murder are etched with photographic clarity, as the narrative moves toward its end with a sort of doomed inevitability."" -- William Gay, author of I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down

Author Information

William Van Meter has divided his time between New York and Paris for the last twelve years. He regularly contributes features to such publications as New York, Harper's Bazaar, New York Post, The New York Times, T, Tokion, V, and publications based in New York and France. Bluegrass is his first book. He currently lives in New York.

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