Overview

"On Memorial Day 1933, Stanford executive David Lamson found his wife, Allene, dead in their Palo Alto home. The only suspect, he became the face of California's most sensational murder trial of the century. After a judge sentenced him to hang at San Quentin, a team of Stanford colleagues stepped in to form the Lamson Defense Committee. The group included poets Yvor Winters and Janet Lewis, as well as the ""Sherlock Holmes of Berkeley,"" criminologist E.O. Heinrich. They managed to overturn the verdict and incite a series of heated retrials that gripped and divided the community. Was Lamson the victim of aggressive prosecutors, or was he a master of deception whose connections helped him get away with murder? Author and Stanford alum Tom Zaniello meticulously examines the details of a notorious case with a lingering legacy."

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9781540200570

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Zaniello's non-fiction book, 'California's Lamson Murder Mystery, ' which publishes October 17, sets the stage with a history of Santa Clara County from the days when it was the world's largest fruit production and packing region to today's prominence as Silicon Valley. In the old days, Santa Clara County was also known for corruption, which allowed the Lamson case to go on for nearly three years with multiple attempts to convict him and a brush with the hangman's noose. This is the first completely researched book on the Lamson case, and Zaniello's interest was piqued by poems on the case by Yvor Winters, one of his instructors at Stanford, and later when he interviewed Janet Lewis, Winters' wife, who introduced him to Lamson's daughter. Winters and Lewis were leaders of the Lamson Defense Committee. Capitol Hill Village News In the 1980s, Zaniello again found himself intrigued by the Lamson case. This time, there were significantly fewer stumbling blocks to his research. He met Yvor Winter's widow, Janet Lewis, who introduced him to David Lamson's daughter, and gave him the go-ahead to write his book. Palo Alto Weekly For anyone familiar with Santa Clara County history, 1933 was a watershed year. It was the year a mob lynched two men in St. James Park. It was the year that a desperate ex-con killed a San Jose cop downtown. And it was the year that David Lamson was tried on charges of murdering his wife on the Stanford campus. Eighty-four years later, when we're used to more brazen news, it's hard to grasp what a sensation the Lamson trial was. But now a Stanford graduate and film teacher, Tom Zaniello, has written a book called California's Lamson Murder Mystery, an unapologetic argument that Lamson was innocent. I disagree with him on several fundamental points. But the book is worth reading for its recreation of a hotly disputed drama that consumed the press of the day. Santa Cruz Sentinel

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