Overview

On the day before Easter Sunday 1895, four women entered the Emmanuel Baptist Church in San Francisco's Mission District to decorate the altar with flowers. When they opened the door to the little room containing the library, they were greeted with a horrible sight: the stabbed and strangled body of 21-year-old Minnie Williams, her blood coating the floor and spattering the walls. A search of the church revealed another grisly discovery in the belfry: the decomposing body of another young woman, reported as missing ten days before. She, too, had been strangled. But unlike the victim in the library, Blanche Lamont was lovingly laid out as if for burial. Clues led the police to a friend of both victims, a medical student who was also the assistant superintendent of the church's Sunday school. But those who knew Theo Durrant denied that this highly respectable young man could have had anything to do with these horrible crimes. The young man who committed these two apparently motiveless murders was depicted by the popular press at the time as a monster, a devil in disguise, only pretending to be religious. McConnell demonstrates that he was exactly what he seemed to be: a genuinely good man whose life went terribly wrong because of the biological, genetic, and mental problems from which he suffered -- problems he was not even aware of. Sympathy for the Devil examines the extensive and sensational press coverage of the case (criticized by the Governor and by the California Supreme Court), the effect of the murders on San Francisco, and also analyzes what turned an apparently upstanding young man into a vicious murderer.

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Reviews

Virginia McConnell reconstructs in powerful detail the 1895 church steeple slayings of two young girls in San Francisco. This double crime, for which Theo Durrant went to the San Quentin gallows, still holds fascination after more than a century. McConnell not only captures the horrors of the events; she also illuminates striking contrasts between the law enforcement and judicial concepts of that era and the present. -Harry Farrell, author of Edgar Award winner Swift Justice: Shallow Grave in Trinity County

Author Information

VIRGINIA A. MCCONNELL, a native of Syracuse, New York, has degrees from The College of St. Rose in New York, Purdue University, and Golden Gate University School of Law. She has taught high school in upstate New York and in Sacramento, California, and has practiced law in San Francisco. Currently, she teaches English, Literature, Speech, and Criminal Justice at Walla Walla Community College's Clarkston Center in Washington, and lives on 30 acres of land in Idaho. She has been researching crimes from the past for many years and would like to become the Ann Rule of Victorian true crime. Her 1999 debut, Arsenic Under the Elms (Praeger), earned a starred review in Kirkus Reviews.

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