January 9, 2006
Veteran Minneapolis journalist Swanson has crafted a compelling look at the brutal 1963 murder of a local housewife, a case that attracted international attention. With a novelist's skill, the author opens with the morning of the crime, when a neighbor found the bloodied and battered Carol Thompson at her door in a quiet St. Paul suburb. The victim died soon after reaching a nearby hospital, leaving behind a grieving husband and four children. The dogged police investigation rapidly saw through the family's Norman Rockwell facade, and the widower's long history of philandering enabled them to focus on identifying the hit men he employed for the crime. Despite a careful murder plot with many elements just like Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder,
the execution of the contract was bungled, and T. Eugene Thompson was quickly given up by his associates. This slim volume stands out from similar explorations of local crimes that have long been forgotten by the nation, thanks to the sensitive and detailed attention given to the characters of Carol Thompson's murderers and of her children and their attempts to come to terms with the horrific reality of their mother's death.
February 15, 2006
T. Eugene "Cotton" Thompson, brush-cut-crowned, go-getting Minnesota lawyer and upstanding citizen, was as shocked as anyone else when his wife, Carol, was found bloody, battered, and dying on a neighbor's front stoop on March 6, 1963, in a quiet upper-middle-class St. Paul neighborhood. Or was he? As police started putting events together, Cotton's prim world and his nominal alibi dissolved. Turns out the fussy, clean-cut image he projected was largely a lie. Swanson quickly disposes of the mystery here: Cotton did it. He hired a sleazeball to kill his wife and make it look like an accident, but said sleazeball subcontracted the job to an incompetent amateur. The meat here is the aftermath as Thompson's kids tell of dealing with their father, who was eventually paroled, and forcing him to admit his guilt. This dandy true-crime excursion constitutes a detailed slice of mid-twentieth-century, middle-class existence in middle America, spiced with pithy observations about media portrayals of sensational crime then and now.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)