Sarah Weinman's Scoundrel looks at how a killer charmed his way off death row — and the women left in his wake
This interview originally aired on March 19, 2022.
Sarah Weinman has done her 10,000 hours and then some. The Ottawa-raised, N.Y.-based Weinman writes a twice-monthly column for the New York Times Book Review, as well as a newsletter, Crime Lady. In 2018, she won the Arthur Ellis Award for Excellence in Crime Writing for The Real Lolita.
Her latest book, Scoundrel, turns the interrogation lamp on Edgar Smith, a homicidal sociopath who managed to convince prominent cultural figures from the 1960s that he was innocent.
Smith, a convicted murderer, was saved from death row via an unlikely friendship with a famous figure in the neo-conservative movement. After Smith killed a 15-year-old girl in 1957, he was set to be executed. But he struck up a friendship with conservative author and political commentator William F. Buckley Jr., who hired lawyers to fight for a new trial. Smith also enlisted the help of Sophie Wilkins, a book editor he would go on to have an affair with, and would be released from prison to become a bestselling author.
Weinman spoke with Shelagh Rogers about writing Scoundrel.
Stories of women and girls
"I began working on this project at the end of 2014, thinking it would be a magazine piece. And I soon realized in the research and the reporting that this was nowhere close to being a magazine piece — there was just too much going on.
"And I was surprised that I didn't know much about the story, and particularly as I did more research and reporting why the women and the girls who were integral parts of the story — whether they were murdered, assaulted, harmed or romantically involved with Edgar Smith — had been completely erased and overlooked."
Escaping death row
"I think what it really comes down to is William F. Buckley genuinely believed in Edgar Smith's innocence, but it's important to consider who we afford that particular belief. Buckley grew up in privilege in a large Catholic family that strongly believed in this counter-revolutionary approach to American politics. He was a staunch anti-communist. He wrote some really incendiary and frankly terrible opinions about Black people in the South and later about gays contending with the AIDS virus.
It was this blinkered idea of who merited artistic integrity — that's what I wanted to interrogate.
"And then, in pumping up Edgar as a literary figure — this idea that another National Review staffer told me that we could never have imagined that someone who wrote so well was a savage killer. It was this blinkered idea of who merited artistic integrity — that's what I wanted to interrogate."
Disarming charm
"Are we all capable of highlighting the wrong people? Absolutely. Are we all capable of falling under the spell of someone who is telling us what we want to hear in words that uncomfortably might mimic our own? Absolutely. Do I believe that any one of us are susceptible to con-artistry, to manipulation, to seduction, and all of those persuasive tools that people use to get what they want? Absolutely. So working on Scoundrel, I think, really amplified all of those feelings that I already had and showed, yet again, how someone can be in the position to wield influence, even from Death Row.
Do I believe that any one of us are susceptible to con artistry, to manipulation, to seduction, and all of those persuasive tools that people use to get what they want? Absolutely.
"Edgar Smith would take college classes, he would read and he would educate himself. But in doing so, it really wasn't just about altruism. It was also about an end goal which was getting out, which was presenting this idea that he was innocent and doing his best to make people believe in that."
Speaking for the voiceless
"It always matters that those who are harmed have their voices heard, knowing that it's really impossible to make their voices fully heard. I'm trying to animate people whose lives I was not intimately acquainted with, who I did not know personally, whose biographies are limited. I mean, Victoria Zielinski in particular, she was 15 when she died. She just didn't have a chance to grow up and lead any kind of life.
"But I did at least want to convey early on in Scoundrel that if we know who she was and what she was like as best as I could portray, then we could have a grounding in the harm that just kept being perpetuated upon her over and over again for decades."
Secret correspondence
"Without Sophie Wilkins there really wouldn't be a book. She's the book editor whose voluminous correspondence was entrancing, enchanting, maddening and exhausting. But I loved spending time with her on the page, and I felt like I came to know her as much as one can know anyone just by reading their letters.
"The correspondence at first was strictly professional. She was telling him about her life as a book editor, whether he needed to get an agent, what books he might consider reading. And then she went on a European vacation and let slip that she was meeting some man and Edgar makes a rather inappropriate comment and then it just sort of snowballs.
When I realized that this had gone so far afield and so far off the rails, that is truly when I knew I had a book.
"He's saying more things that are crossing boundaries and she's saying more things that are crossing boundaries and by the end of 1967, they're professing their love for one another. By early 1968, they're exchanging letters through his lawyer so that the censors don't read, that are so X-rated. When I realized that this had gone so far afield and so far off the rails, that is truly when I knew I had a book."
Sarah Weinman's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
