On this day, Sept. 23, in 1981, convicted murderer-turned-author Jack Henry Abbott was captured in the oil fields of Louisiana.
Less than four months earlier, Pulitzer Prize novelist Norman Mailer helped Abbott win parole on a conviction for killing an inmate.
“Culture is worth a little risk,'” Mailer declared.
Mailer gave Abbott a job as a his assistant. Weeks after his release, Abbott fatally stabbed a waiter outside a Manhattan restaurant and disappeared.
The next day, the New York Times Review of Books, unaware of Abbott’s new crime, published a glowing review of Abbott’s “In the Belly of the Beast,” a collection of letters written to Mailer while in prison.
Police arrested Abbott in Louisiana. He hung himself to death in prison in 2002.
– Scott McCabe
