
Springtime for Sophie
Murder and Madness in a Connecticut Mill Town
Richard H. Underwood(Author)
Shadelandhouse Modern Press, LLC
Published on 21. October 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
220 pages
978-1-945049-00-2 (ISBN)
Description
"The year was 1909, the setting a decaying New England mill town. A saloonkeeper was left for dead, shot a dozen times, his throat slashed for good measure, yet still babbling that a winsome music teacher and her young beau, the victim's rival in love, had done the deed. The two murder trials that followed drew curious hordes and the attention of a nation. With meticulous archival work and rare narrative gifts, Professor Richard Underwood unearths this lost tale of death, duplicity, and personal ruin. In retelling a grisly true-life crime story, Underwood delivers a rich ethnography of Naugatuck, Connecticut, and a law school seminar on evidence, criminal procedure, trial strategy, and lawyers' ethics. It is a lesson too in the gnawing uncertainty of true-life crime stories, where some witnesses lie and others honestly forget, and crafty lawyers win fame by torturing the truth into submission to their designs."
More details
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
479 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-945049-00-2 (9781945049002)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Richard H. Underwood, University of Kentucky University Research Professor and Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law, is the author of Springtime for Sophie: Murder and Madness in a Connecticut Mill Town, Gaslight Lawyers: Criminal Trials & Exploits in Gilded Age New York, and CrimeSong: True Crime Stories from Southern Murder Ballads. He is also the co-author of several books on evidence, trial technique and legal ethics. Underwood has published numerous articles on the law, legal history, perjury, famous trials, and true crime. He has lectured or presented papers on diverse subjects at conferences across the United States and in London and Amsterdam.