Book Review: “Scrapped: Justice and a Teen Informant”
As an appellate practitioner, I read trial transcripts of true crimes all day long in my practice. Usually the last thing I want to read in my free time is more true crime. A good fictional novel with a perfect ending is easier to read than the hypertechnical true crime story that always ends with the government’s suspect behind bars.
But Lisa Peebles’ and John O’Brien’s new book on the kidnapping of Heidi Allen, Scrapped: Justice and a Teen Informant, is radically different. It is true crime written for the criminal defense lawyer. Yes, the authors dive the reader headfirst into the technical “weeds” of evidence they uncover, but they do it all while telling a great story.
Heidi Allen was a young woman kidnapped and murdered in Oswego County, New York in 1994. As is all too common in our cases, police immediately formed tunnel vision and created a narrative of the crime without any real evidence to support it. They quickly identified Gary Thibodeau as their prime suspect.
Thibodeau was tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison. But years later an unusual series of coincidences drew the attention of Peebles and her colleagues, who agreed to represent Thibodeau in his post-conviction pursuit of freedom. The case also caught the attention of John O’Brien, an investigative journalist for a local newspaper. Together, Peebles and O’Brien reopen the investigation of Heidi’s kidnapping.
The case itself has all the ingredients of a wrongful conviction: poor police work, lying jail informants, a crooked prosecutor, a cover-up of the true killers, and judges who seem blind to the truth sitting right in front of them. The book begins like any other true crime novel, focusing on the crime and the police investigation. But after describing Thibodeau’s trial, the book’s focus shifts to Peebles’ and O’Brien’s involvement in Thibodeau’s quest for justice. The reader is taken through the post-conviction investigation, with all its twists and turns.
The first half of the book builds to the story’s crescendo — the evidentiary hearing. The authors place the reader in the courtroom for a bird’s eye view of the hearing. The story alternates between the reporter’s lay perspective of the hearing from the gallery to Peebles’ legal perspective from counsel’s table. After the hearing concludes, the authors next take the reader through the legal process that followed the post-conviction court’s decision.
One of my biggest frustrations with reading true crime novels is the (usually) lay author’s oversimplification of the legal issues or complete absence of their discussion altogether. But in Scrapped, the authors smartly weave the legal issues into the story itself. They explain the legal concepts briefly where they must so the lay reader understands what’s going on. But for the lawyer reading the book, discussion of the legal claims and how they were handled only add to the sense of injustice.
As the authors’ investigation reveals more and more new evidence, the reader struggles momentarily with how it all fits together. What makes this book nothing short of brilliant is one of the final chapters in the book, written by Peebles, where she lays out her theory of the case. She meticulously places every piece of evidence together and presents the best explanation for what happened to Heidi Allen.
The unexpected ending prompts a rush of emotions. It left me with the feeling that criminal defense lawyers are the true warriors of justice in this broken system. Even when everyone else believes the fight is over, we keep going. Scrapped is Peebles’ and O’Brien’s ongoing fight for justice, first for Gary and now for Heidi.