Deborah Larkin was only ten years old when the quiet calm of her California suburb was shattered. Thirty miles north, on a quiet November night in Santa Barbara, a pregnant nurse named Olga Duncan disappeared from her apartment. The mystery deepens when it is discovered that Olga’s mother in-law—a deeply manipulative and deceptive woman—had been doing everything in her power to separate Olga and her son, Frank, prior to Olga’s disappearance.
From a forged annulment to multiple attempts to hire people to “get rid” of Olga, to a faked extortion case, Elizabeth seemed psychopathically attached to her son. Yet she denied having anything to do with Olga’s disappearance with a smile.
But when Olga’s brutally beaten body is found in a shallow grave, apparently buried alive, a young DA makes it his mission to see that Elizabeth Duncan is brought to justice. Adding a wrinkle to his efforts is the fact that Frank—himself a defense attorney—maintained his mother’s innocence to the end.
How does a young girl process such a crime along with the fear and disbelief that rocked an entire community? Decades later, Larkin is determined to revisit the case and bring the story of Olga herself to light. Long overshadowed by the sensationalism and scandal of Elizabeth and Frank, A Lovely Girl seeks to reveal Olga as a woman in full. Someone who was more than the twisted family that would ultimately ensnare her.
As we follow the heart-pounding drama of the case through Larkin's young eyes—her father was the court reporter—A Lovely Girl is by turns page-turning yet poignant, and makes the reader reexamine how we handle fear, how we regard mental illness, and how we understand family as we carve our own path in a dangerous world.Amazon
About Deborah Holt Larkin Larkin holds a bachelor’s degree in American History and Literature from the University of California at Davis, and she studied creative writing at the University of California at San Diego. She has a master’s degree in the Education of Exceptional Children from San Francisco State University.
Connect with Deborah ~
Website: deborahholtlarkin.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HoltLarkinDeborah/
Publisher: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/A-Lovely-Girl/Deborah-Holt-Larkin/9781639362448
Inspiration behind A LOVELY GIRL
“My life-long interest in true crime stories began in 1958 when Olga Duncan vanished
from her Santa Barbara apartment in the middle of the night. At the time, I was a
passionate Dragnet and Nancy Drew fan. But when Olga’s brutally-beaten body was
discovered a month later in a shallow grave on a lonely road near my home town, my
focus shifted to the real-life mystery. And with a constant source of information from both
my father’s newspaper articles about the murder and his never-ending monologue around
the house detailing the bizarre case, I became obsessed with the true crime story. My
mother tried to rein Daddy in with an occasional, “Shhh, you’re scaring the girls, Bob,” but
he had few boundaries when it came to the news of the world. I hung on his every word
because I wanted to understand about evil people and how to avoid them.
I was inspired to write about this unbelievable crime, filled with dark humor and
bumbling killers, by the many conversations I had with my father. But I didn’t want to
write the type of ripped-from-the-headlines, mass market book you find on the spin rack
at the supermarket.
To me, this story is inextricably linked to a more innocent, unsophisticated era just before
the dramatic changes of the 1960s, when we all believed that bad things didn’t happen in
our own small towns if we all followed the rules. In between the carefully researched true
crime procedural chapters, the thread of the story winds back to chapters of my coming-
of-age memoir about our quirky family life and my dawning realization that sometimes
terrible things can happen to good girls. That evil can hide behind a mask of normalcy.”
EXCERPT
Excerpted from A Lovely Girl by Deborah Holt Larkin, now available from Pegasus Books. Copyright © 2022 by Deborah Holt Larkin
When I look back, Elizabeth Duncan’s trial is linked inextricably in my mind to the sound of my father’s voice—his dramatic, profanity-laced, sometimes humorous stories about witness testimony and crazy antics in the courtroom. Stories of blackmail, a Salvation Army man and a phony annulment, too many husbands to count, and Mrs. Duncan breathing fire to the end, often told in snatches between more chaotic attempts at home repair.
I read every word of his newspaper articles, and I scrutinized the frontpage photos of all the trial participants. But his nightly accounts brought the bizarre and brutal characters involved in Olga Duncan’s murder to life around our dining room table. I hung on every detail of his spellbinding tales, and although I’d never met any of these people, I knew them all very well.
The door at the back of Ventura Superior Courtroom One swung open, and a smiling, confident Elizabeth Duncan sashayed in like she owned the place. Her grand entrance was hindered only by the fact that she was cuffed to Mary Fogarty, a Ventura County deputy sheriff. Mrs. Duncan nodded and raised her fingertips to a few familiar faces in the press crowd that she’d come to know during the week-long jury selection process.
Reporters and photographers swarmed. “How about a few pictures before we start?” one of the newsmen called out. Mrs. Duncan’s dapper little attorney, Ward Sullivan, nodded his permission and continued a conversation with his private investigator.
Deputy Fogarty, dressed in a brown skirt and jacket with a sheriff’s star pinned on the front, unfastened the handcuffs. Mrs. Duncan stood next to her chair at the defense table and rubbed her wrist before turning toward the reporters. “Do you like my new outfit?” she asked as she fluffed the skirt of her two-piece, black-and-white dress with a Peter Pan–style, velveteen-trimmed collar. “Frank bought it for me.” Flashbulbs popped.
The dark, mahogany-paneled courtroom, with its gleaming coffered ceilings, arched windows, and three beautiful stained-glass domed skylights, had been built as a public works project at the turn of the century. The judge sat at a raised desk at the front of the courtroom called the bench. The defense and prosecution tables faced the judge, with the witness stand and jury box to one side. Because of the large number of journalists covering the trial, a makeshift press section had been set up behind the counsel tables, inside the low wooden railing, called the bar, that separated the judge, jury, lawyers, and defendant from the ninety-eight-seat spectator gallery.
On most days, the atmosphere in Courtroom One was almost churchlike. People instinctively lowered their voices as they entered. But on the opening day of the Duncan trial, an electric excitement spread throughout the building. Newsmen from all over the country descended on Ventura. Representatives of the wire services and national news magazines, photographers and reporters from all the major newspapers in the state, about thirty journalists in all, assembled in the press section to await the beginning of the trial.
…
The DA told the jury about Mrs. Duncan’s campaign of threats and harassment against her new daughter-in-law and how she had impersonated Olga and hired someone to play the part of Frank in order to obtain an annulment of his marriage. When this didn’t separate Frank from his wife, she looked for a killer.
Frank and his mother sat impassively as they listened to Gustafson speak. Frank had been granted permission to stay in the courtroom throughout the trial, even though he would later be called as a witness in his mother’s defense, because Sullivan had argued that Frank was part of his mother’s legal team and crucial to her overall defense. Gustafson had agreed to the plan as long as his prosecution witnesses were also allowed to remain in the courtroom to hear the testimony of the other witnesses.
Now Sullivan told the judge that he preferred to reserve his right to make an opening statement until later in the trial, at the beginning of the defense case. In quick succession, Gustafson called three witnesses: Olga’s dentist, Olga’s friend Sylvia Butler, and the physician who had performed Olga’s autopsy. The DA also introduced twelve crime scene photos into evidence. Sullivan objected to two of the photos as “particularly gruesome in nature and likely to appeal to the vice, passion, and prejudice of the jury.” Gustafson withdrew both photos.
The dentist, Dr. Richard Pagett, used dental charts to identify Olga’s body. Sylvia Butler, one of Olga’s friends who’d visited her the night she disappeared, followed Dr. Pagett to the stand.
“I will show you People’s Exhibit 36, Miss Butler,” Gustafson said. He held up the bloodstained, tattered robe that had been wrapped around the body. The display of the mud-caked pink nightclothes caused a collective gasp in the gallery. “I ask you whether you recognize these as the garments Olga was wearing the last time you saw her?”
“Yes, that’s what she was wearing that night.” Miss Butler put her hand over her mouth.
The next witness, Dr. D. Gordon Johnson, the autopsy surgeon, established the cause of death. He began by describing the condition of the body.
“The body was covered with dirt that we washed away to reveal the body of a young female, obviously pregnant. The facial features were fairly well destroyed by collapse of the nose and the ears, and some flesh was missing. There were many lacerations over the front half of the scalp. The hair was missing except—”
“Excuse me for interrupting, Doctor,” Gustafson said. “I will show you these three pictures and ask you if they depict the condition of the scalp.”
“Yes, sir, they do. Some of the lacerations reveal the skull, with hair particles carried deep into the depths of the wounds.”
“And did you confirm your opinion that the deceased was pregnant during the autopsy?”
“Yes. We found a female fetus, forty-three centimeters crown-to-heel length, in the uterus.”
The courtroom was silent as the doctor gave the autopsy pictures back to the DA, who handed them off to the court clerk to pass to the jury. Only the sound of crinkling photo paper broke the silence in the courtroom as steely-faced jurors examined the pictures.
Gustafson continued with the witness. “What is your opinion as to the cause of death?”
“The cause was one of three mechanisms: strangulation, brain damage, or suffocation.”
Stay tuned for my review….coming soon!
0 comments:
Post a Comment