Review of Who Killed These Girls?

Review of Who Killed These Girls? by Beverly Lowry
Rating *****

How is it that so many supposed professionals can look at a confession that has every indication of being coerced continue with a prosecution? It’s unbelievable to me that so many detectives, prosecutors, district attorneys, judges, and jurors can be so incompetent that they can’t use common sense when deciding someone’s life. If a detective has to feed details of the crime to a person making a confession so that his confession matches the evidence, that is not a confession. If there is not one shred of physical evidence to back up that confession, it’s a false confession.

The same pattern repeats over and over again. One or more individuals is tried and convicted based on nothing more than a false confession. Years later, most often through DNA testing, it is discovered that DNA found at the scene doesn’t match any of the people convicted of the crime. So what do the prosecutors and detectives and judges responsible for the mistake do? They claim that there must have been another individual involved and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they made a mistake. They’re still guilty because twelve jurors said they were guilty. What about the appeal system? A complete waste of time. Those judges are just as incompetent as the people who made the original mistake.

A story like this takes years to run its course. Author Beverly Lowry spent eight years working on this book. She examines the crime, the murder and rape of four young girls in Austin, Texas on December 6, 1991, from every possible perspective. Through a very careful review of the record, she paints a clear picture of how so many people got so much wrong. If you stick with the evidence, it is almost certain that the two men responsible for this heinous crime were in the yogurt shop as the girls were closing up. They committed the crime, started the fire on the shelves where there were combustibles, and fled out the back door.

As of right now, those two men are still at large. But they made a big mistake. They left their DNA. It wasn’t mentioned in the book whether or not that unknown DNA was run through the CODIS database. Anyone searching for the truth would take this step. People who commit crimes like this don’t lead exemplary lives afterward.

I read the eBook version and listened to the audio version using Whispersyn. My only complaint was the lack of images. There’s no excuse for that omission.

Watch the 48 Hours episode about this crime here.