The Annals of Unsolved Crime, by Edward Jay Epstein – review

Edward Jay Epstein is an American investigative journalist, now in his late seventies, who has spent at least half a century trying to find answers to the troubling theories and nagging questions that always swirl around notorious crimes. The more famous the crime, the harder it is to get at the truth, especially if the crime has political consequences. For example, John Wilkes Booth, who murdered Abraham Lincoln in 1865, was quickly proven to have been part of a conspiracy involving leaders of the defeated Confederate states; but when a reunited country was later seeking reconciliation, it was found expedient to suppress this fact and portray him instead as a deranged individual who had acted alone.

In the case of the Reichstag fire of 1933, which brought Adolf Hitler to power, the opposite was the case. It suited the Nazis to blame it on a conspiracy by the communists, and the communists on a conspiracy by the Nazis; and most people believed in one or other of these two conspiracy theories. But it seems that in reality there may have been only one individual involved — the unbalanced Dutch arsonist Marinus Van der Lubbe, who actually lit the fire and was later beheaded for doing it.

As for the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, which Epstein himself investigated in depth, and about which he wrote the first of his 14 books, The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth, he still doubts the Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and believes that he was following instructions from the Cuban intelligence service, which was bent on revenge for the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.

The 54 ‘unsolved crimes’ analysed in this stimulating book range in time from the Lincoln assassination and the ‘Jack the Ripper’ prostitute murders of the 19th century to the 21st-century murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia and arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in New York for the alleged sexual assault of a hotel maid.