Scoundrel: How A Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free

Edgar Smith died on March 20, 2017, just over a month after his eighty-third birthday. He spent almost forty years in California’s state penitentiary system, much of his last decade in health so poor that it was a surprise he survived so long. He was hard of hearing and barely able to walk more than a quarter mile, and even that short distance required a cane. A weak heart necessitat-ing six bypass surgeries didn’t kill him, either.

That Smith lived into his eighties is all the more remarkable because he was supposed to die nearly six decades earlier, executed by the state of New Jersey for the 1957 murder of fifteen- year-old Victoria Zielinski. At one time Smith was perhaps the most famous convict in America, counting William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of National Review and one of the key architects of the neoconservative movement, as his closest friend.

Scoundrel tells the true, almost too bizarre tale of a man saved from death row thanks to the years-long advocacy, through financial and creative means, of a most unlikely source. When police brutality and mass incarceration are perennially under a national microscope, when the lives of countless Black and Brown boys and men are permanently altered by the criminal justice system, the transformation of Edgar Smith into a national cause more than half a century ago raises uncomfortable questions about who merits such a spotlight and who does not. His story, and the involvement of the many people who helped fashion it, complicates the larger narrative of incarcerated people who proclaim their innocence and of prisoners—on death row and elsewhere—exonerated and freed thanks to newly discovered or long-suppressed evidence.

This book is, in effect, a story of a wrongful conviction in reverse.

As a result of Buckley’s advocacy, Edgar Smith vaulted from prison to the country’s highest intellectual echelons as a best-selling author, an expert on prison reform, and a minor celebrity—only to fall, spectacularly, to earth when his murderous impulses prevailed again. Though the relationship between Norman Mailer and the convict and author Jack Henry Abbott is well known, the comparable one between Buckley and Smith has received far less attention despite the resulting heinous fallout.

Buckley at first took up the Edgar Smith case out of righteous indignation on behalf of Smith, a man whom he believed to be wrongfully convicted and whose literary gifts, which transformed him from underachieving blue-collar worker to curious intellectual, made him worth saving. As Buckley came to regard Smith as a genuine friend, he also operated out of loyalty. As the lawyer and former National Review correspondent Donald G. M. Coxe told me, “We were taken in, I suspect, in part by our unwillingness to believe that anyone who loved NR could be a savage killer.”

Even after it was clear that his faith in Edgar was severely misguided, Buckley concluded, “Edgar Smith has done enough damage in his lifetime without underwriting the doctrine that the verdict of a court is infallible.” That unshakable belief exonerated a psychopath, elevating Smith to prominence and some power at the expense of the women he harmed, injured, and murdered. Buckley fell into the trap described in Fyodor Dostoevsky ’s Crime and Punishment: “An honest and sensitive man opens his heart, and the man of business listens and goes on eating—and then he eats you up.”

***

In March 1957, Edgar Smith seemed like a typical young man living in New Jersey’s Bergen County: married, the father of a newborn baby, a veteran of the marines, discharged because of partial deafness in his left ear, in between jobs. Victoria Zielinski, fifteen years old at the time, was murdered in the small town of Mahwah, her head bashed in by a baseball bat and a couple of large rocks. It didn’t take long for authorities to find and arrest Smith: Zielinski’s blood was on a pair of his pants and in the car he’d borrowed that day. He also admitted to the police that he had given her a ride, though he claimed that she was still alive when they had parted.

The trial lasted two weeks and was a standing-room-only sensation. (Mary Higgins Clark, years before writing the novels that immortalized her as “the Queen of Suspense,” attended every day and dated the beginning of her career as a crime writer to the case.) Smith testified in his own defense, and the resulting inconsistencies were noticed even by trial attendees as young as ten years old. It took less than two hours for the jury to convict him and the judge to sentence him to death. Smith kept appealing his execution and avoiding the electric chair. And since he was staying alive, he decided to better himself, enrolling in college classes, reading history books, and keeping up with current affairs through magazines.

Fate played a hand when William F. Buckley learned of a 1962 newspaper story about Smith in which the convict praised National Review as one of his favorite periodicals. Buckley and the National Review’s intellectual stock were rising among conservatives, but he had only just begun to write his syndicated newspaper column, On the Right, and he was still several years away from his quixotic run for New York City mayor and the first broadcast of his interview show, Firing Line.

Buckley would later learn that Smith’s access to National Review had been cut off after the prison official who lent him copies had been transferred away from the Death House. Sensing a story, feeling some pang of sympathy, or both, Buckley wrote Smith to ensure the prisoner would always receive a copy of National Review. Over the next nine years, through an exchange of more than 1,500 pages of correspondence, the two men became friends—and Buckley became convinced that Smith was not Zielinski’s killer.

Buckley wrote about the case, and his belief in Edgar Smith’s innocence, in several columns and in a 1965 story for Esquire; he used the fee he earned for the story to seed the Death House inmate’s defense fund. Smith had been acting as his own jail-house lawyer; now Buckley found Smith several lawyers to work on his appeals. Buckley also set Smith up with Sophie Wilkins, a dynamic and vivacious editor at the New York–based book-publishing firm Alfred A. Knopf. She worked closely with Smith on his 1968 book, Brief Against Death, which argued that the state of New Jersey’s case against him was riddled with holes and attempted, above all, to persuade the reader that he had not killed Vickie Zielinski.

Wilkins, as I discovered while working in her archives at Columbia University, became more than Smith’s editor. Their correspondence, which she preserved nearly in full, began in strictly professional fashion, with her recommending books to read and offering encouragement on the manuscript that became Brief Against Death. Then it devolved into something more.

They exchanged declarations of love, gifts and artwork, and mutual pornographic fantasies, his smuggled out through third parties to avoid the prying eyes of the Death House censors. He called her “Red”; she called him “Ilya.” Their fights about editorial changes quickly spiraled out of control, and then they made up, lovers’ quarrel style. Wilkins would, in subsequent correspondence with Buckley, express rage and embarrassment at how besotted she had become with Smith and how foolishly she’d behaved.

But that was only after Brief Against Death became a critical and commercial success that prompted many conversations about the necessity of the death penalty, conversations that had been brewing throughout the decade as capital punishment began losing support among the American public. It made Smith a literary star. William F. Buckley promoted his advocacy on The Tonight Show, the Today show, and other major venues in support of the book, and Smith eventually became the first convicted murderer nominated to join PEN America. The book was chosen as an alternate pick of the Literary Guild and was reviewed by every major publication (including a glowing review by the crime novelist Ross Macdonald in the New York Times Book Review). Two years later, in 1970, his novel A Reasonable Doubt garnered similar acclaim, including praise from the hard-boiled writer James M. Cain.

By the end of 1971, the tide had turned fully in Smith’s favor. A federal court of appeals threw out his confession and ordered a new trial. After a seesaw battle between state and federal powers, Smith walked out of court a free man. Officially, he had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and he was credited with nearly fifteen years of time served. Immediately after the guilty plea and the final ruling, Smith climbed into a limousine, Buckley took the seat next to him, and they went straight to the television studio to record two riveting hours of Firing Line, which aired on consecutive weeks.

Edgar Smith became a go-to guy on all things prison related. He published book reviews in Playboy and a self-interview in Esquire, appeared on The Mike Douglas Show and many radio programs, and returned home to Bergen County, ignoring and at times openly mocking the cloud of suspicion emanating from his neighbors. He published a thriller, 71 Hours, under the pseudonym Michael Mason and then another book of nonfiction under his own name, Getting Out. He met and married a much younger woman who believed in his innocence and moved with her to California. Then his celebrity status dissipated, and the gigs dried up. His wife became the breadwinner.

In October 1976, an old pattern asserted itself. Having been turned down for a job at the San Diego Union-Tribune, Smith lay in wait in a supermarket parking lot, where he dragged thirty- three-year-old Lefteriya Lisa Ozbun into his car and, while driving with one hand, attempted to stab her to death with the other. He came close to committing his second murder, but Ozbun struggled mightily, kicked a hole in the windshield, and man-aged to pull the car over, alerting a nearby motorist. Spooked, Smith fled in the damaged car, dumped it for another, and spent the next two weeks as a fugitive, tapping his family for help and money. When those sources dried up, he called Buckley’s office, reaching his secretary. She learned that Smith was in Las Vegas under an assumed name. She told Buckley, who promptly called the FBI and turned Smith in.

The following year at trial, Smith confessed to killing Victoria Zielinski: “I recognized that the devil I had been looking at for the last forty-three years was me,” he told the court. “It was at that time I recognized that my life had reached a point at which I had a choice of doing two things: I could kill myself or I could return to San Diego and face what I was.” He received a life sentence for the attempted murder of Lisa Ozbun and spent the rest of his days behind bars. He died at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, California, seven years before he was next eligible for parole, in 2024, by which time he would have turned ninety.

***

Humans are hardwired to believe what other humans tell them. Most people merit that belief and, when they breach it, try to atone for their mistakes. Then there are those humans who are able to manipulate, obfuscate, and make a mockery of well-meaning people, causing harm that takes years, if ever, to fully overcome. Writing Scoundrel was a way for me to comprehend what can seem like the incomprehensible: how Edgar Smith was able to fool so many who entered his orbit, be they intimates or strangers, and bend the American criminal justice system to his will. What I came to realize is that this story is a forgotten part of American history at the nexus of justice, prison reform, civil rights, neoconservatism, and literary culture.

William F. Buckley’s attempt to free Edgar Smith resulted in catastrophic collateral damage to women: Smith’s victims. Edgar had already robbed Victoria Zielinski of her chance to grow up before Buckley became involved with him. Lisa Ozbun came close to death, surviving only through happenstance and her own tenacious will to live. Smith’s wives and many of his paramours and female friends suffered psychological damage that lasted the rest of their lives.

The relationship between Smith, the convict, and Buckley, the conservative, was fascinating and complex. But it is the voices of the women, sacrificed on the altar of the literary talent of a murderer, that animate the narrative of this book. The nonfiction crime genre increasingly makes greater room for the stories of women, embodying their full spectrum as human beings rather than flattening them into by-products of seductive killers. I hope Scoundrel adds to this growing body of nuanced, psychologically perceptive work.

On several occasions, Sophie Wilkins likened the Edgar Smith case to a work by Dostoevsky. Her son Adam told me that he found himself thinking the story, had it not been true, “would have made a wonderful novel or a wonderfully trashy one. The three key characters—the celebrity political columnist (rich, Catholic, but culturally upper-class WASP); the brilliant psychopathic jailhouse lawyer, working class, Protestant; and the sparkling bright articulate Jewish woman editor—could hardly have been more different in background and personality, but they came together in a most amazing interaction.”

Edgar Smith’s horrible acts, like so many other horrible acts of atrocious men then and now, were overlooked, explained away, or ignored because of his talent—and because women are expend-able. The shared belief in one man’s innocence and his literary acumen forged that unlikely intellectual triangle. It was undone when the totality of his violence against women revealed that his talent was a paper tiger, that brilliant people can be conned, and that the effects of betrayal ripple across generations.