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Overview
The novelist Beverly Lowry was mourning her son’s death in a hit-and-run accident when she came across a newspaper story about Karla Faye Tucker, the infamous Houston murderer who was then on death row. The article captured Tucker’s innocent beauty, the stunning brutality of her crimes — committed with a pickaxe — and the stories of her spiritual awakening on death row. Struck by these apparent contradictions, Lowry found herself inexplicably drawn to Tucker, who some ten years later would become the first woman to be executed in Texas since 1863.Lowry eventually began to visit Tucker in prison, and over the course of several years she listened to the tragic story of her life before the murders and, in turn, told Karla Faye about her own life and the life and death of her son Peter. Crossed Over is a memoir of this time, a moving account of an unlikely but profound and genuine friendship created in the confines of a visiting room on death row. Now with a new foreword that recounts Tucker’s last days and Lowry’s experiences at her execution, Crossed Over is also an intimate portrait of a life gone tragically awry and then redeemed behind bars.
Synopsis
The novelist Beverly Lowry was mourning her son’s death in a hit-and-run accident when she came across a newspaper story about Karla Faye Tucker, the infamous Houston murderer who was then on death row. The article captured Tucker’s innocent beauty, the stunning brutality of her crimes — committed with a pickaxe — and the stories of her spiritual awakening on death row. Struck by these apparent contradictions, Lowry found herself inexplicably drawn to Tucker, who some ten years later would become the first woman to be executed in Texas since 1863.
Lowry eventually began to visit Tucker in prison, and over the course of several years she listened to the tragic story of her life before the murders and, in turn, told Karla Faye about her own life and the life and death of her son Peter. Crossed Over is a memoir of this time, a moving account of an unlikely but profound and genuine friendship created in the confines of a visiting room on death row. Now with a new foreword that recounts Tucker’s last days and Lowry’s experiences at her execution, Crossed Over is also an intimate portrait of a life gone tragically awry and then redeemed behind bars.
Publishers Weekly
Shortly after a hit-and-run driver killed her son Peter in 1984, Texas novelist Lowry ( Breaking Gentle ) began visiting Karla Faye Tucker, a death-row prisoner in Mountain View, Tex., who was convicted with her boyfriend for the 1983 pickaxe murders of an acquaintance and his lover. In due course Lowry read Tucker's trial transcript and interviewed the judge, Tucker's defense attorneys and the jail chaplain. There is little further investigation or much sense of where Lowry is going with any of this material. She seems as lost about what to make of Tucker's death sentence as she is about what meaning to derive from her son's death. But what we learn about Tucker's prison habilitation is instructive: her mother, a prostitute, was 13 when Tucker, the girl's third daughter, was born; Tucker started using drugs before she was 10. Also of value is the rare glimpse the book provides of prison life for a woman on death row. (Aug.)