Author Description

Linda Cumming’s first day in The Aladdin apartments was anything but magical. She was drugged, raped and strangled. Her killer then tightened a rope around her neck and hung her naked body three feet off the floor in an clumsy attempt to make it look like a suicide. And then he spread lies that she had no friends, no family and had just been released from a mental stay at a local hospital. His lies worked. A deputy coroner prematurely, mistakenly and incredibly red-stamped cause of death as SUICIDE. It wasn't long before most folks at The Aladdin forgot the tragic story about the young woman with the pointy glasses who killed herself in apartment 8. But then another woman was strangled at the Aladdin. The killer may have confused the cops, fooled the coroner, and beat the system, but he didn’t factor in one thing: a tenacious newspaper reporter who refused to accept the coroner’s finding. What follows is an extraordinary tale of diligence full of twists and turns over the span of a lifetime by journalist Larry Welborn to expose the truth of a murder camouflaged to look like a suicide. This is not your typical detective whodunit mystery. This is a true story demonstrating the lengths a journalist will go to stand up for the underdog. Over four decades Welborn interviewed more than 60 people, collected thousands of pages of police reports, coroner’s reports and transcripts, and traveled to three states to tell the unlikely story of a murder by suicide. He pestered the police, challenged prosecutors and pushed the stone of Linda’s injustice up the hill over and over for nearly a half-century. Welborn’s tenacious pursuit of the truth – and of Linda’s killer – is the backbone of this book. Sometimes it reads like a modern version of Les Misérables where justice and the good guys were the real victims and where lies, pretense, and deceit too often prevailed