The Chris Voss Show Podcast – MOSAIC Pieces: Surviving the Dark Side of American Justice by Wes Skillings

MOSAIC Pieces: Surviving the Dark Side of American Justice by Wes Skillings

https://www.amazon.com/MOSAIC-Pieces-Surviving-American-Justice/dp/B0FH7JYK55

A child’s murder and a rush to judgment still resonate more than fifty years later with lessons to be learned about American justice from a real-life murder case. The convicted murderer did his time, returned to his hometown of South Williamsport, PA, where the crime occurred, and yet the case against him refuses to retreat quietly into fading memories and a growing cache of the obituaries of those who played many of the prominent roles in this morality play. The impact on him and his family resonates as both tragedy and triumph with a case study that is as much a generational story in more innocent times as it is about the murder of a child in an all-American town known as the home of Little League Baseball.

This story centers on an implausible murderer and his family – not that of the twelve-year-old victim and her family. And that’s a true crime reversal in itself. Other than one tragic realization, that is. Somebody got away with murder and, despite an impressive accumulation of exculpatory evidence widening cracks into chasms in the Commonwealth’s case presented in February of 1974, exoneration has eluded a family sacrificed for political gain and career expediency.

“Mosaic Pieces,” a work of narrative nonfiction by Wes Skillings, might at its heart be a true crime story, but it encompasses so much more than a murder case. Make that several decades more-three generations of one family- with the evolving story of the crime serving as the keystone of this arching chronicle of guilt versus innocence. Subtitled “Surviving the Dark Side of American Justice,” this book reads like a novel supported by a detailed journalistic approach from a man who retired after almost four decades as a newspaper editor, reporter and columnist.

The 1973-74 murder case itself is alternately fascinating and disturbing – if only because of what has been learned in the decades since the trial at the end of which Kim Lee Hubbard, 20, was convicted of murdering twelve-year-old Jennifer May Hill. He is a free man and has been for the past four decades and counting after paying his proverbial debt to society. Yet a debt is something you owe, and this convicted murderer, despite leading a productive and fulfilling life in the very community where the crime for which he was tried and convicted occurred, has his own debt to collect. The debt is exoneration for a crime he swears he didn’t commit and, as this true crime narrative that reads like a novel shows, one that relied on evidence that had been manipulated and manufactured.

The arrest, trial and jury’s verdict required only four-and-a-half months from the day the child’s remarkably well-preserved body was found in a cornfield a few hundred yards from her home on October 28, 1973. She had been dead in that field, according to evidence proffered by the Commonwealth, for 216 hours (nine days) in unseasonably warm and dry October weather for Pennsylvania. And yet the body on the autopsy table the evening of October 29, 1973, “was as fresh as if she had died just the day before,” according to the man who picked up the body and later embalmed it. Acclaimed forensics experts on body decomposition and time of death stated without reservation that the body must have been refrigerated for all but 48 hours of those nine days.

Other aspects of the case, including misuse and abuse of DNA by an apologist for the DA’s office, bring the impact of this story well into the 21st Century. Skillings offers readers the challenge to form their own impressions based on facts and expert opinions. Then again, it is a unique and thought-provoking true crime story with solid human-interest components and insights into murder case essentials like forensic science, expert witnesses, hypnotism of an eyewitness, evidential chain-of-custody and fast-and-loose DNA technology that is not questioned often enough.

About the author
Wes Skillings retired from newspaper journalism on April 1, 2011, after 38 years as a reporter, columnist and editor where, among his assignments for three different newspapers, he covered everything from municipal meetings to murder trials. He is a Vietnam vet with a BA in English from Mansfield (PA) University, formerly Mansfield State College, where he won a national writing award in 1971 with an essay in The Atlantic Magazine Creative Writing Contests for College Students.

As a journalist, he received numerous Keystone Press Awards from the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association (PNA) — fifteen of them over his last 11 years in the business. Eight placed first in the state in their respective categories. His first award as a young reporter came years before in 1980—a first place from the Associated Press Managing Editors of Pennsylvania for exposing shoddy practices in a program overseen by a regional planning agency.

After retirement he continued as a freelance copywriter producing corporate biographies and website content, as well as blogs on various topics on his own website.