The Professor And The Prostitute

Acclaimed true-crime journalist Linda Wolfe presents the chilling case of a college professor who bludgeoned to death the prostitute he loved—plus eight other true stories that expose the psychological forces that drive seemingly respectable people to commit violent, unexpected crimes A professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, a suburban husband, and father of three, William Douglas secretly frequented Boston’s Combat Zone, a world of pimps, pushers, and porn shops. One night in 1982 he met twenty-year-old prostitute and former art student Robin Benedict, with whom he began a torrid affair that would end in murder. With the revealing psychological insights that made her previous books such riveting character studies, Wolfe depicts the catastrophic results of Douglas’s living out his secret love fantasies and the complex police investigation that brought the professor to justice. Among the eight shorter true-crime stories included in this volume is the case of the notorious Marcus twins, Manhattan gynecologists and drug addicts who were found dead together in an Upper East Side apartment. Wolfe also takes readers into the gay and transsexual clubs of 1980s New York for a twisted story of love and murder, and to the Texas suburbs, where a privileged fourteen-year-old boy takes a semiautomatic to his parents one sweltering July morning.

Originally published in 1989, this true crime thriller brilliantly reconstructs one of the most extensive murder investigations in recent years the disappearance of Robin Benedict, a beautiful commercial artist and moonlighting prostitute, and her relationship with the suspect, the eminent Dr. William Douglas. Photos.

This collection of new and classic writings about the sex industry asks us to think about the differences between our society's treatment of prostitution and pornography, while investigating how liberalism deals with the sex industry in general.

In 1836, the murder of a young prostitute made headlines in New York City and around the country, inaugurating a sex-and-death sensationalism in news reporting that haunts us today. Patricia Cline Cohen goes behind these first lurid accounts to reconstruct the story of the mysterious victim, Helen Jewett. From her beginnings as a servant girl in Maine, Helen Jewett refashioned herself, using four successive aliases, into a highly paid courtesan. She invented life stories for herself that helped her build a sympathetic clientele among New York City's elite, and she further captivated her customers through her seductive letters, which mixed elements of traditional feminine demureness with sexual boldness. But she was to meet her match--and her nemesis--in a youth called Richard Robinson. He was one of an unprecedented number of young men who flooded into America's burgeoning cities in the 1830s to satisfy the new business society's seemingly infinite need for clerks. The son of an established Connecticut family, he was intense, arrogant, and given to posturing. He became Helen Jewett's lover in a tempestuous affair and ten months later was arrested for her murder. He stood trial in a five-day courtroom drama that ended with his acquittal amid the cheers of hundreds of fellow clerks and other spectators. With no conviction for murder, nor closure of any sort, the case continued to tantalize the public, even though Richard Robinson disappeared from view. Through the Erie Canal, down the Ohio and the Mississippi, and by way of New Orleans, he reached the wilds of Texas and a new life under a new name. Through her meticulous and ingenious research, Patricia Cline Cohen traces his life there and the many twists and turns of the lingering mystery of the murder. Her stunning portrayals of Helen Jewett, Robinson, and their raffish, colorful nineteenth-century world make vivid a frenetic city life and sexual morality whose complexities, contradictions, and concerns resonate with those of our own time.

Five torn-from-the-headlines true crime books from an Edgar Award–nominated author and “one of our best reporters” (John Leonard). Linda Wolfe delves deep into the crimes that defy explanation—and the twisted minds of those who commit them. In these five books, she combines masterful storytelling with brilliant psychological insight. Wasted: On an August night in 1986, Jennifer Levin left a Manhattan bar with Robert Chambers. The next morning, her strangled, battered body was found in Central Park. This New York Times Notable Book provides a “fascinating, horrifying, and heart-breaking” account of the so-called Preppie Murder, the crime that shocked a city and a nation (Ann Rule). The Professor and the Prostitute: The chilling case of a college professor who bludgeoned to death the prostitute he loved—plus eight other true crimes, including the bizarre story of the Marcus brothers, twin gynecologists, that inspired the David Cronenberg film Dead Ringers. Double Life: The riveting story of how the chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals was brought down by his sexual obsession with a stunning socialite. The Murder of Dr. Chapman: Wolfe skillfully weaves court transcripts, love letters, and period recollections into an edge-of-your-seat historical thriller about a notorious crime of passion that rocked pre–Civil War America. Love Me to Death: Wolfe embarks on a search for the serial killer who murdered her friend in this “intriguing insider’s look into the convoluted mind of a killer” (The Plain Dealer).

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral—"a thoughtful...elegant" (The New York Times Book Review) and often hilarous novel about the dilemma of pleasure: where we seek it; why we flee it; and how we struggle to make a truce between dignity and desire. As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself "a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes." Little does he realize how prophetic this motto will be—or how damning. For as Philip Roth follows Kepesh from the domesticity of childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a ménage à trois in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates a novel that "ranks among the major achievements in the literature of our time" (Village Voice).

This is an examination, from a feminist historian's standpoint, of the background to the present system of regulating prostitution in Britain - which is generally admitted to be not only unjust and discriminatory, but ineffective even in achieving its stated aims. Concentrating on the 1950s, and especially on the Wolfenden Report and the 1959 Street Offences Act, it is a thorough exposure of the sexual double standard and general misogynist assumptions underlying legislation relating to prostitution. In addition to the detailed analysis of the 1950s legislation and the background to it, there is an exposition of the subsequent workings of the Act, and of attempts to amend or repeal it.