True Crime: An American Anthology

Harold Schechter, editor

The Library of America

788 pages, $40

The teenage girl gave birth in a Delaware hotel room; she and her boyfriend would later claim that the infant was stillborn. But the coroner said the baby suffered blunt trauma to the head. This was 1996. The young mother and father, sweethearts from an upscale town, eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter after one turned on the other.

Eight months later, another teenager gave birth, this time at her high-school prom, this time in New Jersey, and killed the baby in the ladies’ room. She pleaded guilty to manslaughter, too.

I was at the New York Daily News for both of these stories, and they were on the front page for days. What made them such big stories? Well, it seemed to me that scared young parents killing their own kids was pretty much as bad as it gets. To me, with ten years in the business at the time, this phenomenon also struck me as something new.

How wrong I was.

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