From Publishers Weekly
Already familiar to readers from the movie Dead Man Walking, this horrifying crime story, related here by one of the victims, becomes an inspiring morality tale of one woman's redemption. In 1980, Morris, then a 16-year-old high school junior in tiny Madisonville, La., was parked with her boyfriend, Mark Brewster, along the Tchefuncte riverfront sipping a milkshake when two men suddenly appeared. Mark and Debbie were kidnapped: he was tortured and left for dead, while she was terrorized and raped repeatedly. With extraordinary presence of mind, she managed, incredibly, to talk her captors into letting her go. The aftershock, however, lasted for years: her relationship with Mark deteriorated; she dropped out of high school; and she suffered recurring claustrophobic fears. Her abductors, Robert Lee Willie and Joe Vaccaro, were captured, and Debbie aided the prosecution in its successful bid for the death penalty for Willie for the earlier rape/ murder of Faith Hathaway. After the trial, she discovered, "Justice doesn't really heal all the wounds." Her true path toward healing was hard won: She's often angry?at Sister Helen Prejean's attentions to Willie ("Where was the help I needed when I felt so alone?"), at her family, at God ("I'd found it easier to forgive Robert Willie than it was to forgive God"). But at the end of a journey that rings true and intensely human, she looks to her husband, son and new life and ceases to see herself as a victim, but instead as a survivor. (Sept.) FYI: Morris's story first appeared on a Frontline segment titled "Angel on Death Row."
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
For years after, she was known only as the "l6-year old from Madisonville," who had been talking with her boyfriend, Mark, when Robert Willie and Joseph Vaccaro kidnapped them. Mark was tortured and shot but survived, and Morris was repeatedly raped but eventually got out alive. Willie and Vaccaro were captured and Morris tried to move on with her life, eventually marrying and having children but always living with hurt and resentment. When the movie Dead Man Walking was made, she contacted Sister Helen Prejean (Dead Man Walking, LJ 6/15/93), the nun who counseled Robert Willie in prison and who was the focus of much of Debbie's anger. After speaking with Sister Helen, however, Morris was able to use her Christian beliefs to learn to forgive. Although Morris does include details of her awful ordeal, this is more a personal reflection on human nature than a traditional true-crime book. The writing is somewhat self-conscious and stilted in spots, but that only gives the story a much more human and vulnerable feel. For larger public libraries.?Christine A. Moesch, Buffalo & Erie Cty. P.L., NY
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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