Review 133: This Night Wounds Time by Shawn Sutherland

This Night Wounds Time
Shawn Sutherland
ISBN 978-0-557-20045-0
158 Pages
Paperback
$9.68

It took me awhile to warm up to This Night Wounds Time. Shawn Sutherland takes a look into the disappearances of two Texas teens on a night in 1988 in this very personal book. Sutherland attended the same High School a few years prior and had met one of the girls in passing shortly before their abduction. It took 20 years for the posters that blanketed the town of Carrollton Texas to spur him to action.

Unlike many books I’ve read, this wasn’t a vanity project or even done to make a profit. Sutherland is selling this book at cost simply to publicize the case and, hopefully, to re-energize the investigation. To me, this is a great use of self publishing. While he doesn’t turn up any new leads or solve the case, he does make a compelling case that perhaps not enough has been done to solve it.

As a bit of a synopsis, the case is still open as a missing persons case because the bodies of Stacie Madison and Susan Smalley have never been found. While they were well known and popular, they seemed to simply disappear into thin air on that fateful March night. Stacie’s Ford Mustang was found locked in the parking lot of a popular hangout and there was no sign of foul play. Their movements that night are hard to document and full of holes. Were they abducted by a scorned boyfriend and his brother? Did they meet up with some friends from Dallas? Or was it something else entirely? The problem remains simply that no one knows. Or more accurately, someone knows but isn’t saying.

The book is extremely well researched. Sutherland talked to virtually everyone associated with the case that would talk to him. This included parents, friends, police detectives, and even the most likely suspect, the ex-boyfriend of one of the girls. The book is liberally interspersed with pictures of the town, the girls, the car, and anything else that helps to illustrate what is being discussed. All references are painstakingly referenced.

So, if it’s such a noble cause and a well researched book, why was I slow to warm up to it? The formatting was a little distracting. Every few paragraphs gets its own subheading. The footnotes also get repetitive. There is not only a Preface, but also a three page list of acknowledgments and even an explanation of the Title (words on a King Crimson album cover) before the book gets going. As the book comes to an end, it has three chapters that could potentially be considered a conclusion. And in the middle is the somewhat formal, fact-based writing that is clearly Shawn’s writing style in his ‘day job’ in a legal field. This excerpt is pretty typical:

Accordingly, we must presume Stacie and Susan parked their car at the intersection of Webbs Chapel Road and Forest Lane in order to accept a ride from someone they knew to one degree or another.
In any event, based on the above assertions, the presumption can only be that the girls entered a vehicle owned by someone they knew. More than likely, they knew the driver of this car very well.

Once I got past these little quirks and indulgences, the story really was gripping and every parents’ worst nightmare. I can only imagine how my life would change if my teen were to go missing, with no explanation and no closure. Sutherland does take the time to detail the aftermath including how the families have dealt with it.

When everything was said and done, I was glad I had read the book and that Shawn Sutherland had written it. I got past my hang-ups with formatting and got drawn into the narrative. By the end, I was truly invested in the case and Sutherland had done his job. Even if you’re not a fan of true crime, you’ll find yourself trying to figure out ‘who done it.’