Liars, Saints, and Sinners: Crime, Mystery, and Family History

How do you make sense of your mother who married five times or your father who left his birth family and changed his name? What do you do with three differing newspaper accounts of your father’s death? How does your uncle, the Dynamite Man, the most arrested gangster in St. Louis, fit into all this? In an intersection of Mormons and mobsters, Stevenson takes you on a journey of discovery that spans seven generations and two-thirds of the continental US. She uncovers her father’s two Social Security cards with two different names and two different numbers. She finds a half-sister that her mother told her about and a St. Louis family that her mother never met. One cousin in St. Louis spent years collecting news articles on the notorious uncle. Dawn follows-up with research of her own, reading more than a thousand news articles on Uncle Blackie, whose gangster life is well documented in newspapers of the day; on her father, Woody, and his likely employment aboard a gambling ship in southern California; and, in a final mystery, the dozen news items that give three different accounts of the three-car accident in which her father died with the third car going both north and south-not Schrodinger’s cat, right? Woven throughout the family story is Stevenson’s own path from a childhood in rural Utah to college as a nontraditional student and professional success, growing up in and eventually out of the Mormon church. The tale is so compelling, so real, so accessible that anyone anywhere can identify with it, even if one has not been raised in the strict Mormon Church, as she was growing up. (Clint Palmer, filmmaker and writer, Pasadena, CA)