Author(s): Joseph Wambaugh

True Crime

Hollywood. 1963. A Saturday night. A broken taillight leads to a routine traffic stop. It shouldn't have changed the lives of the four men involved, but it did. Before the night was over, one was dead, two would find themselves facing the death penalty, and the other's life would never be the same again. Fresh from a string of robberies, the car contained two desperate men who got the drop on the two LAPD cops who stopped them, seized their guns and kidnapped them. They then drove to a rural onion field where they decided to execute the cops. One officer was able to escape, but only at the price of his partner's life. Haunted by horrific memories, wracked by guilt, ostracized by his own, and repeatedly tormented by defence attorneys in one retrial after another as the defendants manipulate the quicksilver legal system, this cop suffered emotional meltdown. Wambaugh, takes us meticulously through the crime, second by second, and then tells the surviving cop's powerful and moving story: the destruction of a forgotten victim. "The Onion Field" is Joseph Wambaugh's best-known and most celebrated work. It may be based on a true story, but it reads like a novel, much like Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood".