Trial in Cooperstown

“'Mr. Morgan, you tell me you’re a writer. Let them know what you witnessed here this week. Let the people know what you witnessed here.' With these words, Ray Kelly, the attorney who defended, dispatched me from the courtroom at the end of the trial. Outside I paused and took in the lights of the building. 'Let the people know what you witnessed.'" In early March of 2006, Timothy Beckingham was tried in Cooperstown, New York's Otsego County Courthouse on the charge of First Degree Manslaughter of his wife, JoAnne Beckingham who, on the night in question, was found lying near death from a beating in her kitchen. She subsequently died of her injuries. Tom Morgan spent years researching trial transcripts and other pertinent records to create a gripping work of narrative non-fiction that encompasses his own impressions of the trial he was witnessing, a description of the personalities and architecture of Cooperstown, and his conversations with those directly and indirectly involved with the trial. Morgan offers skillfully written reportage in the tradition of Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood."