Book review of "The Crime of Sheila McGough"

Janet Malcolm is a rare breed of journalist. She dives deep into the intricate details of our interaction and communication as a societya. Malcolm brings these nuances to the front of the dialogue in The Case of Sheila McGough. In her previous work, The Journalist and the Murderer, Malcolm told of the deception of writer Joe McGinnis as he lifted information from a convicted felon whom he “knew” to be guilty. Sheila McGough instead tells the story of a woman Malcolm “knows” is innocent. Malcolm uses the story of McGough to make her point that absolute truth and the “truth” we see in court are two different things. Juries and judges (like movie audiences) like aesthetically pleasing stories. But absolute truth cannot be confined to such.

McGough was a lawyer (disbarred after her conviction) who helped a client in a transaction involving the sale of insurance companies. Her client, Bob Bailes, was a con artist who hired her services as he arranged the sale of two insurance companies. A down payment to be held in escrow by McGough until the complete transaction was finished was withdrawn immediately and McGough was charged with “escrow fraud.”

Malcolm has extensively studied the legal process and concludes that McGough’s conviction was the result of her inability to “tell a good story” in court , or anywhere for that matter; their first conversation lasted two hours and Malcolm did not get a word in until after this time. This, Malcolm believes, is the cornerstone of winning any legal battle. A victim’s (or defendant’s) story must be easy to understand and convincing. Malcolm describes McGough as longwinded but honest, decent but “maddeningly tiresome.” Throughout the book she argues that McGough just didn’t provide the right facts in the right way and was beaten by the prosecution because their story was better.

The truth of McGough’s told in its entirety, and complete truth on every occasion Malcolm says, is “messy, incoherent and aimless” and to tell this story would deter a jury from sympathy for the defendant. She argues that McGough was so brutally honest and truthful in her daily life that she never had to construct a “likeable” story and was at a loss when she was faced with the charges she knew were wrong. Unfortunately this “entire” story that might have proved her innocence, might still not have worked because, Malcolm claims, juries and judges didn’t like the spun stories better.

Janet Malcolm, The Case of Sheila McGough (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999)