biography
Mara Leveritt works as a newspaper and Web reporter in Arkansas, focusing mostly on the criminal justice system. She has won numerous awards for investigative reporting, and in 1994 was named Arkansas Journalist of the Year.
Her book, THE BOYS ON THE TRACKS, published in 1998, examines the still-unsolved murders of two Arkansas teenagers and the drug-related corruption that obscured the case. Kirkus called the book “a wrecking-ball tale of tragedy, malfeasance, and machine politics.” It won Arkansas’s Booker Worthen Prize.
In 2002, Simon and Schuster published DEVIL’S KNOT, Leveritt’s examination of the legal irregularities that followed the sensational murders of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. Acting on the deeply flawed confession of a minor, police arrested three local teenagers, now known as the West Memphis Three, and charged them with the crime. Prosecutors said the teens had killed the younger boys as part of an occult ritual. One of the three was sentenced to death, the two others to life in prison. Despite an absence of physical evidence linking any the three to the crime, the Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed all three convictions. Leveritt considers the case as much a travesty—and as important to American history—as the Salem witch trials.
Library Journal “highly recommended” DEVIL’S KNOT, which it called “an indictment of a culture and legal system.” The Toronto Globe and Mail observed that, “In the best tradition of crime journalism,” Leveritt exposed a case that “has become a Gordian knot for U.S. justice and the nation’s sense of its freedoms.” In 2003, Leveritt was awarded a second Booker Worthen Prize. Leveritt opposes the death penalty, in part due to her familiarity with faults in the legal system. In 1999, she was named Arkansas Abolitionist of the Year. While she is often labeled a true-crime writer, she stresses that, more than bloody ones, she is interested in crimes by public officials.