Who Named the Knife: A Book of Murder and Memory

Murder. Hawaii’s beautiful Hanauma Bay. The suspects: two young mainlanders on their honeymoon. Maryann Acker, a pretty young Mormon woman, is eighteen. William, just out of prison, is twenty-eight. The crime is robbery, ending in a killing.In 1982, Linda Spalding, a mainlander herself, living in Hawaii, is chosen as a juror for Maryann’s trial there. Surprisingly the chief witness against Maryann is William, accusing her of shooting their victim. Spalding has reasonable doubts, but on the last day of the trial, she is abruptly dismissed from the jury, and Maryann found guilty. Who Named the Knife is the story of how, eighteen years later, Spalding stumbles over the journal she kept during the trial, and reading it carefully, wonders if she right to have those doubts. She tracks down Maryann, who is still incarcerated, starts a correspondence, and begins to uncover much more than the answer to the question of Maryann’s guilt or innocence. There’s the bold new friendship frustrated by monitored visits, hard-to-make phone calls, and the dehumanizing results of years in prison. But as her understanding of the forces that drove Maryann’s actions grows, Spalding finds herself compelled to examine her own past as well as Maryann’s. Who Named the Knife is a record of this complex journey--a journey into America’s troubled soul and into the twists of fate that spin two lives down different but infinitely painful paths. The story is Maryann’s but it is also Spalding’s, as subject and writer overlap, and the hunt for truth unmasks family mysteries. Lyrical and achingly honest, this is a story that offers us profound insight onto the vagaries of the human heart.