Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans FROM THE PUBLISHER
"A shot rings out in a New Orleans parking lot and a routine purse snatching turns deadly. Within two days the law has a bead on a twenty-five-year-old suspect: a hustler, a father, a ladies' man, a thief, and a fence. For the police and for District Attorney Harry Connick, the stakes are high. New Orleans is in the crosshairs of the global media as the site of the 1984 World's Fair, and Connick is a week away from a citywide vote on his bid for re-election. Less than three months - and two trials - later, Curtis Kyles is sentenced to death for the murder of a sixty-year-old white woman named Delores Dye." "Kyles had spent fourteen years in Louisiana's hellish prisons when, in the late 1990s, he walked free - to howls of disgust from a community convinced of his guilt. How he disentangled himself from his legal snares is as astonishing as the zealousness of the prosecutors who took him to trial another three times after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the original conviction. In the official version of the case, the murder is seen as the work of an urban predator - a young man with a gun to the head of a defenseless woman. But over time, as witnesses grow stale and courtroom tactics lose their punch, another reality begins to emerge, a tableau with three figures. One is Kyles. Another is Pinkey, the woman who bore him five children. The third is an acquaintance of theirs - a man in the grip of sexual obsession and drug addiction." Was Kyles framed? Or did an informant lead police, however deviously, to the right man? Desire Street takes readers deep into the underworld of America's most exotic and duplicitous city in search of the truth about Delores Dye's murder and about the fascinating - and troubling - man who was sent to death row for it.
FROM THE CRITICS
William Grimes - The New York Times
Jed Horne, the city editor of The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, follows each twist and turn of Mr. Kyles's legal ordeal, relying on a mountain of court transcripts and interviews with many of the people involved in the trial, including Mr. Kyles. As a purely legal drama, the story is fascinating. Time and again, pure coincidence and strange bits of luck, both good and bad, influence the life-or-death outcome for the defendant, things as small as the difference between "on sale" and "for sale."
Library Journal
In the fall of 1984, Delores Dye, a housewife and grandmother, was shot and killed in a grocery store parking lot in New Orleans. Four days later, Curtis Kyles was arrested and charged with the crime. Horne (city editor, the Times-Picayune) traces the case in detail as Kyles is tried five times for the murder and ends up on death row for 14 years, maintaining his innocence throughout. His first trial ended in a deadlock, which resulted in a mistrial. In the second, he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Eleven years later, his appeal case went before the U.S. Supreme Court, and he was granted a reversal. In both the third and the fourth trials, the jury was deadlocked and the case declared a mistrial. In 1998, after a fifth jury failed to reach a verdict, District Attorney Harry Connick Sr. conceded defeat, and Kyles was set free. Over the course of the five trials, it came out that Kyles had been framed by an acquaintance and that police and prosecutors may have been complicit. This interesting and well-written book is a worthy purchase for large public libraries, especially where there is local interest.-Sarah Jent, Univ. of Louisville Lib., KY Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The city editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune analyzes an extraordinary sequence of events that turned a cut-and-dried murder case into a protracted, racially tinged mangling of due process. Horne's first book opens with a grisly recounting of the 1984 murder of white housewife and grandmother Delores Dye, accosted in an outlying section of a supermarket parking lot and summarily shot in the head, apparently for purposes of robbery and carjacking. There were eyewitnesses, one close enough to be terrified for his own life, and in due course a known drug dealer named Curtis Kyles was arrested and brought to trial. This is not a straightforward retelling; from the outset Horne lets the story marinate in redolent language as poverty, hopelessness, and a daily diet of black-on-black crimes seep into the picture from Kyles's flat on Desire Street in the infamous Ninth Ward. Kyles was brought to trial twice, convicted, and sat on Death Row for more than a dozen years through an unprecedented three subsequent trials while noted District Attorney Harry Connick (Sr.) marshaled his minions to reshape a capital case that a jury might buy. During the ordeal, rumors surfaced: Kyles was actually set up by his opposite number in a love triangle; the cops knew about it and went along, "inclined to cut corners in the name of getting another nigger off the street." The rumors gained plausibility from New Orleans' well-known proclivity for extremes in good and bad times, not to mention its endemic political corruption. After 14 years, with the case still essentially unsolved, Kyles was released. Horne sums up the story as a study in "the persistence of a determined prosecutor [and] the persistence ofracism in the post-segregation South," with the objective of justice for Delores Dye long since relegated to oblivion. Frequently profane, steeped in violent imagery, and sometimes unduly speculative, but Horne tells the whole story. Agent: Claudia Menza/Clausen, Mays & Tahan
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