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My Grandfather's Prison: A Story of Death and Deceit in 1940s Kansas City (repost)

Posted By: Veslefrikk
My Grandfather's Prison: A Story of Death and Deceit in 1940s Kansas City (repost)

My Grandfather's Prison: A Story of Death and Deceit in 1940s Kansas City By Richard A. Serrano
Publisher: Univ.,ers.ity of Mis.sou.ri Press 2009 | 152 Pages | ISBN: 0826218644 | PDF | 2 MB

James Patrick Lyons abandoned his family for a life on Kansas City's skid row. A town drunk, he was arrested eighty times for public intoxication. On the night of his last arrest, he was taken to the city jail and held in solitary confinement. The next morning he was dead. Officials said it was natural causes - yet they could not explain his broken neck. When Richard Serrano learned of the grandfather he had never known, the longtime journalist embarked upon a search that led him deep into the city's wide-open and ignoble past. He stumbled upon his maternal grandfather's death certificate from 1948 and discovered that the evidence pointed to murder in that basement cell. That revelation triggered a blizzard of questions for Serrano and provided the impetus for this engrossing story. Part memoir, part investigative report, "My Grandfather's Prison" takes readers back to a crossroads year for Kansas City. The Great Depression and World War II were over, yet vestiges still lingered from the corrupt Pendergast political machine. The city jail itself was a throwback to the old lockups and rock piles of popular fiction, while the sheriff's office was dishonest and inept - and tried to cover up the death.