The Unforgiven

It's a case reminiscent of the explosive story of Susan Smith, convicted in the drownings of her two young sons in South Carolina. But in The Unforgiven, three young children are in the back seat of a car driven by Amanda Hamm's boyfriend as it slips into an Illinois lake. Amanda and her boyfriend survive. Her three children do not.The question of whether it was a horrible accident or a murderous plot divided family and friends and traumatized the entire community. The brief but intense police investigation included seven interviews Hamm voluntarily gave police without the benefit of counsel. The outcome remains controversial to this day and comes full circle with state child welfare workers' concern about children born to Hamm since the fateful day at Clinton Lake.The Unforgiven co-author and journalist Edith Brady-Lunny covered the case from start-to-finish, beginning the night of the drownings. Her co-author Steve Vogel lives nearby. His Reasonable Doubt, considered a true crime classic, was a New York Times best-seller. Together they have extensive first-hand knowledge of the case and access to nearly every record related to the court proceedings.
About the Author: Steve Vogel is a veteran print and broadcast journalist, columnist and talk show host who invites you to visit his web page at www.stevevogelauthor.com. He is author of Reasonable Doubt, a New York Times best-seller that became part of the St. Martin's Press True Crimes Classics library.With a B.A. from Illinois Wesleyan University and a master's degree from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, his career has spanned print and broadcast news, radio programming, corporate communications and newspaper column writing. His work has appeared in publications ranging from The Congressional Record to Corvette Magazine.He claims his journalism career began with production of a neighborhood newspaper (circulation was in the low single digits--he lived on a farm with very few neighbors). While in high school, he covered sports and wrote a weekly column for The Minonk (Ill.) News-Dispatch and worked part-time in the sports department of the Bloomington, Ill., Pantagraph during his years at IWU. (His undergraduate degree is in political science with a minor in economics.) His graduate school education was interrupted by service in the U.S. Army, including a year in Europe where he was assigned to the American Forces Radio Network.After finishing grad school, Steve resumed his broadcasting work with WJBC Radio in Bloomington, where he did a daily talk show and headed the station's award-winning news department while also doing commentaries on the Voice of America. He later headed the media relations department of a Fortune 25 company and served the company's chairman and CEO as a communications assistant. He retired from that position in 2012 and returned to his print journalism roots by writing an opinion page column for The Pantagraph. He is the recipient of numerous journalism awards, including a Champion-Tuck Award for economics reporting from Dartmouth College, from the Freedom Foundation, the National Headliners Club and the Associated Press. He was also a semi-finalist in NASA's First Journalist in Space competition.Steve lives in central Illinois with Mary, his wife of 45 years. They have three children and three grandchildren. He loves music, and likes to read almost as much as he likes to write. He says other writing projects are in the pipeline