The Fascination Parlor

In the summer of 1947, the attention of all New England was riveted upon a rape/murder trial in the historic town of Plymouth, Massachusetts -- one of those run-of-the-mill crimes that somehow captures the public imagination far out of proportion to its novelty or significance. Perhaps it was the victim, the “attractive (or raven-haired, or carefree) vacationist,” or the defendant's mother, who somehow usurped the victim's mother as the “gray-haired, grieving mother.” The already-sensational trial became a media phenomenon when defense attorney Matthew King enlisted the era's leading criminal lawyer to argue the case in court. The defendant, despite a strong circumstantial case, was found innocent, and no one else was ever charged. Now, thirty-five years later, a chance encounter leads one of the trial's participants to re-examine her memories. Winnie King brought the case to her husband after befriending the defendant's mother at the Fascination parlor. In the uncomfortable role of wife of the defense counsel and friend of the victim's mother, Winnie felt obligated to keep a secret that, if revealed, could have impugned her friend's credibility and altered the trial's outcome. Long after the trial, when she finally felt ready to tell her husband, he was already starting to lose his memory to early-onset Alzheimer's. Haunted ever since by the victim's unquiet sleep, Winnie is finally able to come to terms with her husband's complicity, and her own, in letting an apparently guilty killer go free. Based on the true story of one of the postwar era's most notorious murder trials, The Fascination Parlor is not about solving mysteries, but creating them – how the clarity of guilt or innocence dissolves in the trial's theatrics and optics, the defense's deconstruction of truth and memory, and the biased worldview of a jury system that excluded women.