Dark back roads and even darker prospects in a cold, cold case.

Ted Gregory, a Chicago Tribune reporter, is lured into the dead-end investigation of a true crime by an individual who just can't quite put it down. Gregory gets wind of Mike Arians' obsession with an unsolved murder from long ago. Mike, former mayor of Oregon, Illinois and restauranteer, meets with Gregory and lays out an unbelievable set of circumstances.

It was a hot, humid summer's night in 1948 when Mary Jane Reed walks into a crowded bar. Although only seventeen years old, Mary Jane skirts over to the bar and settles down next to Stanley Skridla. Mary Jane had since dropped out of high school and Stanley, a twenty-eight year old veteran, had clocked his time with the Navy. As if by some magnetic force, these two would spend their last few hours with one another.

Destiny would take them to a back road near the Rock River. Not much traffic and not too much conversation would be happening at that hour. But someone, either purposefully or at random, came upon the lovers. Stanley's body was found the next day. Mary Jane's was found several days later. A shocking jolt to a small town in the Midwest where one day matched the very next.

Mike Arians fills in more details with strange goings-on at his roadhouse restaurant. He's put up photos of the attractive Mary Jane. It seems that Mary Jane is cooperating with her new found notoriety. There are visits by an unknown lady who disappears in the empty parking lot. The juke box continuously plays "After Sunrise" by Sergio Mendes when not a coin has been put in. There are bumps in the night and lights that go on and off. Mike knows that someone has taken up new residence there.

Ted Gregory's research brings quite a bit to the surface. It appears that there was a lot of faulty investigations by the police and evidence that seemed to disappear. One of their own, Vince Varco, had been dating Mary Jane as well. Was a jealous rage in the mix? And the town in 1948 was mum as the grave itself. People have long since died or were too young to have a memory of the crime. Even Mary Jane's brother Warren, six years old at the time, knows that something has always been amiss here.

Gregory injects quite a bit of parsley with his main course. Although an interesting read, it is bogged down with far too many local history facts and unrelated crimes. We come to know Lincoln quite personally and the Chicago River and all surrounding areas. I suppose these fill-ins were necessary to add a little bulk to the burger. Sadly, the tale of Mary Jane still remains in its original darkness.

I received a copy of Mary Jane's Ghost through NetGalley for an honest review. My thanks to the University of Iowa Press and to Ted Gregory for the opportunity.

Two stories, one book. Mary Jane and her beau are murdered when visiting a common lover's lane. After an investigation, no one was found to 've charged for the murder.
50 years later the story is investigated by a reporter. There are many stories that he investigates and writes about while Mary Jane's murder is still on his mind. Many years later he finds what may have happened. Will Mary Jane's ghost be finally laid to rest?
Interesting, a must read!
5 Stars

If Gregory has stuck with just the murders, he'd have an article-sized piece. since he didn't, this book also includes his forays into all the other local interest stories in downstate Illinois, a giant ugly fiberglass statue of Lincoln, the discovery of a mass grave of strikebreakers murdered in a 1920s labor dispute, the decline and bankruptcy of the Chicago Tribune, backstories on almost everyone he encounters and a program pairing underperforming school kids with Alzheimer's patients. The murder, itself, in retrospect, is more straightforward than its various obsessed pursuers make out (especially Mike, whose summoning of psychics, seances and a paranormal TV show explain why, maybe, local law enforcement tired of his crusade?). A young woman from the wrong side of the tracks had been seeing a married, violent cop who probably also shared her with local luminaries like the local judge, and when she started seeing a navy vet/telephone lineman from out of town, it set off predictable behavior like going to her house and slapping her around in front of her mother. When she and the new suitor were murdered while parking, it could have been two guys who were angry about card game winnings and set out to rob them, or it could have been the angry cop. Either way, the whole town had reason to stymie the investigation, shrug about a "party girl" and bury her with a half-assed autopsy. That the whole town knew what happened and talked about it while doing nothing probably did send the victim's mother into a mental breakdown. Gregory misses that this is still pretty much the methodology of investigating sexual assaults today, minus the glamour of 1948 and the frustration that everyone involved is already dead now.

Histories - call them stories if you like - never really end. It's more like they continue to unfold, but we've left them; they've ceased to resonate.

Chicago Tribune general assignment reporter Ted Gregory gets roped into the investigation and conspiracies of a cold case more than a half-century old, while ruminating on the state of print newspapers and the difficulty in finding a good story to tell.

In June 1948, a very pretty seventeen year old named Mary Jane Reed drove with her date, Stanley Skridla, to a lovers' lane in the rural town of Oregon, Illinois. Skridla was found shot five times and Mary Jane's body was discovered four days later, shot in the head. Local gossip and legend pointed to one of her many beaus, a married, jealous cop named Vince as being responsible. Allegations of a coverup ran rampant, many who knew details had refused to talk over the years. 

Enter an "eccentric entrepreneur" named Mike Arians, who runs a bar and restaurant called the Roadhouse which he says is haunted by Mary Jane's spirit. He's developed a close connection to this spirit, or presence, or whatever (Gregory is healthily skeptical) and also developed what he calls "Mary Jane unsolved murder disease," meaning he's too obsessed with the cold case to stop pursuing answers, despite the lengthy amount of passed time. This leads to him sinking more than a hundred thousand dollars into investigations and forensics to try to definitively solve the crime. Along the way, he sends a letter to Gregory at the Tribune, and the reporter becomes equally enmeshed and under the small town unsolved murder spell.

Gregory writes meaningfully, "Although I didn't know it at the time, the case would stay in that deep, resonant place for more than a decade, through all the distractions. At the outset, I knew part of the reason. This was a scandalous murder of two innocent young lovers that remained unsolved for more than half a century, and some guy was now trying to get to the bottom of it. Over the years, the reasons grew into something broader and deeper, something about the damage inflicted by all unexplained murders and the desire to forget; about disposable victims and the mysterious beauty of a place; about the value of pursuing truth; and about an eccentric man's pursuit of his ghosts.

That would make for a potentially interesting tale. But the book contains major segues from the main story of Mary Jane's and Stanley's unsolved murders. There are chapter-long segments following Gregory's research excursions into other stories, a selection of what he pursued in the years that he was also taking field trips to Oregon and following the progress of Mike's investigations into Mary Jane's case. At first, I thought these segues would circle back somehow to the main story, provide something revealing, but no. One was about the proliferation of Asian carp in Illinois rivers, another about Alzheimer's patients paired with Chicago teens in a buddy project, one about a giant, ugly Abe Lincoln statue. These weren't necessarily uninteresting or badly written, but they were completely distracting and unrelated to the case I thought I was supposed to be reading about.

Then there's the recounting of the newspaper's decline. It didn't belong. The overall effect was that this book didn't know what it wanted to be, or maybe that despite being intriguing at first glance, Mary Jane's story and Mike's quirkiness weren't enough to flesh out a full-length book, necessitating additional reporting on wholly unrelated topics. But that should make an essay collection, not a book called Mary Jane's Ghost.

Sometimes a book that loops together multiple disparate elements ends up being something impossibly wonderful and compelling, like Maggie Nelson's The Red Parts, but here they're too discordant, it's a literary cacophony. And that's too bad, because aside from the inclusion of some unnecessarily specific personal details and far too many mentions of impending deadlines, Gregory is an able and interesting writer and this could've been a fascinating exploration of the botched bureaucratic history, decades of rumor mill and small town intrigues and suspicion, and bizarre modern elements surrounding Mary Jane Reed's murder.

I loved the coverage of the rural, small town America aspect, I loved learning that Illinois is considered a kind of barometer state for measuring the country as a whole. Fascinating stuff, and it provided scene setting for the cold case. Chapters on Asian carp, despite a few laughs courtesy of the author's self-deprecating humor, not so much. What does it have to do with the price of tea in China? Some attempts are made to tie the stories in together by highlighting the importance of storytelling in general, and how it connects us to past and future, and keeps people and memories and places alive.

About the rest of the Mary Jane story, I don't want to write much, because it's quite compelling and with some significant twists. It's worth the read.

I think Gregory could've written an essay collection of long form journalism pieces, with Mary Jane's story being the longest, but it feels unfair to package it this way. I constantly wondered what and why I was reading what I was.

But it's marketed as a story about Mary Jane and the effect on her little part of small town America, and I wasn't interested at all in reading about the financial and managerial troubles of the Chicago Tribune.

"Stories connect our histories and memories to our future, they help us remember how we got where we are...stories, even those filled with romance, mourning, mistrust, and cruelty, bring us together, help us grow. When real journalism recedes, that capacity to grow, reform, and build our communities fades right along with it, almost imperceptibly, and that's an unsettling thing."

He makes a worthy argument that journalism isn't a lost or archaic art, it's crucial to our understanding of our world and ourselves, and woe unto anyone who forgets or shuns history. Into this he ties the peripheral segue stories he told throughout the book. I agree with him completely, but this needed to be a different book, or even two. It's not a bad read by any means, but it's a frustrating one.

Thank you for the opportunity to read this book. My favourite books are true crime I have always been fascinated with people that commit crimes. What motivates them to do the things they do, what goes through their minds when committing such violent acts on other people. This book had me a bit confused at times as it went from one thing to.something totally opposite. It was a good book, very well written. Definately worth a read, I'd recommend it to anyone.