Weep for the Living - Softcover

Butler, Anne; Padgett, Abigail

3.52

81 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0738840777 ISBN 13: 9780738840772

Publisher: Xlibris Corp, 2000

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A respected retired criminologist picks up a pistol and shoots his wife five times as she rocks on her plantation home's gallery. WHY?? In this riveting book, the wife who miraculously survived provides some answers with remarkable candor, compassion, even humor. This is not fiction--it's stranger!

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From the Back Cover:

Yes, perhaps he'd made a mistake in leaving his wife of many years to marry Anne. We all make such mistakes, but we don't torture and kill the lovers who fail our dreams. At seventy he had wanted the lively 46-year-old Anne, courted her, won her. 'A less formal arrangement, a simple affair, would have made much more sense', say we who live in other places. But we don't live in St. Francisville, Louisiana, and we aren't these two people.
--From the foreword by Abigail Padgett, author of Child of Silence

Anne Butler's autobiographical narrative of her husband's attempt to murder her after seven years of marriage is a compelling and surprisingly compassionate story of true love turned
"true crime."
Ms. Butler's story of survival details the unraveling of her marriage to Murray Henderson, a former warden of Louisiana's high-security Angola Prison, and her journey of recovery and redemption following the crime. This is her attempt to understand why Henderson tried to kill her; why he felt, as he put it, "there [was] no other option." It is an engaging tale of forgiveness, filled with insightful passages and heart-stopping details. But it is not just her story; it gives a voice to what in the past has too often been a silent crime, and it has lessons for women everywhere. Said one reader to the author, "You speak for us all."
The setting of Weep for the Living is Ms. Butler's family plantation home, Butler Greenwood Plantation Bed and Breakfast, where Ms. Butler is the chatelaine. The author of a dozen books, including children's books, cookbooks, travel books, and nonfiction on criminal justice, Ms. Butler also wrote Audubon Plantation Country Cookbook, named Best New Cookbook of the Year by Louisiana Life magazine.

About the Author:

A graduate of Sweet Briar College in Virginia with an MA in English from Humboldt State in California, Anne Butler has worked as a journalist, writer and editor on both coasts. She is the author of ten books, the most recent of which are significant non-fiction ones on crime and criminal justice in Louisiana, Angola and Dying To Tell, books in which she exhibits not only superb writing skills but also a deep, abiding compassion and human interest. She certainly never expected to be more than an objective observer for her crime books, but when she became a victim, she turned tragedy into a writer's golden opportunity, somehow still retaining a sense of compassion for the perpetrator of a violent and senseless crime committed against her own self. She lives with her son in rural south Louisiana, where she writes and operates a Bed & Breakfast on her family plantation.

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