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Informationen zum Autor Jennifer Toth is the author of Orphans of the Living, a Simon & Schuster book. Klappentext On an icy night five years ago, Johnnie Jordan -- just fourteen years old -- brutally murdered his elderly foster care mother, leaving the state of Ohio shocked and outraged. He could not tell police why he did it or even how it made him feel; all he knew was that something inside him made him kill. At the time, few people predicted the swift emergence of a class of young so-called "super-predators" -- criminals like Johnnie who injure and kill without conscience, personified to the nation by the Littleton, Colorado, tragedy in 1999.In What Happened to Johnnie Jordan? acclaimed journalist Jennifer Toth, author of The Mole People and Orphans of the Living, once again takes a look at the people in our society whom we so often discard and altogether ignore. As Toth investigates Johnnie's crime and life, she unravels the mysteries of a child murderer unable to identify his emotions even after they converge in acts of fury and rage. In the course of her research, Johnnie grows dangerously into a young man who "will probably kill again," he says, "though I don't want to." Yet he also demonstrates great kindness and caring when treated as more than just a case number, when treated as a human. Through Johnnie's harrowing story, Toth examines how some children manage to overcome tragic beginnings, while others turn their pain, anger, and loss on innocents.More than a beautifully written narrative of youth gone wrong, this is the story of a child welfare system so corrupted by bureaucracy and overwhelmed with cases that many children entrusted to its care receive none at all. It is also the story of a Midwestern town struggling with blame and anger, unable to reconcile the damage done by so young an offender. From Johnnie's early years on the streets to his controversial trial and ultimate conviction, What Happened to Johnnie Jordan? is a seminal work on youth violence and how we as a society can work to curtail it. Ultimately, Toth ponders one of the most difficult and important questions on youth violence: If we can't control the way children are raised, how can we prevent them from destroying other lives as well? Leseprobe Chapter 1 The glory of the winter's setting sun flashed red and pink across northwestern Ohio's frozen horizon as Charles Johnson drove his tired green Chevrolet home from Sears with a space heater he hoped would save him from his wife's icy feet in bed. The two-lane rural highway was almost empty, but Mr. Johnson kept to the thirty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. At seventy years of age, with the remains of his hair grey and the memory of thousands of wide, proud smiles recorded in deep creases in his weathered red-brown skin, life was no race to Mr. Johnson. But this evening, he was hurried. He knew his wife was anxious for him to get home. A tall, willowy man with brown eyes regularly buffed by the wind and shining with the wonder he found in life around him, he genially bent to his wife's wishes. He smiled whenever he thought of her, even after thirty years of marriage. Jeanette Johnson, a petite, gentle woman, "held the Lord's love in her eyes," as he put it. To say that Mr. Johnson loved his wife would understate the truth. She was his world on this earth. He loved even her cold feet, though the thought of them made him shudder slightly and shake his head with a low chuckle. A sharp cold had rolled down from Canada across Lake Erie and invaded the Johnsons' one-story aluminum-sided house earlier in the week, and hadn't budged since. The two-bedroom home had no furnace, only a woodstove and a space heater which had broken sometime during the previous night. Mrs. Johnson always wore thick white socks to bed, but Mr. Johnson could feel the cold rush to her warmth, and though she protested, he knew how she melted when he rubbed her feet...
