Announcing our next book: Winters' Time

We're pleased to announce next publication: Winters’ Time: A Secret Pledge, a Severed Head, and the Murder That Brought America's Most Famous Lawyer to Vermont. It's a fascinating account of a dramatic episode in Vermont’s history: the time that Clarence Darrow, America’s most famous lawyer, came to Vermont to defend a convicted murderer before the Vermont Supreme Court.

It’s authored by Jeffrey L. Amestoy, the former Vermont Attorney General (1985-1997) and Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court (1997-2004), who has spent years researching the story. The book will be released in September and will retail for $19.95. It will be available directly from VHS, from local bookstores around the state, and on Amazon.com. 

Here’s the description: 

In November 1926, Cecelia Gullivan, treasurer of the Cone Automatic Machine company of Windsor, Vermont, was brutally killed in her home. Local police quickly arrested Cone Automatic machinist John Winters on suspicion of the crime, and the trial that followed was sensational and swift.

Convicted of murder, Winters’ appeal brought in an unexpected ally: America’s most famous defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, who took the case after Winters’ family called in a favor promised decades before.

Read our interview with Amestoy here. 

This is a book that has a little bit of everything in it: a true crime thriller about the murder of a prominent executive, a dramatic trial and subsequent appeal, while also exploring the culture of Vermont in the 1920s, looking at the state’s industry, prisons, police practices, the role of women, and quite a bit more.

VHS executive Director Steve Perkins says that he couldn’t put the book down when it was first submitted. “The original manuscript was submitted to Vermont Historical Society in two parts. I couldn't put down the first part and was left on the edge of my seat wanting more until the second part arrived a few months later.” 

Publications editor Alan Berolzheimer describes Winters’ Time as “more than a true-crime legal drama,” and that “VHS chose to publish Jeff Amestoy’s book about Clarence Darrow’s mission to Vermont because of how it illuminates multiple dimensions of Vermont’s history in the 1920s, an era of rapid change: the workings of the criminal justice system, attitudes toward the death penalty, and evolving gender roles.”

Archer Mayor, author of the long-running Joe Gunther mystery series, called it “an extraordinary account of one of Vermont’s most lurid murder trials with its twists and turns, internecine convolutions, and high political drama, is revealed in perfect measure by the best of possible narrators.”

Randall Tietjen, editor of In the Clutches of the Law: Clarence Darrow’s Letters, says: “Jeffrey Amestoy reconstructs a forgotten story in American history—one that reveals tensions of class, gender, and family, and gives the reader a glimpse of justice in the 1920s. It’s all told beautifully, with careful scholarship, and at a pace that keeps the book in your hands.”

Paul S. Gillies, author of The Law of the Hills: A Judicial History of Vermont and Uncommon Law, Ancient Roads, and Other Ruminations on Vermont Legal History (both published by VHS) says that “Former Chief Justice Jeffrey Amestoy is the perfect scholar to write this story of the time Clarence Darrow appeared before the Vermont Supreme Court on behalf of a defendant accused of murder. That court had to work hard to ignore the reputation of America’s greatest advocate. Amestoy’s insight into the legal and social issues of the Winters case is grounded in his own experience on the court, and his understanding of the special pressures felt by his predecessor John H. Watson is particularly intriguing.”

The Vermont Historical Society publishes a range of books about the history of the Green Mountain State, including the recently-released Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont, edited by Garrett M. Graff, Ira Allen: A Biography by J. Kevin Graffagnino, and “Vermont for the Vermonters”: The History of Eugenics in the Green Mountain State by Mercedes de Guardiola. You can find more details about these titles over on our publications page. 

Winters' Time is now available for preorder via our online bookstore, and is slated to be released in mid-September. (Amestoy will sign preorders, and we'll ship them to you prior to the release date.)