"A revolting transaction"

by Barnaby Conrad

A true crime book in which the victim was the great grandmother of the author, Barnaby Conrad, author of the acclaimed Matador and other works. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0877955344
• ISBN13: 9780877955344
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: Arbor House
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

intriguing true-crime book

It's a shame that "A Revolting Transaction" is out of print. I ran across it while writing a history piece on the Josephine Barnaby murder for the Colorado Lawyer magazine. The book is written by Mrs. Barnaby's great-grandson, Barnaby Conrad, who was already a well-known author when he wrote it. The Barnaby murder was scandalous, the O.J. Simpson case of its day. Dr. T. Thatcher Graves graduated at the top of his medical school class at Harvard and eventually attached himself to the wealthy Mrs. Barnaby. Though she lived in the Eastern United States, she liked to visit Denver and it was in Denver where she drank a "fine old whiskey" that had been sent to her in the U.S. Mail. The whiskey contained arsenic and she died an agonizing death. Another lady who drank it with her survived. The prosecution was subsidized by Mrs. Barnaby's son-in-law, a powerful and rich man from Montana, who paid for witnesses to attend the trial. Conrad suggests the son-in-law may have had impure motives for persecuting Dr. Graves. After a bizarre trial featuring antics that would never be tolerated in a courtroom today, the jury convicted Dr. Graves of first-degree murder. The Colorado Supreme Court overturned his conviction, but he committed suicide before he could be retried. Or, he was murdered in jail. Or, he faked his death and escaped. There are many loose ends surrounding this case... If you like true crime and are at all a history buff, I think you will enjoy this book.