 | The Bourque Family Story of "Dead Man Walking" ( 224p, soft-cover, available at deadfamilywalking.com; Amazon.com). From the first page turned, when a mother wakes from a 3 a.m. scream heard miles away, de Vinci wields your heart in the portrayal of a family's perpetual suffering resulting from a Catholic nun's prior relationship with an executed killer that inspired her exaggeration-filled book, "Dead Man Walking,"( written by Sister Helen Prejean ) which the writer claims destroyed the lives of an American Family. On November 5, 1977 the Bourque's teenage daughter, Loretta, was found murdered in a trash pile near the city of New Iberia, La, lying side-by-side near her boyfriend with three well-placed bullet holes behind each head. No apparent motive. Very little clues. |
NEW IBERIA, LA. - (mmd-news) - - So says D.D. de Vinci, author of recently published true story, "Dead Family Walking: The Bourque Family Story of Dead Man Walking" ( 224p, soft-cover, available at deadfamilywalking.com; Amazon.com). From the first page turned, when a mother wakes from a 3 a.m. scream heard miles away, de Vinci wields your heart in the portrayal of a family's perpetual suffering resulting from a Catholic nun's prior relationship with an executed killer that inspired her exaggeration-filled book, "Dead Man Walking,"( written by Sister Helen Prejean ) which the writer claims destroyed the lives of an American Family.
On November 5, 1977 the Bourque's teenage daughter, Loretta, was found murdered in a trash pile near the city of New Iberia, La, lying side-by-side near her boyfriend with three well-placed bullet holes behind each head. No apparent motive. Very little clues.
While the devout-Catholic Bourque family fought to piece their lives back together after the capture and trials of the killers of their daughter, they suddenly faced an unexpected opponent, Sister Prejean, who would use their story in a religious-political spin that would take the world by surprise.
Prejean's award winning book later published in 1993, based on the crimes and executions of Elmo Patrick Sonnier and Robert Lee Willie, instantly catapulted her to international fame and recognition. Her polemic defense and arguments against the death penalty appeared to be her main inspirations for writing the book, but details fueled by a tape recorded conversation with a Catholic priest and an interview with a homicide detective led de Vinci to a conspiracy theory which readers and maybe Hollywood may find intriguing.
Almost three decades after the murders and thirty exhaustive months of research later, de Vinci's fact-filled "Dead Family Walking" sheds the truth about the early life of the murderer-rapist, Elmo Sonnier, who remains buried next to bishops, priests and nuns on sacred ground in a Baton Rouge cemetery and details a forbidden death row intimacy no one was supposed to know about.
"In the tortured logic peculiar to those in love"(excerpt from "Dead Family Walking"), de Vinci's investigative research indicates that Prejean's book is not honest. According to a 2004 interview with Detective Russell Duplantis, who spent over an hour at Louisiana's Angola State Penitentiary thirty days prior to his execution on April 6,1984, Sonnier revealed shocking information about his relationship with Prejean that still stuns the New Iberia homicide detective to this day. Duplantis is quoted from "Dead Family Walking": "All these years, I have kept this information to myself, but now it needs to come out. The Bourques got a raw deal from the Church and Prejean. They had to go through much pain and anguish. Sister Prejean has been using the Bourques for her anti-death penalty and got away with it! The public needs to know that she and Elmo fell in love."
Non-fictional facts disputed. "Prejean wrote in ‘Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States,' that she was at Angola for the entire evening of Sonnier's last day alive," says de Vinci, a Louisiana writer. " She even mentions the exact time on her wristwatch as events occurred up until his execution." Not so, according to incarcerated former Gov. Edwin Edwards in a jail-house letter written from a Dallas Texas prison in February of 2004, confirming the validity of a twenty-year old memorandum which stated that he called Angola Warden Maggio on the night of the execution at 8:20 p.m., from the Governor's mansion in Baton Rouge with Prejean at his side. But on page 88 of Prejean's book, she wrote that she looked at her watch at 8:40 p.m. next to Sonnier's cell-which was twenty minutes after the call from the Governor. A well-known fact that cannot be disputed is the one-hour drive from the Governor's mansion to Angola. "Who was telling the truth? Who was lying?" writes de Vinci.
In a time when the literary world of non-fiction is under microscope, "Dead Family Walking" reveals an explosive 1978 courtroom document that defies the ending of Sister Prejean's book (another Oprah guest) which potentially makes her use of the Lord's Prayer in her finale one of the most disrespectful profanations history will ever record, and certainly makes "Dead Man Walking" compete with James Frey's "Million Little Pieces" in their race towards deception.
Contact Person: T J Edler, Publisher
Company Name: Goldlamp Publishing Company
Telephone Number: Prefer Email or Fax Communication
Fax: 337-229-8457
Web site Address: www.deadfamilywalking.com
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