BiblioVault - Books about Scapegoat

Fall Guys

False Confessions and the Politics of Murder

Jim Fisher

Southern Illinois University Press, 1996

Jim Fisher, criminal justice professor and former FBI agent, reveals how he uncovered the framing of two boys in a pair of unrelated murders committed in 1956 and 1958.

In the first of the cases, eleven-year-old Charlie Zubryd confessed that at the age of eight, he had murdered his widowed mother by driving a hatchet into her skull. The crime was committed in the basement of the modest Zubryd home in a rural section of Sewickley Township in western Pennsylvania, an area not far from Pittsburgh. Following intense police questioning, young Zubryd confessed to the crime in March 1959, a full twenty-eight months after the bloody murder of his mother.

Too young to prosecute, Charlie Zubryd was adopted after his confession and a brief stay in a mental ward. A childless couple gave Zubryd a new name and identity. It would be twenty years before Charlie Zubryd—now going by the name Chuck Duffy—would have any contact with his biological family.

When Zubryd/Duffy made an effort to get his real family back, he was rejected because his relatives still believed he had murdered his mother. In fact, until Fisher began to investigate the case in 1989, Chuck Duffy himself was not sure he had not killed his mother during some kind of mental blackout.

The second murder occurred in 1958, two years after the Zubryd case. Thirteen-year-old Jerry Pacek endured forty-one hours of police grilling before he confessed to raping and killing fifty-year-old Lillian Steveck as she walked home one evening from a bus stop in Breckenridge, Pennsylvania. Pacek told the same Allegheny County homicide detective who had framed Charlie Zubryd that he had killed the woman with a variety of blunt objects, none of which were ever found. The thirteen-year-old boy was tried and convicted of the murder the following spring. He was sent to Camp Hill Prison, where he remained incarcerated for ten years.

Fisher’s investigation cleared the names of both the wrongfully accused boys. Because of his investigation, the Zubryd case was reopened, which led to the identification of a vicious killer. In 1991, Fisher’s investigative efforts convinced the governor of Pennsylvania to grant a full pardon to Jerry Pacek, who as a teenager had served ten years in an adult prison for a murder he had not committed.

Jim Fisher and the Zubryd and Pacek stories have been featured on a number of nationally broadcast television programs.

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Flesh Becomes Word

A Lexicography of the Scapegoat or, the History of an Idea

David Dawson

Michigan State University Press, 2013

Though its coinage can be traced back to a sixteenth-century translation of Leviticus, the term “scapegoat” has enjoyed a long and varied history of both scholarly and everyday uses. While WilliamTyndale employed it to describe one of two goats chosen by lot to escape the Day of Atonement sacrifices with its life, the expression was soon far more widely used to name victims of false accusation and unwarranted punishment. As such, the scapegoat figures prominently in contemporary theories of violence, from its elevation by Frazer to a ritual category in his ethnological opus The Golden Bough to its pivotal roles in projects as seemingly at odds as Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Western metaphysics and René Girard’s theory of cultural origins. A copiously researched and groundbreaking investigation of the expression in such wide use today, Flesh Becomes Word follows the scapegoat from its origins in Mesopotamian ritual across centuries of typological reflection on the meaning of Jesus’ death, to its first informal uses in the pornographic and plague literature of the 1600s, and finally into the modern era, where the word takes recognizable shape in the context of the New English Quaker persecution and proto-feminist diatribe at the close of the seventeenth century. The historical circumstances of its lexical formation prove rich in implications for current theories of the scapegoat and the making of the modern world alike.

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A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness

The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America

Frederic Jaher

Harvard University Press

In a country founded on the principle of religious freedom, with no medieval past, no legal nobility, and no national church, how did anti-Semitism become a presence here? Frederic Cople Jaher considers this question in A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness, the first history of American anti-Semitism from its origins in the ancient world to its first widespread outbreak during the Civil War. Comprehensive in approach, the book combines psychological, sociological, economic, cultural, anthropological, and historical interpretation to reveal the rise and nature of anti-Semitism in the United States.

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Scapegoat

The Impact of Death-Fear on an American Family

Eric Bermann

University of Michigan Press, 1973

Roscoe A. was eight years old when psychologist Eric Bermann first met him and his family. In kindergarten Roscoe was considered highly creative, but he was also evaluated by his teachers as a potentially dangerous and destructive child capable of uncontrolled aggression toward other children. His parents denied the report. To them, Roscoe was a quiet, well-behaved boy. In the second grade, over the objections and confusions of his parents, Roscoe was finally removed from public school and admitted to a day treatment facility where he could receive psychotherapy. Progress was minimal. After a year of effort there still was no agreement about "Roscoe's problems." Mental health professionals despaired. They deemed his parents "unworkable," and labelled them "deniers" of their son's destructive behaviors. In turn the parents blamed the professionals for therapeutic incompetencies and failure to help Roscoe, who, after all, "was never a problem at home." The one alternative to terminating the therapeutic effort was the possibility of obtaining new data and fresh insights into the dilemma. It was at this point that Dr. Bermann, a clinical researcher embarked on the study of family interaction, was consulted. He immediately negotiated with the family to visit them in their home where he might observe their interactions in situ. He hoped, with them, that in so doing he might shed some light on the discrepancy in reports about Roscoe's behavior. Dr. Bermann visited the family and recorded his observations regularly and in detail throughout the next year. His analysis of these observations has resulted in this startling book--a research account that is both stunning in the originality of its method and searing in its documentation of an American family in crisis. In the course of his visits Dr. Bermann discovered the family's central and well-concealed "secret": Roscoe's father had been for years in precarious health and now was on the brink of death. Although the family nev

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Victim of the Muses

Poet as Scapegoat, Warrior and Hero in Greco-Roman and Indo-European Myth and History

Todd Merlin Compton

Harvard University Press, 2006

This book probes the narratives of poets who are exiled, tried or executed for their satire. Aesop, fabulist and riddle warrior, is assimilated to the pharmakos—the wretched human scapegoat who is expelled from the city or killed in response to a crisis—after satirizing the Delphians.

In much the same way, Dumezil's Indo-European heroes, Starkathr and Suibhne, are both warrior-poets persecuted by patron deities. This book views the scapegoat as a group's dominant warrior, sent out to confront predators or besieging forces. Both poets and warriors specialize in madness and aggression, are necessary to society, yet dangerous to society.

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