Stalking Mary Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Stalking Mary? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Stalking Mary. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Stalking Mary ReviewI feel confident in saying that even the most veteran readers of true crime have never read a story like the one Eileen Bridgeman Biernat presents in STALKING MARY. In 1980, in one of the most bizarre crimes I've ever heard of, 30-year-old Ming Sen Shiue, a Minnesotan with a history of mental disturbances, kidnapped and held captive for 7 weeks Mary Stauffer and her daughter Beth. The only reason Beth was included in this decidedly less-than-sophisticated romp was that she happened to be with her mother when Shiue decided to go into action. And, horribly, a 6-year old boy, Jason Wilkman saw Shiue throwing Mary and Beth into the trunk of her car and was coincidentally seen by Shiue. Shiue grabbed Jason and threw him into the trunk as well.
What is truly amazing about this case is that Shiue's connection with Mary Stauffer was that she was his freshman algebra teacher. Fifteen years earlier! Stauffer had no recollection of Shiue, but Shiue had been obsessed with her for that entire period of time, stalking her and going so far as to break into her apartment and cut a hole in the floor under her bed so he could enter the basement and listen to her at night. When he found out she and her husband were leaving town and realized he was losing the love of his life, he finally completely snapped and kidnapped mother and daughter.
For 7 weeks he kept Mary and Beth chained up in an apartment, with their bedroom being a closet with a bucket for a toilet. He fed them canned Dinty Moore beef stew, which he knew Mary liked since he would regularly follow her around the supermarket. Shiue, a virgin up to this point in his life, was so deranged that he imagined that Mary - enthralled by his virility - would come to love him, and to show his love and affection for her, he chained her up and raped her on a regular basis. Eventually they escaped and Shiue, as delusional as they get, couldn't understand why his new family would want to leave him.
This is Biernat's first book, and she writes well and intelligently. I feel the book has many positives and some negatives. Biernat is a psychologist and the extensive background information and discussion of Shiue's social disintegration beginning as a young teen is fascinating, as is the case as a whole. And the book is a fast and easy read.
On the negative side, in my opinion, is that STALKING MARY contains considerable repetition.
In the first place, Mary, a missionary Baptist is a woman of great Christian faith and it was this faith that allowed her and Beth to live through the 7 unimaginable weeks without disintegrating. On the other hand, Biernat feels compelled to repeat - and repeat - and restate this information at every possible turn, and it became highly irritating.
The often boring or worse trial section is not particularly well handled by Biernat. The standard dueling psychiatric testimony about Shiue is very interesting, and she reports two completely grotesque outbursts by Shiue, one at each trial (one federal and one state), but in between she basically has cops and others reading their written reports into testimony. In the first place, almost all of this material has already been presented when Biernat is writing about the crime and Shiue's apprehension. And if that weren't enough, a lot of the material covered at the second trial is the same as at the first trial, so the reader gets to read the same stuff for the third time.
And though the book seems for the most part factual, Biernat has committed the sin of occasionally fabricating - writing "creatively" in what is supposed to be true crime:
"Anxious parents raced to the park, searching for their own children, dread weighing them down, each one desperate to make sure their child was safe. They prayed silently that the lurid scenarios playing over in their minds had not come true for their family. They silently begged God that some stranger had not taken their child."
Well, please! All of these people scared for their kids were dealing with it by "silently begging God"? Maybe, but it's just as likely that none of them were. Or maybe that some were and some weren't. The point is that this kind of writing is clichéd B.S. and belongs on daytime TV, not in quality true crime.
The above is only an example, and the book is hardly rife with such creativity, but it should not happen.
But as I've mentioned this is Biernat's first book. If she writes another, and I hope she does, she will likely improve her weaker areas, and her strengths, as shown here, are considerable.
STALKING MARY is imperfect true crime, but parts of it are just amazing. I'm glad to have read it and recommend it, if not as a must read, as a fascinating psychological study of grandiosity and delusion.
Stalking Mary OverviewA disturbed adolescent boy, a young female teacher, and a fifteen-year fixation that ultimately led to a horrific and deadly abduction.
In May of 1980, Mary Stauffer and her eight-year-old daughter Beth thought they were preparing for an international mission trip. Ming Sen Shiue, Mary's high-school algebra student from 1965, had other plans.
Stalking Mary is the true account of the kidnapping of Mary and Beth Stauffer, the thoughtless murder of a young boy named Jason Wilkman, and the psychosexual ploys of a dangerously deranged Shiue. Using court documents, video and audio transcriptions, personal interviews, and thousands of pages from Shiue's own sexual fantasy scripts, Eileen Biernat paints a harrowing picture of two families caught in the grip of a nightmare.
After three decades in prison, Shiue is scheduled for release on July 7, 2010--thirty years to the day that Mary and Beth, still chained together, escaped from Shiue's home where they'd been held captive for seven weeks.
''My involvement in the events surrounding the kidnapping and rescue of Mary and Beth Stauffer in the summer of 1980 was the most extraordinary of my law enforcement career. The visual memory of finding Mary and Beth chained together, cowering behind a car in Shiue's front yard, anxiously waiting for rescue, is etched in my mind forever.'' -- Sergeant Marie Ballard, Ramsey County sheriff (retired)

Want to learn more information about Stalking Mary?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now