Stephen Corwin

Stephen Corwin is the man at the center of the novel's central crime: the murder of Tessie Fine, a young Jewish girl killed in the tropical fish store where he worked. His act, and the investigation that follows, draws Maddie Schwartz out of her stalled life and into the world of journalism, making him the catalyst for her transformation. Though he never appears as a living presence in the narrative, his crime, his letters, and his eventual conviction shape the fates of nearly every major character, from Maddie herself to his own mother, Angela Corwin.

The Crime and Its Aftermath

Stephen Corwin was a worker at a tropical fish store, a place that proved to be a tempting location for a man with dangerous proclivities. When Tessie Fine, a self-possessed and confident girl, walked into the store and stamped her feet, something in him snapped. The police did not believe the story that he simply lost control; as Ferdie Platt told Maddie, detectives did not accept that a man could snap, hit someone on the side of the head, and then have the presence of mind to drag the victim to the basement to finish the job by breaking her neck. They believed Corwin had what Ferdie called "proclivities," a genteel word for a monstrous pattern. The police suspected he had touched other children before, working in a place that was, after all, very tempting for a child, and doing things that the children did not register as too odd—guiding a small hand into his trousers, asking for no more than a touch or two. But they had not been able to find any other child who had visited the pet shop basement, and the evidence they had was not enough to pursue the death penalty. Tessie Fine, self-possessed and confident, probably fought back when he tried something with her, and that resistance cost her her life.

The Correspondence with Maddie Schwartz

After finding Tessie Fine's body, Maddie Schwartz felt a strange connection to Stephen Corwin, the last person to see the girl alive. She wrote to him on simple cream vellum stationery, addressing him as "Dear Mr. Corwin," and identifying herself as the woman who found the body. She told him that she felt connected to him, for better or worse, and noted the terrible symmetry of their positions: he was the last person to see Tessie alive, and she was the first person to see her dead. She walked to the main post office to make sure the letter would be delivered as soon as possible, and it never occurred to her that he might not write back, because men almost always did what Maddie wanted them to do. Almost. He did write back, and their correspondence became a key thread in her investigation. In a second letter, he mentioned his time at Fort Detrick, a detail that Maddie seized upon. She learned that Stephen Corwin had been drafted five years earlier, that he had claimed conscientious objector status as a Seventh-Day Adventist, and that he had been sent to Fort Detrick to take part in an experiment known as Operation Whitecoat. This revelation suggested to Maddie that there might be an accomplice, or someone with knowledge of what he had done, and it deepened her conviction that the official story was incomplete.

Conviction and Legacy

The case against Stephen Corwin ended with his conviction for the murder of Tessie Fine. He was given the death penalty for his role in the crime, but that sentence was later changed to life in prison after a US Supreme Court decision struck down most of the nation's death penalty laws in 1972. The conviction of Stephen, however, was not the end of the story. His mother, Angela Corwin, was eventually convicted of the first-degree murder of Tessie Fine as well, a development that would have seemed impossible at the start of the investigation. Maddie Schwartz's harrowing first-person account of her near death at the hands of Angela Corwin became the foundation of her career at the Beacon, where she started in 1966. The Corwin case, which began with a single act of violence in a tropical fish store, thus became the hinge on which Maddie's entire professional life turned, and the name Stephen Corwin receded into the background of a story that was no longer really about him.