Mosaic Pieces: Surviving the Dark Side of American Justice

Mosaic Pieces: Surviving the Dark Side of American Justice

By: Wes Skillings

Mosaic Pieces is a nonfiction narrative about a murder, investigation, trial, and conviction in the 1970s you might call the centerpiece of three generations of family history. The murder case itself is fascinating-if only because of what had been learned in the aftermath of the trial at which twenty-year-old Kim Lee Hubbard was decreed guilty in Williamsport, Pennsylvania of the murder of twelve-year-old Jennifer May Hill.

Jennifer had been dead in a cornfield, according to the forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy, for as many as nine days in the unseasonably warm and dry weather of that October. And yet the body on the autopsy table "was as fresh as if she had died just the day before," according to the man who picked up the body and later embalmed it. It was just the beginning of a litany of discrepancies in evidence and testimony presented at the trial, as well as questionable investigative practices. The murder may have occurred on an Indian summer day in October 1973, but the story begins some forty-five years before with the compelling lives of Joe and Dorisann Hubbard leading up to their marriage and the tragedies and difficulties throughout their lives together.

About the Author

Wes Skillings is a published writer of a book about traumatic brain injury (A Matter of Recovery: The Story of C.B. Miller) available through Amazon and B&N in soft and hardcover as well as on Kindle and Nook. Skillings has received numerous Keystone Press Awards from the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association (PNA)-fifteen of them over his last eleven years in the business and eight of them first place in the state in their respective categories in news and feature writing. He served in the US Army, including a year in Vietnam as an intelligence analyst. Upon his return to the states, where he was on special assignment with the Defense Intelligence Agency, he married his wife, Mary, then went on to earn a BA in English and a minor in creative writing from Mansfield University. They have two adult married children, Pamela and Jeremy, and a nine-year-old grandson, Benjamin.