Flesh and Blood: A True Story of an NFL Player Who Murdered his Pregnant Girlfriend (The Stacks Reader Series)

By Peter Richmond

NFL Wide Receiver Rae Carruth, the women who loved him, and the one he wanted dead. Love, sports, murder-for-hire, and a courageous victim who, thanks to a haunting, 12-minute emergency call made to 911, saved her son and implicated his father before she passed. Including an interview with the author by series editor Alex Belth.

The Stacks Reader Series highlights classic literary non-fiction and short fiction by great journalists that would otherwise be lost to history—a living archive of memorable storytelling by notable authors. Brought to you by The Sager Group, with support from NeoText (www.NeoTextCorp.com).

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Sager Group
• Release date: May 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781950154548

Peter Richmond

Richmond is a graduate from the University of Tasmania. He spent many years working in the spatial-information industry; two of which were spent mixing it with the Kurds in pre-war Northern Iraq, as a consultant for the United Nations. After evacuating himself to Russia he resided for twelve months in Moscow, acquainting himself with Russian life, enduring freezing winter temperatures, writing restaurant reviews for an ex-pat website and enjoying the cafe culture of a blissful Moscow summer. Upon returning to Australia he devoted himself to writing fulltime. Many of his fiction short stories have been published in magazines such as "The Tasmanian Surveyor" and "Azimuth" and he has received an award for one of his poems "A Parent's Plea" in the 2010 FreeXpresSion Literary Competition. Richmond is a member of the Bondi Writers' Group (Fellowship of Australian Writers). He lives in Sydney with his wife and two sons.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

All I knew was that he was a first round wide receiver which means the guy has hands. I knew that they said he took a hit out on his pregnant girlfriend. That’s all I knew. That he was a very talented professional football player who had been handed a lifetime dream and despite that was capable of the most violent of crimes.

By the time he reported and wrote the Rae Carruth story for GQ, Peter Richmond was a pro at the height of his powers, a decorated magazine writer steeped in next-level storytelling and good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting. Don’t let his ex-hippie persona fool you, Richmond was an achiever. He attended Yale undergrad where he studied with John Hersey, the pioneering journalist who wrote the famous account of the bombing of Hiroshima for The New Yorker. And years later, Richmond spent time at Harvard under a Neiman Fellowship.

His newspaper apprenticeship lasted more than a decade, starting at the copy desk at the New Haven Journal-Courier and then the prestigious Washington Post before serving an apprenticeship as a reporter and writer at the San Diego Union and the Miami Herald. It was there, as the national sports writer, he caught the attention of Rob Fleder, features editor for The National Sports Daily, a short-lived but lavish experiment, a national daily sports newspaper.

It was at the National that Richmond made a name for himself as something more than a solid newspaper writer and turned in eye-catching profiles of TV personality Jimmy the Greek, rodeo star Lane Frost, and movie star Bill Murray, with whom Richmond spent several days hanging out in Chicago, in bars and at Wrigley Field, having a grand old time. His work for the National brought Richmond to the attention of Art Cooper, editor of GQ, then poised to become a literary competitor to Esquire. This was in perhaps the most lucrative time to be a magazine writer and it was at GQ that Richmond became a star. He made a splash with Tangled Up in Blue, a paralyzingly good profile about Tommy Lasorda Jr., the gay son of Los Angeles Dodgers manager, Tommy Lasorda. It was a story fueled by outrage at the homophobia in pro sports and it remains on the short-list of great magazine profiles.

The hits kept coming through the ‘90s, portraits of Barry Bonds, Derek Jeter, Cal Ripken Jr., and beyond sports, Geena Davis, Eddie Murphy, and Paul Newman. There was also the chilling true crime feature on a limo driver shot and killed by NBA star Jayson Williams, as well as the unforgettable remembrance of his military hero father, which was adapted into a must-read memoir, My Father’s War: A Son’s Journey. More books followed,