The Officer's Daughter: A Memoir of Family and Forgiveness

"When I was sixteen, my sixteen-year-old cousin, Karen, had her face blown off at pointblank range by a sawed-off shotgun . . ."

In 1981, Elle Johnson and her cousin, Karen, were both daughters of Black law enforcement officers. Elle’s father was a highly protective, at times overbearing, parole officer; her uncle, Karen’s dad, was a homicide detective. Elle dreamed of being best friends with her popular, cool cousin, who understood her in a way no one else could.

Then Karen was killed in a robbery gone wrong. The NYPD and FBI launched a cross-country manhunt to find the killers, and the subsequent trials and media circus marked the end of Elle’s childhood innocence.

Thirty years later, Elle - living in Los Angeles and working as a television writer on scripted police dramas - received an unexpected request from Karen’s brother. Would Elle write a letter asking that Karen’s killer not be released on parole? Suddenly, Elle realized she didn’t know if she would or could - until she’d faced some hard truths of her own past: of a family who didn’t speak of the murder and its devastating effect, of the secrets they buried, of a complicated father she never truly understood.

The Officer’s Daughter is a piercing memoir that explores what parents can and cannot do to protect their children, the reverberations of violence on survivors’ lives, and the overwhelming power of forgiveness, even in the face of unspeakable pain.