The Onion Field

Joseph Wambaugh recounts the March 1963 kidnapping and cold-blooded murder of LAPD officer Ian Campbell in a Bakersfield onion field, and the profound psychological destruction it caused to his surviving partner Jimmy Lee Smith. The book examines police trauma, institutional failure and a grotesquely prolonged justice process that dragged through the courts for more than a decade.

ISBN 9780385341592 · Bantam Dell · 1973