On May 23, 2009, Amanda Stott-Smith drove to the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon, and dropped her two children into the Willamette River. Forty minutes later, rescuers found the body of four-year-old Eldon. His seven-year-old sister, Trinity, was saved. As the public cried out for blood, Amanda was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.
Embarking on a seven-year quest for the truth, Rommelmann traced the roots of Amanda’s fury and desperation via thousands of pages of records, meetings with lawyers and convicts, and interviews with friends and family who felt shocked, confused, and emotionally swindled by a woman whose life was now defined by an unspeakable crime. At the heart of that crime: a tempestuous marriage, a family on the fast track to self-destruction, and a myriad of secrets and lies as dark and turbulent as the Willamette River.
Praise for To the Bridge
“Unrelenting… A painstaking and meticulous exploration of all the facts and conjectures surrounding a disturbing case.” – Kirkus Reviews
“Rommelmann employs compassion and emotional honesty in her investigation to try to comprehend the motivations behind the crime and its aftermath.” – Publishers Weekly
Nancy Rommelmann has written for the LA Weekly, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, among other publications. She is the author of several previous works of nonfiction and fiction. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
Emma Eisenberg is a writer of fiction and nonfiction interested in queerness, gendsdklak;er, Appalachia, violence, crime, having a body, and being alive. Her work has appeared or will soon in places like Granta, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, AGNI, The Los Angeles Review of Books, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature Recommended Reading, ZYZZYVA, The New Republic, The Marshall Project, Salon, Slate, and more. Her longform piece on missing trans woman Sage Smith was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award and named to Longreads’ list of Best Crime Reporting 2017. Her first book, THE THIRD RAINBOW GIRL, is forthcoming from Hachette Books in 2020.
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