Deliberate Intent: A Lawyer Tells the True Story of Murder by the Book

The case was Lawrence Horn hired a contract killer to execute his ex-wife and severely brain-damaged son. On March 3, 1992, the man he hired, an inexperienced killer named James Perry, used a book called Hit Man — billed by the publisher as “A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors” — as a blueprint for the murders; following to the letter the book’s explicit instructions on how to make the killings look like a burglary gone wrong and how to keep from leaving forensic evidence at the scene. To Horn and Perry it seemed like Hit Man was all they needed to create the perfect murder. They were wrong. The copy of Hit Man found in James Perry’s possession actually helped the prosecution lock up Horn for life and send Perry to death row.

But the Hit Man case was not closed. The victim’s families shocked the nation by filing an unprecedented wrongful death suit against Paladin Press, the publisher of Hit Man — a suit that seemed to defy the First Amendment itself. Although it went against his abiding belief in freedom of the press, Rod Smolla took the case, likening the book to “a loaded pistol or a vial of poison.” Deliberate Intent is the dramatic story of the legal battle that followed.