What Lisa Knew

What Lisa Knew: The Truths and Lies of the Steinberg Case by Joyce Johnson, 303 pages

Everyone knew her as Lisa Steinberg, and she herself had never known any other name, but her birth certificate read "Baby Girl Launders" and her death certificate, issued six years later, would read "Baby Girl Launders, also known as Lisa".  The day she was born, her mother handed her over to attorney Joel Steinberg, who claimed to know a wealthy family eager to adopt the girl and give her every advantage in life.  Instead, he and his girlfriend Hedda Nussbaum kept her and raised her in their own hell of sadism and drug abuse, until the day when Joel beat the six year old so badly that she died slowly and painfully while Hedda watched, not calling an ambulance until hours later, by which time it was far too late.

Nussbaum is the real mystery.  Steinberg was a sadistic control freak, while Lisa (and Mitchell, another child Steinberg illegally acquired, only 16 months old at the time of Lisa's death) was a helpless child.  At the time she met Steinberg, Nussbaum had a successful career as an editor at Random House, was a published author herself, and had multiple serious relationships with men behind her without a hint of abuse.  Yet by the time of Lisa's death, Steinberg's beatings had left Nussbaum a hollow shell of her former self, with prematurely gray hair and the face of a veteran boxer.  Her defense attorneys presented her as a case of battered woman syndrome, but Steinberg maintained that most of Nussbaum's injuries resulted from consensual sado-masochist activities, fueled by their mutual abuse of crack cocaine.

Johnson gives a plausible account of the psychodrama between the two principals, though whether it is an accurate account can never be known - indeed, the author admits explicitly "What Lisa knew will never be known."  Some of her confidence in certain witnesses is questionable, as are her negative insinuations about other people involved.  Overall, it does have an interesting account of how a woman with so many advantages could proceed one step at a time down a spiral with murder and madness at the bottom, though like most true crime (especially when it's well-written), it also disappoints - the madness turns out to be more pathetic than fantastic, and the cruelty merely depressing.