The name Constance Kopp is probably not familiar to many readers, but it deserves to be. Award-winning, non-fiction writer Amy Stewart tells the true tale of Constance and her sisters Norma and Fleurette, who lived in rural New Jersey, as a crime fiction story, complete with plucky heroines, gangsters, ugly henchmen, sensational newspaper headlines and decent lawmen. In the summer of 1914, the Kopp sisters’ buggy was driven into by an automobile and destroyed. The incident marked the start of a year of terror for the sisters at the hands of a local hoodlum, Henry Kaufman. Constance was a towering figure, leading a life that could be described as “closeted”, but she decided not to allow her family’s victimisation to go unchallenged, going as far as carrying a gun and taking up the investigation of Kaufman and his thuggish activity. Constance went on to become one of the US’s first female deputy sheriffs; an inspirational figure to women of her own and our time too.
