James G. Hollock has 30 years of experience with the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, primarily at Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh. In Born to Lose: Stanley B. Hoss and the Crime Spree That Gripped a Nation, Hollock traces Hoss from his earliest misdemeanors at the age of fourteen to a daring rooftop escape from the Allegheny Workhouse in Blawnox, Pennsylvania, where he was being held on a rape charge, to his killing of police officer Joseph Zanella in Oakmont, Pennsylvania, to the kidnapping near Cumberland, Maryland, and his ultimate murder of Linda Peugeot and her two-year-old daughter Lori in the autumn of 1969. Their bodies have never been found.
By consulting previously sealed state and federal archives and interviewing sixty individuals who witnessed or had significant knowledge of Hoss’s series of felonies, Hollock vividly re-creates the crimes, police dispatches, and court proceedings in this gripping narrative. He poignantly characterizes the players involved, especially those who suffered either directly or indirectly at the hands of Stanley B. Hoss.