Survived by One

On November 8, 1985, 18-year-old Tom Odle brutally murdered his parents and three siblings and was sentenced to death. However, after seventeen years on death row, Illinois governor George Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty, and later abolishment of capital punishment, changed Odle’s sentence to natural life. The commutation of his sentence turned Odle’s life upside down. Wanting to understand why he committed the murders, he reached out to Dr. Robert Hanlon, a forensic neuropsychologist who had examined him in the past. Hanlon tells a gripping story of Odle’s life as an abused child and as a young man coming of age within the prison system, seamlessly weaving into the narrative Odle’s honest, unadorned reflections of his childhood, finding family on death row, his role as counselor to fellow inmates, and his belief in the powers of redemption.