Thirty-seven-year-old Donald Goines had a checkered past, to put it mildly. Born in Detroit, Michigan to middle-class parents who owned a laundry business, Donald became somewhat troubled as a teenager. At the age of fifteen, he falsified his identification and joined the Air Force, eventually going on to fight in the Korean War.
While Donald was deployed overseas, he developed a crippling addiction to heroin, and upon returning to the States after his honorable discharge, he fell into criminality as a way of paying for his habit. Over the ensuing years, he spent time in and out of jail on charges ranging from robbery to illegal manufacture of liquor to pimping. Though it seemed that he could have been destined to a lifelong criminal career, he actually discovered a creative outlet while incarcerated in Jackson Penitentiary in Michigan: writing.
Donald Goines began writing novels at a feverish pace in order to get them published and out in print fast enough to feed his heroin habit. Donald used his experiences in prison to fuel his stories, often using thinly disguised versions of actual criminals he knew as characters in his tales. He wrote so voluminously that his publisher eventually had to advise him to publish some of his works under pseudonyms, to keep from flooding the market.
By the time 1974 rolled around, Donald had completed sixteen novels, and was quite a well-regarded voice in urban fiction. But on October 21st, this voice would be silenced by persons unknown; two men stormed into the Highland Park, Michigan apartment that Donald shared with his common-law wife Shirley Sailor and their two children, and gunned down the writer and his partner in cold blood.
Donald and Shirley both died from multiple gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Their children were left unharmed in a bedroom. To this day, the motive for the assassination-style killing is unclear. Some investigators speculate that Donald’s drug addiction might have had something to do with his death, particularly if he had taken to dealing in heroin himself.
Others believe it is more likely that some criminal of his acquaintance hadn’t taken too kindly to his portrayal in one of Donald’s fictional works. Whatever the reason, the murders of Donald Goines and Shirley Sailor remain unsolved, though the legacy of Donald Goines’ writing still resonates into the twenty-first century; his books have been name-checked by several prominent hip-hop artists, and his writing is second only to the works of Iceberg Slim in terms of best-selling black experience literature.
Crime Immemorial 