A prominent author faces spending the rest of his life behind bars after accusing the police of a “racist cover-up” over the murder of a fashion writer.

Peter Manso, a biographer of Marlon Brando and Norman Mailer, claims that he is the victim of retaliation by police and the local prosecutor for his inquiry into the death of Christa Worthington’s in 2002 in the affluent Massachusetts beach community of Truro.

His effort to write a “bombshell” book about what he sees as a racist cover-up has been sidetracked by gun possession charges after police responding to a false alarm at his house found weapons with expired permits.

Mr Manso calls the gun charges “an attempt to intimidate me”. Now 67, he fears that he could spend the rest of his life in prison because the most serious of the charges carries a maximum sentence of ten years. “The situation verges on the Kafkaesque,” he told The Times.

Ms Worthington, 46, a contributor to Vogue and Elle magazines as well as The Independent, was found dead in a pool of blood at her secluded hilltop bungalow in Truro, where she had spent summers as a child.

Christopher McCowen, a black local dustman with an IQ of 76, was convicted of the killing after a controversial “DNA dragnet” in which police conducted genetic testing on all adult males in the town.

Mr Manso knew Ms Worthington, a neighbour, because she once approached him for work because he was US correspondent of the French magazine Paris Match.

The author, a longtime Cape resident who wrote a provocative book about the gay stronghold of Provincetown, mounted his own investigation into the killing. Mr Manso suspects that, even if Mr McCowen was present at the murder scene, local authorities are covering up the role of a police informant, who is white, in Ms Worthington’s killing.

But his inquiry was derailed when a house alarm went off at his house on Boxing Day while he was at his other home in Berkeley, California.

Police responding to the alarm found three weapons with expired licences in a cupboard, including an AR15 semi-automatic rifle.

Mr Manso was first charged with six counts of illegal gun possession and then indicted on 12 charges.

The author admits that he failed to renew the licences, saying that he was never notified of a 1998 state law that required lifetime permits to be renewed every four years. But he insists that he is being selectively prosecuted for a licensing breach committed by hundreds of thousands of people in Massachusetts.

“I am being charged as if I was a career criminal. I am an ex-professor trying to write a book about racism and police willingness to suppress [evidence] to wrap up a case that has been going on for years,” he said. “What I would maintain at the very most is they only half solved the case. That is what they do not want me to be saying.”

The charges against Mr Manso have elicited strong reactions and Michael O’Keefe, the local prosecutor, has assigned the case to his counterpart in the neighbouring county to avoid a conflict of interest.

Seth Rolbein, editor of the Cape Cod Voice, said Mr Manso was right to look into the killing: “This district attorney has mishandled this case so badly that he’s lost all credibility.”

Robert George, the lawyer for the incarcerated Mr McCowen, calls the gun charges “an attempt to impede or delay” Mr Manso’s tell-all book.

“Manso’s criticism of the DA’s office was sticking his head into the lion’s mouth just begging to have his head bitten off,” he said.

Chronology of a death

January 2002 The body of Christa Worthington, 46, is discovered by her former boyfriend, Timothy Arnold

March 2004 Investigators take a DNA sample from Christopher McCowen, a 30-year-old dustman

January 2005 Local and state police ask men at the local post office, shop and dump to give DNA

April 2005 McCowen is arrested. Pleads not guilty to rape and murder

November 2006 McCowen found guilty of murder, aggravated rape and burglary. Judge sentences him to three concurrent life sentences December 2008 Police responding to a house alarm find three weapons with expired licences in the home of the writer Peter Manso. Charged with six counts of illegal possession

August 2008 Manso is indicted on 12 charges, the most serious carrying a maximum sentence of ten years

Source: Times archives

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