Three books. Thirty-six cases. The killers here held down jobs, coached little league, and paid their taxes on time—until the ordinary turned lethal.

A word of warning: these accounts are not sanitized. The news reports stop well short of what the case files contain. This collection does not.

**A sampling of the thirty-six stories:**

**Whips and Chains** – A trooper checking a truck parked dark on I-10 found a woman chained naked in the sleeper. On the CB, trucker Robert Ben Rhoades was Whips and Chains, and he claimed fifteen years at it. In his Houston apartment, police found photographs of a fourteen-year-old girl laid out like a calendar—and a barn in the background they still had to find.

**Hello Kitty Murder** – In Hong Kong, Fan Man-yee, a young mother of an infant son, was dragged into a flat on Granville Road over a debt too small to cover a secondhand car. A month later, police found what was left of her sewn inside a child's toy. The witness who finally talked was a teenage girl who had been in the flat the entire time.

**No Fire, No Food** – A desperate Phoenix family paid nearly $14,000 to send sixteen-year-old Aaron Bacon into the Utah backcountry, trusting a wilderness program to straighten him out. Twenty days later he weighed 108 pounds, and the journal he left behind recorded each of them.

Plus thirty-three more, among them Jessica Heeringa, who vanished at closing time from a gas station with no cameras, and Derrick Todd Lee, who talked his way through unlocked doors across Louisiana while investigators chased the wrong man.

Every case is reconstructed from court records, police files, and firsthand testimony. No sensationalism, no padding, no sanitizing.

Harrowing, scrupulously researched, and impossible to put down, this collection is essential listening for fans of Ann Rule, Robert Kolker, and M. William Phelps.