AN ABUSIVE MOTHERRaised in the suburb of Riverside, California, twenty-year-old college student Jason Bautista endured for years his emotionally disturbed mother's verbal and psychological abuse. She even locked him out of the house, tied him up with electrical cord, and on one occasion, gave him a beating that sent him to the emergency room. His fifteen-year-old half brother Matthew Montejo also was a victim to Jane Bautista's dark mood swings and erratic behavior,...

An Abusive MotherRaised in the suburb of Riverside, California, twenty-year-old college student Jason Bautista endured for years his emotionally disturbed mother's verbal and psychological abuse. She even locked him out of the house, tied him up with electrical cord, and on one occasion, gave him a beating that sent him to the emergency room.A Son's RevengeOn the night of January 14, 2003, Jason strangled his mother. To keep authori...

Thomas and Jackie Hawks had big plans. The couple wanted to sell their retirement home--a hard earned 55-foot yacht named Well Deserved--and move onto land to spend more time with family. So when a baby-faced buyer, Skylar Deleon, wanted to test drive the yacht, the Hawks were overjoyed. However, Skylar--with his troubled past as a flamed-out childhood actor, a dishonorably discharged Marine and a suspect in the mysterious death of his former friend, Jon Jarvi--had an even more tr...

On September 28, 2000, former Indiana state trooper David Camm made a frantic call to his former colleagues in the state troopers office: He had just walked into his garage and found lying on the floor the bodies of his thirty-five-year-old wife, Kim, and their two children, Brad and Jill, ages seven and five.Three days later, things got worse when police arrested David Camm for the triple murder. Soon new stories started emerging about mistresses and violent bursts of temper. And ...

Neighbors were unaware of what went on behind the tightly closed doors of a house in Fresno, California—the home of an imposing, 300-pound Marcus Wesson, his wife, children, nieces, and grandchildren. But on March 12, 2004, gunshots were heard inside the Wesson home, and police officers responding to what they believed was a routine domestic disturbance were horrified by the senseless carnage they discovered when they entered.By Their Father's Hand is a chilling true story...

Grand Junction, Colorado, 2001: When Michael Blagg’s adoring wife, Jennifer, and his six year-old-daughter, Abby, disappeared from their home, Michael led the charge to find them, even going so far as to make a nationwide appeal on Good Morning America for information. But seven months later, investigators found Jennifer’s remains in a Mesa County landfill, and things took a darker turn....Jennifer had been shot in the head, investigators discovered, and Abby was nowhere t...

The true-crime story of Edwin Snelgrove, an American serial killer who wanted to out-kill Ted Bundy, from the New York Times bestselling author.In September 2001, Carmen Rodriguez, a beautiful thirty-two-year-old Hartford mother of four, went missing. At first police were stymied . . . until a killer's crucial mistake led investigators down a long, dark road of cold, calculated murder . . .In 1987, single mother Mary Ellen Renard was strangled, rep...

A loving father and his new wife set out to pick up his kids for a scheduled weekend visit—but never suspected they were walking into a death trap.A handwritten note instructed Alan and Terra Bates to enter the back door of his ex-wife's Alabama home. A day later their charred bodies were found hundreds of miles away, wrapped in blankets, in a burned-out car's trunk on a desolate Georgia road.At Jessica McCord’s house, law enforcement officials found windows covered in blan...

Cold StorageIn May 2003, an Arizona man who’d bought dozens of sealed boxes at an auction of unclaimed property made a horrifying discovery: the bodies of three plastic-wrapped infants, one of which had become mummified over the years. Police traced them to Dianne Odell, 50, a mother of eight children, who admitted the babies were hers but claimed that they’d died of natural causes.Justice DeferredIn 1989, police had found the remains...

They Were The Perfect Family...For twenty years, Ken and Kristine Fitzhugh and their two sons had lived lives of comfortable middle-class normality in the university town of Palo Alto, California. Then came the shocking news that Kristine Fitzhugh was dead, the victim of a terrible accident.... By the time the Palo Alto Police Department looked closer at the death of Kristine Fitzhugh, there could be only one conclusion. Someone had murdered Kristine in her own hom...

Family FeudA real estate lawyer in Connecticut’s moneyed seaside communities, Beth Ann Carpenter, 30, had beauty, brains, and success. But she wanted more—namely guardianship of her two-year-old niece, Rebecca, daughter of Beth’s estranged sister, Kim. When Kim married Anson “Buzz” Clinton, 28, a former male exotic dancer deemed an unsuitable guardian by the Carpenter family, Beth Ann became obsessed with the idea that only his death could ensure that she and her pa...

The fatal nightOn a warm Florida evening, Karen Gregory saw a familiar face at her door. What the beautiful young woman could not know was that she was staring into the eyes of her killer—a savage monster who would rape her, stab her to death, and leave her battered body on the floor outside the bedroom.The desperate searchDetectives frantically sifting through the evidence were tormented by one disturbing question after another: Wh...