Surviving Murder: A True-Crime Memoir

Where were the heads? On June 27, 1990, that was the question of the hour. The night before, the evening quiet had been shattered by the bloody aftermath of a son’s rage against his parents. Two dismembered, headless corpses would be tomorrow’s headlines—corpses that had been the author’s aunt and uncle. The murderer was her own cousin. This gripping, first-hand account of a surviving family portrays an ordinary citizen forced, in the blink of an eye, to become a solitary advocate for two murdered relatives. Her personal odyssey begins with the murders and, after a nine-year span of anguish and delays, leads to a gut-wrenching trial. This true-crime memoir depicts the horror murder begets, how survivors are victimized by the system designed to protect them, the plight of those whose lives are forever changed by one person’s unthinkable act, and how the human spirit manages to transcend it.