One hot summer night in 1988, Bonnie Von Stein's second husband was murdered in their bed, Bonnie herself stabbed, beaten, and left for dead beside him. It looked like a brutal but tragically typical case: Von Stein was newly wealthy, and Bonnie's troubled son Chris, seemed like the obvious suspect.
But Chris turned out to have an air-tight alibi and new leads suggested the crime could be much more complex. The trail led to Chris’s two strange new friends from college and a real-life enactment of a bizarre Dungeons and Dragons fantasy adventure, and it implicated Bonnie's teenage daughter as well.
In Cruel Doubt, Joe McGinniss probes the dark heart of family life and small-town North Carolina society to uncover a fascinating and terrifying story that is at once a chilling murder mystery, a tense courtroom drama, and a heartbreaking account of a mother forced to doubt her own children.
Probing the heart of a small-town North Carolina family, the author of Fatal Vision brilliantly weaves together this riveting account of ordinary people whose lives and illusions are shattered by a horrifying murder. Subject of an NBC-TV mini-series.
Joe McGinniss was an American journalist and best-selling author.
Joe McGinniss was born in New York on December 9, 1942. He graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in 1964 and became a general assignment reporter at the Worcester Telegram in Worcester, Massachusetts. Within a year he left to become a sportswriter for the Philadelphia Bulletin. He then moved to the Philadelphia Inquirer as a general interest columnist. At his death McGinniss was at work on a memoir chronicling his adventures as a writer and his experience with prostate cancer.
He died March 10, 2014 at UMass Memorial Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts. The cause of death was pneumonia and septic shock secondary to metastatic prostate cancer.
from joemcginniss.net
