My first acknowledgment, as always, is to the patience of my wife, Susan McCarthy, which, I should tell you, was worked especially thin by the fact that I wrote this book while I was supposed to be working on a different book, cowritten with her. I would also like to thank my first editor at Scribner, Brant Rumble, and my second editor, John Glynn, and my third editor, Rick Horgan; apparently I am hell on editors. Others at Simon and Schuster who were vital include Mia Crowley-Hald, who served as the production editor, and Taylor Noel, our publicist; thank you, Taylor. Nan Graham was supportive from above; thank you, Ms. Graham.
I would like to thank my daughter and coauthor, Rachel, whom I hired to do research on the book when I thought I might be missing a corner of the story, but who discovered that I was missing most of the story. Chuck Verrill and Liz Darhansoff have represented my interests in the publishing business for uninterrupted decades. Thirty-six years, I guess. I try in each book to acknowledge my debt to Dan Okrent, whose interest in my work helped my writing career get off the ground some forty years ago.
My personal friends Cal Karlin and Joe Posnanski read the book before it was published; thank you, Joe and Cal, and also Matthew Namee. I would like to thank some very nice lady at the Kansas State Historical Society, who may have been Susan Forbes, Sara Keckleson or Sarah Garten. I am sorry, I have lost the slip of paper that had your name on it.
The primary indebtedness of this book is to those who have written about these crimes before, or who have written before about the places and times which are critical to the book. It is my belief that it is inadequate to acknowledge in a footnote those whose work you use, and that sources should be directly acknowledged in the text. I have tried to do this throughout this book. Literally thousands of people have written about one of these crimes or another, although (a) none of those people had a full view of the series of crimes, and (b) most of those people are now dead and would get little pleasure from being acknowledged by me. But a short summary of the living and more recently deceased: Frederick Brogdon, JD Chandler, Susan Cronk, Dr. Edgar Epperly, Donna Fricker, Alan G. Gauthreaux, Beth Klingensmith, Gary Krist, Beth Lane, John Nova Lomax, Roy Marshall, Dr. Charlton Moseley, Keven McQueen, Kelly and Tammy Rundle, Troy Taylor, Mike Vance and Susan Barringer Wells. Out of that list, I would especially like to thank Dr. Moseley for allowing me to quote from his work.
Thank you all, and my apologies to whomever I have forgotten to thank, and also to anyone whose name I have misspelled or whose well-earned title I have omitted.