FOREWORD

She asked me if I had seen the article; I had. While drinking our respective morning coffees, my editor at the New York Times and I had both happened upon a small mention in a local paper. It wasn’t much, several hundred words of simple facts, and not too many at that. A man who lived on a choice street in Pelham, New York—an upscale suburb of New York City—had just been implicated in an old Kansas murder. With the help of a female accomplice, he was thought to have killed a sleeping man. Quite brutally, it seemed.

On any ordinary day, there might be legal and ethical lapses among the well-heeled residents of Pelham, but little in the way of murder, much less wholesale slaughter. This was intriguing. Had a murderer, undetected for two decades, lived in close quarters with CEOs, investment bankers, and venture capitalists? Was he one of them? One of those people with an innate and expedient ability to succeed in our world? Probably. The article mentioned that the accused’s attorney was Michael “Mickey” Sherman, who had represented Kennedy family member Michael Skakel in that cold murder case. Sherman had clout and did not come cheap.

Life’s path is always fraught with lurches and surprise, but this journey from Kansas to Pelham and the height of New York respectability seemed like an especially crooked line. And then there was the name of the town back in Kansas: Olathe. I wasn’t even sure how to pronounce it, but for some odd reason, it looked familiar. A trip to my bookshelf told me why. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood had profiled the pair of murderers who’d used Olathe as their base, departing from the small east Kansas town to kill the Clutter family and returning there later that same blood-soaked, wakeful night. This murder, though, was already different. In In Cold Blood, the pair of murderers had stumbled from crime to crime and were caught a month and a half after the murder, eventually executed together. No such tidy, frontier moral play here. This Pelham man and his female cohort, who were originally suspects but somehow went free, had gone their separate ways and apparently had been living accomplished lives in the two decades since their own particular blood-soaked, wakeful night. Were they weighed down by remorse? Or were they able to put a tight lid on the guilt? Perhaps they were totally innocent, wrongfully accused. Even the authorities must have some doubts. The woman had been indicted for murder, but the man was only named as a coconspirator, as yet not formally charged. Why not adhere to the more common practice of formally indicting both suspects?

There seemed to be far more questions than answers.

My editor—the incomparable Jeanne Pinder—gave me the go-ahead. Without further delay, I was off to Kansas.