This is not the standard true-crime pulling together of all the stories ever published about the crime(s). Rather, author Gregg Olson has done extensive original research, serious spade-work to unearth the deeper, more horrifying truths behind this tragic story.
But I dinged Olson a star for ‘Story’, giving a 4 instead of a 5, for what is missing and desperately needed in this narrative. That is, the research into the psychological reasons that help explain why a bright, lovely, energetic and able young woman marries into such a destructively dysfunctional family – and stays, and stays, and stays. And does the dance with her husband and his predatory family, against her own bests interests, and against the best interests of her children as well. There are reasons that victims ‘turn Stockholm’, as it were, even as they speak out that they do see a grim fate bearing down on them.
Olson tells us everything that happened and many things that are rumored and surmised to have happened, to give a catalog of events that is as complete and well-rounded as is possible from the outside. He’s honest about the occasionally incomprehensible actions of his sometimes hard-to-like victim, as she seems complicit in the mind games that threaten both her and her children. What he doesn’t do is include the extensive research into this behavior that would help us better understand the victim’s point of view.
Even without that, though, this is a great story, and one that is a bit unusual for a bad-husband true-crime book. It may well be a wake-up call for someone who is connected not just to a problematic partner, but to the partner’s pernicious family as well.