The Forever Witness

“Thought-provoking true-crime thriller…the book raises urgent questions of balancing public and private good that we’ll likely be dealing with as long as the title implies.”—Wall Street Journal A relentless detective and a civilian genealogist solve a haunting cold case—and launch a crime-fighting revolution that tests the fragile line between justice and privacy. In November 1987, a young couple from the idyllic suburbs of Vancouver Island on an overnight trip to Seattle vanished without a trace. A week later, the bodies of Tanya Van Cuylenborg and her boyfriend Jay Cook were found in rural Washington. It was a brutal crime, and it was the perfect crime: With few clues and no witnesses in the vast and foreboding Olympic Peninsula, an international manhunt turned up empty, and the sensational case that shocked the Pacific Northwest gradually slipped from the headlines. In deep-freeze, long-term storage, biological evidence from the crime sat waiting, as Detective Jim Scharf poured over old case files looking for clues his predecessors missed. Meanwhile, 1,200 miles away in California, CeCe Moore began her lifelong fascination with genetic genealogy, a powerful forensic tool that emerged not from the crime lab, but through the wildly popular home DNA ancestry tests purchased by more than 40 million Americans. When Scharf decided to send the cold case’s decades-old DNA to Parabon NanoLabs, he hoped he would finally bring closure to the Van Cuylenborg and Cook families. He didn’t know that he and Moore would make history. Genetic genealogy, long the province of family tree hobbyists and adoptees seeking their birth families, has made headlines as a cold case solution machine, capable of exposing the darkest secrets of seemingly upstanding citizens. In the hands of a tenacious detective like Scharf, genetic genealogy has solved one baffling killing after another. But as this crime-fighting technique spreads, its sheer power has sparked a national debate: Can we use DNA to catch the murderers among us, yet still protect our last shred of privacy in the digital age—the right to the very blueprint of who we are?

He'd been shot in the head, decapitated, and set on fire. Who could have turned on the real-estate ace with such bloodthirsty fury? Even before the remains were found, circumstantial evidence was building against Rudin's 52-year-old wife, Margaret, who stood to inherit a handsome share of her husband's fortune. Rudin's friends also suspected Margaret, and the victim has thought that his wife was trying to poison him when he was alive. Then a chilling caveat was discovered in Rudin's living trust: should he die under violent circumstances, an investigation should be conducted. By the time authorities closed in on Margaret Rudin she'd disappeared. It would take two and a half years to hunt the Black Widow down, and to discover the secrets at the heart of poisonous marriage... Now, reporter Michael Fleeman delivers a startling glimpse into the mind of a woman who would stop at nothing to get what she wanted. Fleeman also details the relentless pursuit of justice that would lead authorities from the glamorous facade of Las Vegas to a squalid apartment on the outskirts of Boston, to hold the remorseless wife accountable for her shocking crimes.

This national bestseller from the Pulitzer Prize-winner catapults readers to the dark side of the justice system with the powerful true story of one man's battle to prove his innocence. Besieged by murder, rape, and the vilest conspiracies, the all-American town of Bakersfield, California, found its saviors in a band of bold and savvy prosecutors who stepped in to create one of the toughest anti-crime communities in the nation. There was only one problem: many of those who were arrested, tried, and imprisoned were innocent citizens. In a work as taut and exciting as a suspense novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Edward Humes embarks on a chilling journey to the dark side of the justice system. He reveals the powerful true story of retired high-school principal Pat Dunn's battle to prove his innocence, and how he was the victim of a case tainted by hidden witnesses, concealed evidence, and behind-the-scenes lobbying by powerful politicians. Humes demonstrates how the mean justice dispensed in Bakersfield is part of a growing national trend in which innocence has become the unintended casualty of today's war on crime.

Documents governmental and political corruption in the Deep South through the story of a daughter who seeks justice when her parents are slain in Mississippi.

What should we teach our children about where we come from? Is evolution a lie or good science? Is it incompatible with faith? Have scientists really detected evidence of a creator in nature? From bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes comes a dramatic story of faith, science, and courage unlike any since the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. Monkey Girl takes you behind the scenes of the recent war on evolution in Dover, Pennsylvania, when the town's school board decision to confront the controversy head-on thrust its students, then the entire community, onto the front lines of America's culture wars. Told from the perspectives of all sides of the battle, it is a riveting true story about an epic court case on the teaching of "intelligent design," and what happens when science and religion collide.

No one wants me to tell you about the disappearance of Sloane Sullivan. Not the lawyers or the cops. Not her friends or family. Not even the boy who loved her more than anyone. And most certainly not the United States Marshals Service. You know, the people who run the witness protection program or, as it’s officially called, the Witness Security Program? Yeah, the WITSEC folks definitely don’t want me talking to you. But I don’t care. I have to tell someone. If I don’t, you’ll never know how completely wrong things can go. How a single decision can change everything. How, when it really comes down to it, you can’t trust anyone. Not even yourself. You have to understand, so it won’t happen to you next. Because you never know when the person sitting next to you isn’t who they claim to be…and because there are worse things than disappearing.

Eight ways to unleash the powers of your mature mind.

Was a monstrous killer brought to justice or an innocent mother condemned? On an April night in 1989, Jo Ann Parks survived a house fire that claimed the lives of her three small children. Though the fire at first seemed a tragic accident, investigators soon reported finding evidence proving that Parks had sabotaged wiring, set several fires herself, and even barricade her four-year-old son inside a closet to prevent his escape. Though she insisted she did nothing wrong, Jo Ann Parks received a life sentence without parole based on the power of forensic fire science that convincingly proved her guilt. But more than a quarter century later, a revolution in the science of fire has exposed many of the incontrovertible truths of 1989 as guesswork in disguise. The California Innocence Project is challenging Parks's conviction and the so-called science behind it, claiming that false assumptions and outright bias convicted an innocent mother of a crime that never actually happened. If Parks is exonerated, she could well be the "Patient Zero" in an epidemic of overturned guilty verdicts—but only if she wins. Can prosecutors dredge up enough evidence and roadblocks to make sure Jo Ann Parks dies in prison? No matter how her last-ditch effort for freedom turns out, the scenes of betrayal, ruin, and hope will leave readers longing for justice we can trust.