Cruel Doubt

From the New York Times bestselling author of Fatal Vision comes a shocking true account of murder, family secrets, and final justice now available for the first time as an e-book...

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.