Olsen Gregg - Overkill: True Crime Box Set

Gregg Olsen and Rebecca Morris

Copyright 2014 by Gregg Olsen and Rebecca Morris
All Rights Reserved
Book cover design by BEAUTeBOOK
Original cover photography: Her Lovers Wife: Helmuts Guigo, The Deadly Daughter-In-Law: Ulrich Joho and mrhayata
Map by Brad Arnesen
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the authors.
Published by Notorious USA

Gregg Olsen is the New York Times bestselling author of twenty books, both true crime and fiction, including Shocking True Story, Fear Collector, A Twisted Faith, Starvation Heights, and If Loving You Is Wrong.

Rebecca Morris is the author of Ted and Ann The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy, and Bad Apples Inside the Teacher/Student Sex Scandal Epidemic.

Together they are the authors of If I Cant Have You Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance and the Murder of Her Children, and the New York Times bestselling Bodies of Evidence, the first book in the Notorious USA series.

PRAISE FOR
If I Cant Have You

Compelling, haunting
The Salt Lake Tribune

A powerful narrative of one familys tragedy.
Publishers Weekly

absorbing and deeply researched
The Seattle Times

By Gregg Olsen and Rebecca Morris

WEVE WRITTEN ABOUT DOZENS OF CRIMES in our Notorious USA series. Weve looked at the worst of the worsthusbands who killed their wives; women who killed their boyfriends; children who died because they became inconvenient to a parents lifestyle; boys who took a weapon to school; love triangles that have turned ugly. How could they not?

What have we learned? Mental illness is often a factor, but most people who commit horrific acts do so because of jealousy or greed. Its alarming how many kill in order to collect on life insuranceeven on their children.

Overkill is a compilation of Notorious Colorado, Arizona and Utah.

Colorados edition includes three of the countrys most infamous crimes which all occurred in the same area of Colorado: the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the Columbine school shooting, and the Aurora movie theater massacre. We also report on an Amish serial killer, a fatal attraction that led to a murder, and on a ministers wife whose illicit passion drove her to murder.

In Arizonas, we update several cases, including: a man suspected of marrying vulnerable women, then killing them; two infamous Arizona killers freed after decades in prison; televisions it girl Jodi Arias; a woman who was her mother-in-laws worst nightmare; and a football mom who got a little too cozy with members of her sons high school team.

And in Utahs edition, we report on one of the most sensational and heartbreaking crimes weve come acrossMegan Huntsman, the Utah mother who hid seven dead infants in a garage; a cold case that was finally solved by a childs Lego; the rogue Fundamentalist Mormon who thought it was his right to marry and rape young girls; the sad case of children dying in hot cars; the husband who ended years of lying with murder; and an update on the disappearance of Susan Cox Powell, the case we write about in our book If I Cant Have You.

Why are we fascinated and repelled by crime? To paraphrase the Chinese philosopher Xun Zi, every one of us is born with feelings of envy and hate. If we give in to them, were led to violence and crime. The rest of us struggle and might come close to that proverbial line in the sand, but we dont cross it. But were disgustedand a little intriguedby those who do.

If theres a notorious case youd like us to write aboutanywhere in the countrycontact us.

To buy the New York Times bestselling Notorious USA series and learn more about the books, please visit our website:

www.notorioususa.com

Gregg Olsen and Rebecca Morris

BOULDER, LITTLETON AND AURORA, COLORADO sit in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains near Denver.

Central Colorado was settled by hunters, trappers, farmers, and men mining silver and gold and the merchants who did business with them. Millions of years before, it was home to ancient glaciers, mountain ranges, deserts, and even oceans and beaches.

The mines are long-closed and now the area is known for its nature preserves, rock climbing, winter sports, and what researchers call quality of life.

The town of Nederland is a steep drive up the southern side of the Rockies in an area called The Front Range. Its just up the hill from Boulder, but motorists climb a jaw-dropping 5,000 feet in just 17 miles. The town of 1,500 people seems a world away from the cluster of better-known towns down the hill, the hometowns of JonBenet Ramsey, Columbine High School, and the Century movie theater.

Together the towns form a tragic triumvirate of western crime.

By Stephanie Cook

I AM WRITING THIS A FEW DAYS after my 25th birthday, which means my family has spent a quarter of a century living in Colorado. We moved from sunny Burbank, Californiawhere my parents grew up and met as high school sweetheartsto a tiny mountain town called Nederland when I was 22 days old. Despite the long winters, recent floods, and occasional feelings of isolation that mountain living can bring, my mom and dad, Sandy and Ted Cook, still live in the house they bought over the phone in 1989.

Colorado is renowned for its wild and mountainous beauty. In winter, trees glisten with snow. In summer, wildflowers adorn rivers and streams that reflect the clear blue skies above. The Front Range area, in particular, remains one of the most beautiful and safest places in the country to live and raise a family. I grew up wandering around my small mountain town with my two sisters, worrying only about mountain lions, bobcats, and bears, not strangers or guns. Strangers were always kind to me (and there were so few of them in Nederland anyway), and guns were for hunting pheasant and elk.

My dad keeps his guns locked and displayed in a glass cabinet in the living room. Growing up, I would watch him clean them before one of his hunting trips. As a child, I never thought much about it. Later, I wondered if the shooting at Columbine High Schooland other mass shootingschanged his opinion about owning guns, especially as a father of three.

Over the past twenty years, Ive watched three of Americas greatest tragedies unfoldall clustered within miles of my house. The murder of JonBenet Ramsey left Boulders tight-knit community longing endlessly for answers and justice, and the nearby towns of Aurora and Littleton lost dozens of peoplemost under the age of 30to outbursts of gun violence carried out by angry and troubled young men.

The sun still shines in the Rockies, but the specters of the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the shooting at Columbine High School, and the mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora linger in the air like fog hanging over the Flatiron Mountains.

JonBenet Ramsey was a year younger than me. Its hard to believe the six year old imprinted in our minds as a child beauty contestant would be in her mid-twenties now. She grew up in Boulder, a picturesque university town. Many people who live in Nederland work and spend most of their time in Bouldermy family includedso JonBenet and I were essentially two little girls growing up at the same time in the same place. Still, when I first saw her image flash across the evening news, I thought she looked like shed come from another planet. I was a mountain girl with bangs and pigtails, and she was a pageant star with a sash and a tiara.