A gentle, unassuming English teacher at one of America’s finest public high schools, Susan Reinert was found naked, bound, and abused, in the trunk of her car. Her children, Karen and Michael, had disappeared. For seven years, dozens of state troopers, FBI agents, and prosecutors searched for the bodies of Karen and Michael, now presumed dead, and for the men who had murdered them. Residents of main line Philadelphia were horrified by the murders, but the convictions shocked them even more, because the men how had murdered Susan and her children were not strangers, they were highly respected members of the community, and they had been entrusted with the care and education of children. William Bradfield, charismatic, intelligent, attractive, ran the English department at Upper Merion High. Engaged to Susan Reinert when she died, at the time of publication, he was serving three life sentences for conspiracy to commit murder. Also, at the time of publication, Dr. Jay Smith, for twelve years the principal at Upper Merion, was on Death Row, sentenced to the electric chair for three counts of murder. Driven to understand how so many people could so misjudge two men, how the William Bradfield who was loved and revered by women, colleagues, and students could be the same man who planned the brutal, sordid murders of a mother and her children, Loretta Schwartz-Nobel spent more than three years probing every aspect of the case. She interviewed everyone who knew Susan and William; she had complete access to FBI and police records; she attended all trials and she talked to Bradfield himself during countless prison visits when he discussed literature, God, and Susan Reinert. Relentless in her research and intrepid in her intimate exploration of Bradfield and Smith, Schwartz-Nobel has written a riveting and terrifying book about three murders that shattered the fundamental tenets upon which every community of human beings depends for survival. If Bradfield and Smith are guilty, is there anyone of whose innocence we can be certain