In an update to one of the most astonishing crimes of the Case Files volumes, Ann Rule profiles the criminals that kill without conscience and shatters their crimes without pity. In eight stunning Case Files volumes, from A Rose for Her Grave to the #1 blockbuster Last Dance, Last Chance , Ann Rule reigns as "America's best true-crime writer" ( Kirkus Reviews ). Now, she updates the most astonishing cases from that acclaimed series—and presents shocking, all-new true-crime accounts—in one riveting anthology. In every explosive chapter of Without Pity , Ann Rule deepens her unrelenting exploration of the evil that lies behind the perfect facades of heartless killers...and the deadly compulsions of greed and power that shatter their outward trappings of material success. They are the admired, trusted neighbor; the affable family man; the sexy, charismatic lover; the high-achieving professional. Perhaps most frightening of all is that they are heroes in their own minds. But when someone gets in the way of their deluded dreams, they are capable of deadly acts of violence with no remorse. Analyzing the true nature of the sociopathic mind in chilling detail, Ann Rule traces the murderous crimes of seemingly ordinary men—killers who drew their unsuspecting victims into their twisted worlds with devastating consequences. Ann Rule (1931–2015) wrote thirty-five New York Times bestsellers, all of them still in print. Her first bestseller was The Stranger Beside Me , about her personal relationship with infamous serial killer Ted Bundy. A former Seattle police officer, she used her firsthand expertise in all her books. For more than three decades, she was a powerful advocate for victims of violent crime. Chapter One: The Tumbledown Shack After writing more than a thousand articles about homicide cases, I suppose it's natural that some of them blur slightly in my memory. However, there are those that I recall vividly, and I even remember my own life at the time I first researched their tragic details. The story that follows brings back gloomy recollections of four days when I was trapped by a blizzard in Wenatchee, Washington. The sheriff of adjoining Okanogan County had given me a ride from Seattle over the Cascade Mountains on November 16, 1978, and I planned to take the bus back after I'd talked to Chelan County homicide detectives. But a huge snowstorm clogged the mountain passes and no car, bus, train, or plane could get through. That meant I couldn't get home until the road thawed. All the sidewalks in Wenatchee were covered with four or five inches of ice that weekend and many stores had closed. Stuck in a little motel, all I had to read was the police file of this horrifying case. I found no diversion from horror when I turned on the television set. The news had just broken that Reverend Jim Jones, the cult leader of the Peoples' Temple from San Francisco, had forced his hapless congregation to drink poisoned Kool-Aid at "Jonestown," in Guyana. Of his 1,100 followers, 973 were dead, and so were California state representative Leo J. Ryan and most of the staff and film crew who had gone with him to Guyana to investigate Jones. There was nothing for me to watch beyond blanket coverage of that story on every channel and a screen filled with a sea of bodies. I spent those days completely alone in the dead of winter only thirty-five miles from where the case I was studying had happened in the blazing summer heat. By the time the ice thawed, I knew this story of two vulnerable young women by heart and it stays in my mind to this day. Like those who died in Jonestown, the Chelan County victims had been lulled into the false belief that they were safe, and they too trusted enough that they failed to see the evil behind a pleasant facade. It would seem that a double homicide that happened almost thirty years ago would have been solved by now. It has certainly not been forgotten. I still meet people who were closely connected to the victims, people for whom time has no meaning. Technically, it is an open case. Yet, over and over again, one man confessed to the murders of two beautiful young women. Was he telling the truth, or was he only throwing up a smokescreen that clouded the investigation so that the real killer was never caught? You be the judge. Chelan County, Washington, is only a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Seattle, but it lies on the other side of the mountains in eastern Washington, in a climate where the landscape is completely different. The weather, the vegetation, and the topography of Chelan County might as well be three or four states away. Chelan County is fruit-growing country, particularly Delicious apples, and vacation country, a place far away from the congestion of the increasingly industrial west sides of Oregon and Washington, where Portland and Seattle traffic rivals that of L.A. and New York City, and where new housing developments cover fertile valleys with cement