Two young, attractive women. Both savagely attacked, brutalized, raped, and murdered. Rachel Newhouse disappeared on the night of November 12, 1998, in San Luis Obispo, California. Only months later, in the same town, Aundria Crawford lost her life in an act of unimaginable violence.

As authorities worked to find clues to the killer’s identity, parole officer David Zaragoza paid a routine visit to one of his charges-Rex Allan Krebs, a violent serial rapist who’d served only ten years of a twenty-year sentence. After sending Krebs back to jail for violating his parole, Zaragoza found a keychain belonging to one of the victims. An intensive search led to the gruesome discovery of buried remains near Krebs’s secluded cabin. In his confession, Krebs asked, “If I am not a monster, then what am I?” A jury responded by sentencing him to death by lethal injection.

On a December night in Austin, Texas, teenagers Jennifer Harbison and Eliza Thomas closed up the yogurt store where they worked. The girls were joined by Jennifer’s younger sister, Sarah, and her friend Amy Ayers.
Less than an hour later, all four girls were dead-tragic victims of an apparent fire. Until it was discovered that the girls had been bound and gagged, sexually assaulted, and shot execution-style.
With no physical evidence or eyewitnesses, Austin police faced one of their toughest cases ever. Nearly eight years passed before four young men were charged with the crime, and authorities learned how a planned robbery exploded into a drug- and sex-fueled spree of brutality. But the road to justice was packed with shocking twists . . .

“We gotta kill ’em. They know what we look like.”

On a hot summer night in Houston, two teenage girls-bright, beautiful, success-bound friends-took a shortcut home from a friend’s apartment to make their curfew. They never reached their homes. The next morning, the families of the two girls began a frantic search, organizing friends and neighbors and posting thousands of fliers across the sprawling city. But not until an anonymous 911 call four days later were the bodies of Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena finally recovered. Their killers were soon rounded up-a brutal, unrepentant gang of teenage boys whose convictions should have put them behind bars for life. But in the halls of justice, nothing is ever a sure bet . . .