Paperback: Murder On A Lonely Road (2012) is the true account of a murderer who thought he was beyond punishment, and the lawmen who would not relent until justice was finally done.
On 17 June 1985, twenty-year-old beauty pageant winner Jackie John's car was found abandoned, the interior drenched in blood. Four days later, her bludgeoned, nude body was discovered floating in a nearby lake.
Sheriff Dwight McNiel vowed to catch Jackie's killer, however long it took.
His prime suspect: local rich kid Gerald Carnahan. But despite suspicions, the evidence never managed to add up, and Carnahan slipped away again and again.
Throughout the next two decades, multiple other women went missing - some murdered, some never found. Fearful residents believed that a murderous bogeyman was connected to all these crimes.
Carnahan's conviction on the charge of attempted kidnapping of another young woman brought his name into the mix over and over again - but all of the cases remained unsolved for decades, until a highway petrol sergeant sent DNA from Jackie John's murder for testing and came up with a quadrillions-to-one match to Carnahan.
This book is not only about a brutal beauty queen murder that shocked Missouri residents, but also about a privileged killer it took twenty-five years to bring to justice.
About the author: George Pawlaczyk and Beth Hundsdorfer are investigative reporters for the Belleville News-Democrat in southern Illinois near St Louis. They have worked as a team for more than a decade, during which they won the Robert F Kennedy Award in 2007 for their series "Lethal Lapses" (about the faulty child protection system that led to the deaths of over fifty children) and the prestigious George Polk Award in 2009 for their series "Trapped in Tamms" (exposing the state supermax Tamms Correctional Center's practice of holding mentally ill prisoners in solitary confinement for more than a decade). This is their first book.
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