Unfortunately, Scammell often resorts to the Dragnet-style O&As to integrate the mounds of interrogation transcripts. Instead, they had to rely on bones, hair clumps, torn clothing, and the contradictory testimonies of the accused and his accomplices. Revolving around Carl Drew-a Satanist and pimp with Manson-like powers who ordered his followers to kill two young prostitutes and 20-year-old Karen Marsden, whose skull fragment is the main piece of evidence in the forensic jigsaw puzzle-the ""lurid metaphysics"" of devil worship and ritual sacrifice take back seat here to detailed accounts of how police and prosecutors made sense out of a murder case with no body. Scammell, a free-lancer who writes about aerospace, medicine, and archaeology, was assisted by Douglas Ubelaker, a ""bone man"" from the Smithsonian, in writing this true-crime exposÉ that reads more like an adventure in evidence-gathering. A cool-tempered combination of police science and forensic anthropology that tells of satanic murders in Fall River, Mass.-where Lizzie Borden chopped up her parents.
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