Death of an Angel, St. Martin's True Crime Classics

From a New York Times–bestselling author, the true crime story of a Rhode Island family murdered by a Sunday school teacher.

When prosperous lawyer Ernest Brendel mysteriously disappeared, along with his wife Alice, and their eight-year-old daughter Emily, friends in the close-knit Rhode Island neighborhood worried that family had been kidnapped. It would be agonizing months in a massive FBI search before they would know the heartbreaking truth.

The shaken community began to lose hope that the family would ever be found alive. Their worst fears were confirmed when heavy rains from a tropical storm uncovered Alice and Ernest Brendel’s badly decomposed bodies—shot with a giant crossbow, strangled, and buried in the quiet woods of the town. Lying under her mother’s corpse was little Emily’s lifeless body, now a silent witness to her killer’s shocking identity.

Like a hand pointing from the grave, the evidence led authorities to one of Ernest Brendel’s closest and most trusted friends. What Ernest couldn’t have known was that Christopher Hightower—a Sunday school teacher and respected member of the community—was a psychotic liar obsessed with greed, jealousy, and murderous revenge.