Murder in the Family, Burl Barer
Murder in the Family, Burl Barer
9 Rating(s)
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Murder in the Family

Author: Burl Barer

Narrator: James Edward Thomas

Unabridged: 11 hr 32 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Lantern Audio

Published: 09/15/2016


Synopsis

On March 15th, 1987 police in Anchorage, Alaska arrived at a horrific scene of carnage. In a modest downtown apartment, they found Nancy Newman's brutally beaten corpse sprawled across her bed. In other rooms were the bodies of her eight-year-old daughter, Melissa, and her three-year-old, Angie, whose throat was slit from ear to ear. After an intense investigation, the police narrowed the principal suspect down to 23-year-old Kirby Anthoney, a troubled drifter who had turned to his uncle, Nancy's husband John, for help and a place to stay. Little did John know that the nephew he took in was a murderous sociopath capable of slaughtering his beloved family. This true story, shocking and tragic, stunned Anchorage's residents and motivated the Major Crimes Unit of the Anchorage Police Department to do everything right in their investigation. Feeling the heat as the police built their case, Kirby bolted for the Canadian border. But the cops were on to him. First they hunted him down; then the cops and a tenacious prosecutor began their long, bitter battle to convict him against an equally tough defense lawyer, as well as the egomaniacal defendant himself. This shocking tale reached its climax in a controversial trial where for the first time an FBI profiler was allowed to testify and the controversial, pre-DNA science of allotyping was presented to a jury. But justice would not be served until after the psychopathic Kirby Anthoney took the stand in his own defense, and showed the world the monster he truly was.

About Burl Barer

Burl Barer is a Edgar Award winning author and two-time Anthony Award nominee with extensive media, advertising, marketing, and public relations experience. In addition to non-fiction/ true crime best sellers, Barer also writes new adventures of Leslie Charteris's The Saint, and the Jeff Reynolds series of private eye novels and the American Panther series based on the life of the world's greatest safe cracker, Paul "Punch" Stanimirovic. Barer spent two years adapting Pouran Rahimi's important oral history of the persecution of Iran's Baha'i community, Love at the Cost of Life, into conversational English, and deems it the one effort on his part that will still be read in a hundred years.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Barbara on July 20, 2021

This is a true crime story about a horrific multiple murder that occurred in Alaska. On March 15, 1987 the bodies of Nancy Newman and her two daughters - Angie (3 years old) and Melissa (8 years old) were found in their Anchorage, Alaska apartment. The three females had been brutally murdered, and Na......more

Goodreads review by The Romance Book Disciple (Samantha) on February 16, 2017

Overall, I thought this was a balanced take on the story. While it makes a strong case that Anthoney was a horrible criminal, it does provide some balanced legal info that purported the other evidence. The narrator was good and did a good job of changing intonation when reading monologues from vario......more

Goodreads review by Katherine on February 12, 2017

I believe this case has been an episode both of Forensic Files ("Trail of Truth" 5.7) and The New Detectives, which only makes sense given that it's a landmark case in the use of forensic evidence like hairs and fibers in convicting a murderer. Also, the vileness of this particular murderer is exempl......more

Goodreads review by Rachel on December 01, 2016

A pal told me that she couldn't finish this book because she got very uncomfortable and upset about how someone our age could do this to his family. They still wanted to know about it so they asked me to read and tell them about it since reading true crime novels is my guilty pleasure. This book was......more

Goodreads review by Bettye on July 26, 2016

Highly recommended for true crime fans. This outstanding story is not for weaklings. It is an account of the almost incomprehensible acts of a young psychopath who savagely raped and murdered his aunt and two young cousins. The battle for justice in the courtroom was ferocious on both sides. The defen......more