Immortalized in the spellbinding documentary Dear Zachary, this angry,
raw, and brutally honest memoir of murder and loss chronicles a system's
failure to prevent the death of a child.
In November 2001, the body of a young doctor named Andrew Bagby was
discovered in Keystone State Park outside Latrobe, Pennsylvania, five
bullet wounds in his face, chest, buttocks, and the back of the head.
For parents Dave and Kate, the pain was unbearable--but Andrew's murder
was only the first in a string of tragic events.
The chief suspect for Andrew's murder was his ex-girlfriend Shirley
Turner--also a doctor. Obsessive and unstable, Shirley Turner lied to
the police and fled to her family home in Newfoundland before she could
be arrested. While fending off extradition efforts by U.S. law
enforcement, she announced she was pregnant with Andrew's son, Zachary.
The Bagbys--hoping to gain custody of Zachary--moved to Newfoundland and
began a long, drawn-out battle in court and with Canadian social
services to protect their grandson from the woman who had almost
certainly murdered their son. Then, in August 2003, Shirley Turner
killed herself and the one-year-old Zachary by jumping into the Atlantic
Ocean.
DANCE WITH THE DEVIL is a eulogy for a dead son, an elegy for lives cut
tragically short, and a castigation of a broken system.
