Edgar Award Finalist: The shocking account of a Wyoming father who
terrorized his family for years--until his children plotted a deadly
solution.
One cold November night, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, fifteen-year-old Richard
Jahnke Jr., ROTC leader and former Boy Scout, waited for his parents to
return from celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the night they met.
When his father got out of the car, the boy blasted him through the
heart with a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. Richard's
seventeen-year-old sister, Deborah, was sitting on the living room couch
with a high-powered rifle--just in case her brother missed.
Hours later the Jahnke kids were behind bars. Days later they made
headlines. So did the truth about the house of horrors on Cowpoke Road.
Was it cold-blooded murder? Or self-defense?
Richard Jahnke Sr., special agent for the IRS, gun collector, and avid
reader of Soldier of Fortune, had been subjecting his wife, Maria, and
both children to harrowing abuse--physical, psychological, and
sexual--for years. Deborah and her brother conspired to finally put a
stop to it themselves. But their fate was in the hands of a prejudiced
and inept judicial system, and only public outcry could save them.
Written with the full and revealing cooperation of the Jahnkes, this
finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime is "the ultimate family
nightmare, played out in the heartland of America. . . . From the night
of the murder through both trials, convictions and both youngsters'
eventual release . . . it's gripping reading" (Chicago Tribune).
