A Dark and Bloody Ground: A True Story of Lust, Greed, and Murder in the Bluegrass State

A Dark and Bloody Ground: A True Story of Lust, Greed, and Murder in the Bluegrass State

<DIV><B>An Edgar Award–winning author’s true crime account of a grisly string of killings in Kentucky—and the shocking spectacle of greed that followed.</B><BR /><BR /> Kentucky never more deserved its Indian appellation “A Dark and Bloody Ground” than when a small-town physician, seventy-seven-year-old Roscoe Acker, called in an emergency on a sweltering evening in August 1985. Acker’s own life hung in the balance, but it was already too late for his college-age daughter, Tammy, savagely stabbed eleven times and pinned by a kitchen knife to her bedroom floor in Fleming-Neon. Three men had somehow managed to breach Dr. Acker’s alarm and security systems and made off with a substantial amount of the cash he had stashed away in a safe over his lifetime. <BR />  <BR /> The killers—part of a three-man, two-woman gang of the sort not seen since the Bakers—stopped counting the moldy bills when they reached $1.9 million. They found that all the cash came in handy shortly afterwards, when they were caught and needed to lure Kentucky’s most flamboyant lawyer, the celebrated Lester Burns, into representing them.<BR /><BR /> The acclaimed author of <I>The Hillside Stranglers </I>and <I>Murder in Little Egypt </I>provides “an arresting look into the troubled psyches of these criminals and into the depressed Kentucky economy that became fertile territory for narcotics dealers, theft rings and bootleggers” (<I>Publishers Weekly</I>).<BR />  </DIV>