Читать книгу Betrayal In Blood - Michael Benson - Страница 4

Author’s Note

This is a story of a small group of people—related by blood, marriage, and lust—who built their own prisons, bar by bar. Some built theirs out of misguided restlessness, others from drug dependency and jealousy. With their self-made cages complete, their lives spiraled out of control in a tragic maelstrom of betrayal. Today one is dead, two others are in prison until they die, and the other is caged for a long time, now by literal—rather than figurative—bars.

And it is the story of a woman who, in the wake of losing her youngest son in a horrible accident, had to deal with the fact that her oldest son had murdered her youngest daughter. The toll on her children over a five-year span had been horrible. Out of four, two dead, one behind bars.

This book hopes to tell the story of the murder of Tabatha Bryant as a cautionary tale, one that will influence its readers in a positive way. It includes details of the happenings of July 13 and 14, in Penfield, New York, that cannot be found anywhere else, not in the daily reports of the local newspapers or in the sound bites of Rochester’s electronic media.

It is based on the recollections of the eyewitnesses I interviewed, on the records of the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office of New York, on court transcripts, and other documents acquired during research.

Although this is a true story, some names have been changed to protect the privacy of the innocent. Pseudonyms will be marked as such upon first usage.

When possible, the spoken word has been quoted verbatim. However, when that is not possible, conversations have been reconstructed as closely as possible to reality, based on the recollections of those who spoke and heard those words. In places, there has been slight editing of spoken words, but only to improve readability. The denotations and connotations of the words remain unaltered.