Dance with the Devil

In August 1982, a 30-year-old woman, Jane Goodwin, was found murdered in her Newark, New Jersey apartment. Her killer had strangled Jane until she passed out. Then, reportedly, he ripped open her blouse, posed her with her breasts exposed, and repeatedly stabbed Jane in the chest. He left no fingerprints or DNA--just a shattered, grieving family.

Over the next 19 years, three other women were attacked in a similar fashion. Two of them, Karen Osman (at Rutgers University in Newark) and Carmen Rodriquez (in Hartford, Connecticut) died at this monster's hand.

Police eventually caught their assailant, Edwin "Ned" Snelgrove, a promising college grad with an uncontrollable desire to hurt women. Ned was jailed. Yet while serving a 20-year sentence, he developed a twisted obsession with one very sick hero--infamous serial murderer Ted Bundy, a man he wrote about extensively in his prison letters to a friend. Ned studied the notorious killer, looked up to him. And as Ned festered in prison, waiting for the day he was to be cut loose, he decided he would be better than Bundy when he got out and started killing once again.

Author M. William Phelps takes readers to some very dark places here, so hang on.

Introduction by New York Times bestselling author Gregg Olsen.