America s #1 true-crime writer fulfills a murder victim s desperate plea with this shattering New York Times bestseller. If anything ever happens to me...find Ann Rule and ask her to write my story. In perhaps the first true-crime book written at the victim s request Ann Rule untangles a web of lies and brutality that culminated in the murder of Sheila Blackthorne Bellush--a woman Rule never met but whose shocking story she now chronicles with compassion exacting detail and unvarnished candor. Although happily ensconced in a loving second marriage and a new family of quadruplets Sheila never truly escaped the vicious enslavement of her ex-husband multi-millionaire Allen Blackthorne a handsome charmer-- and a violent controlling sociopath who subjected Sheila to unthinkable abuse in their marriage and terrorized her for a decade after their divorce. When Sheila was slain in her home in the presence of her four toddlers authorities raced to link the crime to Blackthorne the man who vowed to monitor Sheila s every move in his obsessive quest for power and revenge.