Murder in the Family

Now updated, the New York Times bestseller about a horrifying Alaska massacre and a controversial trial: “Barer writes true crime at its best.” —Jack Olsen

On March 15, 1987, police in Anchorage, Alaska, arrived at a horrific scene of carnage. In a modest downtown apartment, they found Nancy Newman’s brutally beaten corpse sprawled across her bed. In other rooms were the bodies of her eight-year-old daughter, Melissa, and her three-year-old, Angie, whose throat was slit from ear to ear. Both Nancy and Melissa had been sexually assaulted.

After an intense investigation, the police focused on a principal suspect: twenty-three-year-old Kirby Anthoney, a troubled drifter who had turned to his uncle, Nancy’s husband John, for help and a place to stay. Little did John know that the nephew he took in was a murderous sociopath.

These shocking, tragic events stunned Anchorage residents and motivated the Major Crimes Unit of the city’s police department to get everything right. Feeling the heat, Kirby bolted for the Canadian border. But he was caught in time—and the cops and a tenacious prosecutor began a long, bitter battle to convict him, up against an equally tough defense lawyer and the egomaniacal defendant himself. The tale reached its climax in a controversial trial, where for the first time an FBI profiler was allowed to testify and the pre-DNA science of allotyping was presented to a jury. But justice would not be served until after the psychopathic Kirby Anthoney took the stand in his own defense—and showed the world the monster he truly was.