Murder in the Thumb

From Richard Carson's website:

Murder is an infrequent visitor in the Village of Caro, a community of 4,000 in Michigan's Thumb area.

When Robin Adams disappeared on a steamy August night in 1976 leaving a two-year-old boy for whom she was babysitting unattended, her friends and family feared the worst.

Her former boyfriend, Melvin Garza, a fiery 19-year-old Mexican-American, had angrily opposed Robin's attempts to break up with him.

Lost amid concern for the missing 17-year-old, who would never have left the little boy alone, was the strange prophesy of a Ouija board. A year or so earlier, the board "said" Robin would die before her 17th birthday.

This was but the beginning of a litany of bizarre of events, some tragic, most lacking logical explanation. Rumors of black magic practiced against a key witness, the extraordinarily accurate predictions of two psychics whom police consulted combine to create a story with a surprise around every corner.

Add to that, the rarity of a Roman Catholic priest representing an accused killer, the role the little-used one-man grand jury played in the case and the strange behavior of the prime suspect who continued to taunt police as months turned into years with little or no progress in the investigation.

Even after the murder trial that took place nearly eight years after Robin's disappearance, tragedy continued to haunt key figures in the story. Was some form of retribution being sought through practice of the dark arts? Was Melvin Garza plotting revenge from behind prison walls?

Veteran journalist Richard W.Carson, who undertook the book project when no one else would, said he began to feel like a character in a Stephen King novel as his research took one strange turn after another.

Murder in the Thumb, a true-crime book from Marquette Books, provides readers with a riveting account of a small town homicide case in which the predictions of two psychics proved remarkably accurate. Beginning with a Ouija board’s startling prophesy of untimely death followed by evidence of Satanism and black magic, the story suggests dark forces were at work as tragedies, one after another, struck people with ties to the case. See the author’s website at dickcarson.com and be sure to click on the video.