After an investigation spanning nearly two years, Los Angeles investigators come up empty in the case of a terrifying serial sex killer.
But then, a seemingly unrelated arrest is made across state lines. In book two of Murder by Increments, we journey deeper into the life and mind of the suspect at the center of the case: one of the most confounding and mysterious serial killers in American history.
Killing Cousins documents the shocking story of an abusive childhood that created a monster, and the suspect’s possible involvement in a separate string of killings of teenagers in Rochester, New York.
Did this man truly have multiple personalities, or was he a cunning sociopath enacting a daring hoax against the criminal justice system? By the end, you make up your own mind.
Genre: TRUE CRIME / Murder / Serial KillersChapter 1
It's squaresville, Ken would say of his hometown, Rochester. There was nothing there; nothing waiting for him but a job at Kodak.
He invoked Kodak often as a convenient shorthand for all the reasons Rochester was a nothing place, hardly fit for a man like him, a man with dreams and ambitions.
The company that actually invented the digital camera in 1975 haplessly dropped it from their line out of fear it would threaten their core business, a decision that ultimately stripped it of its position as the foremost manufacturer of photographic equipment. Kodak became a poster child for postindustrial irrelevance, as did many mid-size cities in the northeast. Ken couldn't see into the future, but he knew Kodak was a place for losers, and so was Rochester.
The other thing Ken always talked about was the cold. Over one hundred inches of snow a year, nine months of which were spent indoors. The townsfolk awoke in darkness at six o'clock and didn't know if it was morning or night. The May Lilac Festival suffered a regular deficiency of lilacs.
The Buonos weren't bothered about the cold and gloom. They had been toughened by endless days working in the hot sun of San Buono, in the Abruzzio region of Italy. In 1919, when Kenneth's mother Frances was born, Rochester was an industrial boomtown. Her parents were among the millions that migrated from Southern and Eastern Europe after the war. They settled in Utica, Syracuse, Buffalo and Rochester in great numbers, and the cities prospered with the influx of labor. The work was hard, the cold and snow horrendous, but there was a good living to be made, new homes, and space to raise families. And that was all that really mattered.
