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Product Description A corporate lawyer tells how he stumbled onto the trail of a female serial killer and devoted five years to bringing her to justice after she murdered his neighbor's daughter for insurance money. 20,000 first printing. From Publishers Weekly At church in Louisville one day in 1987 a woman named Bobbie Roberts asked another parishioner, corporate lawyer Steven Keeney, for help: her daughter, Deanna, had fallen to her death along the Big Sur coast of California earlier that year, and now her insurance company was balking at paying benefits. What emerged was a scandal of far greater magnitude. Soon Keeney uncovered evidence suggesting that Deanna had been pushed off the cliff by her traveling companions, B. J. and Virginia McGinnis, a married couple who had secured a life insurance policy on her the previous day. After further investigation, Keeney came to suspect that over 20 years Virginia McGinnis had killed her three-year-old daughter, her mother and her ex-husband, as well as committing crimes of shoplifting, forgery, theft and arson. Heilbroner ( Rough Justice ) does a respectable job of reporting how Kenney learned of McGinnis's childhood of poverty and abuse. But in his courtroom coverage, surprisingly, this former New York City prosecutor cools down his potential potboiler through a pedestrian analysis of the 1992 trial. B. J. McGinnis, who was indicted, died in prison before being tried; Virginia McGinnis was sentenced to life imprisonment. Photos not seen by PW. BOMC alternate; movie rights have been optioned; condensation rights to Reader's Digest; author tour. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal In 1987, Steve Keeney, a Louisville, Kentucky, corporate attorney totally unfamiliar with criminal law, was approached by Bobbie Jo Roberts for advice because her insurance company would not pay the proceeds of her daughter's life insurance policy. Keeney quickly discovered that Virginia McGinnis, the woman with Roberts's daughter when she fell to her death from a cliff in Big Sur, California, had an astonishing history. McGinnis had lived in six homes, all of which had burned to the ground; her three-year-old daughter had died of accidental hanging; her mother and second husband perished mysteriously while under her care. Yet McGinnis had avoided suspicion for more than 30 years. Freelance writer Heilbroner recounts Keeney's tireless efforts to bring McGinnis to justice in a nonfiction narrative that reads like a classic thriller. Readers will find it very difficult to put down. Highly recommended. - Sandra K. Lindheimer, Middlesex Law Lib., Cambridge, Mass. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews The nail-biting tale of a female serial killer and the lawyer who dogged her to justice. Although Heilbroner is an attorney himself (three years in the Manhattan D.A.'s office, described in his excellent Rough Justice, 1990), the crusading lawyer here is one Steven Keeney, a prim, conservative tax attorney from Louisville. A tenderfoot at criminal law, Keeney finds himself knee-deep in a murder investigation when the victim's mother approaches him in church to ask for help in settling a life-insurance claim. It seems that the insurance company is balking with good reason: Another policy had been taken out on the victim just one day before her mysterious death in a fall off a cliff in Big Sur. Suspicion settles on the creepily nondescript Virginia McGinnis, mother of the beneficiary and landlady of the deceased. As Keeney sniffs around, horrifying revelations come to light. McGinnis's three-year-old daughter died of accidental hanging--if it was an accident; her husband and mother also succumbed in suspicious circumstances, and in each case McGinnis collected life insurance. She lived in six homes in 20 years, and all of them burned to the ground. Her sons turned out to be killers themselves (``Virginia McGinnis was not just a murderer hers