Overview
"Got a problem down here." Bloomington, Illinois, police officer Hibbens didn't sound like himself. His voice cracked. "There's something you ought to see."
The scene awaiting the other policemen as they entered the charming suburban house at 313 Carl Drive was one they would never forget. Three children and their mother lay hacked to death in their beds, their sheets and walls soaked in blood. A butcher knife and an axe lay nearby.
There appeared to be no physical evidence, and the detective at first suspected a bungled robbery. But as the police sifted clues and questioned friends an family members, an appalling possibility presented itself: Could David Hendricks, the grief-stricken father, away on a business trip, have methodically killed his wife and children before he left? And why would a successful businessman and devoted member of a fundamentalist religious group want his family eliminated? The prosecution painted a darker picture of David Hendricks...
Convicted by his first jury, awarded a new trial, a second jury has now concluded that David Hendricks had not been proven guilty—beyond a reasonable doubt.
Vogel recreates the Bloomington, Il, murder of three children and their mother in 1983 and the subsequent investigation and trial.