Dennis Mowry

Ken raised his three sons in a squeaky-clean suburb of Los Angeles. He envisioned fatherhood as coaching their sports teams, taking them to church (where he was the pastor), and visiting colleges one day. Instead, he got an education on the street names of opioids, fluency in rehab vernacular, and an insider’s view of the California prison system, when his middle son, Lucas, accidentally killed a man with his car while high on heroin.

One late spring evening in 2010, Shannan Gilbert - after running through the oceanfront community of Oak Beach screaming for her life - went missing. No one who had heard of her disappearance thought much about what had happened to the 24-year-old: She was a Craigslist escort who had been fleeing a scene - of what, no one could be sure. The Suffolk County police, too, seemed to have paid little attention - until seven months later, when an unexpected discovery in a bramble alongside a nearby highway turned up four bodies, all evenly spaced, all wrapped in burlap.