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On an October night in 1973, in the safe, suburban town of Concord, Massachusetts, two good girls were doing their homework in an unlocked house. Their mother was dead, and their father was away. The older girl was fifteen, her sister fourteen. An intruder with a gun commanded them to act according to his whim. He then raped them, brutally, several times. Both girls were sure he would kill them. But when the rapist left, an hour after he had arrived, he told the girls that his gun was not real. When the two girls told the police what had transpired, the officers were skeptical. The crime was not solved.
But the rapist did not stop with these two girls. His next victim would kill herself. The younger sister reacted as rape victims often do. She was petrified to be alone. The older sister thought the rape was behind her. But she had lost her capacity to feel fear in normally frightening situations.
She took on dangerous work, traveling around the world to interview terrorists. She became a lecturer at Harvard University and a well-known terrorism expert. It never occurred to her that the terror of that night had influenced her choice of profession, studying perpetrators of violent crimes. Thirty-five years later, the terrorism expert, Jessica Stern, found herself wanting to know what had happened that night.
She went back to the police in her hometown and asked them for the complete file. Lt. Paul Macone was in high school when the crime occurred. He went to find the file and was astounded to discover that there had been a series of remarkably similar rapes, throughout the Boston area.
"It was the same kind of gun," Macone said. "The perp sounded remarkably similar. Unless I was missing something, this was clearly the same guy," Lt. Macone went on to note that his agency gets a lot of record requests, but this one was very unusual. "This was the most serious crime I've seen in my twenty-nine years on the force," he said.
The Concord police reopened the cold case. Denial: A Memoir of Terror tells the story of what happened when these two intrepid sleuths - one a terrorism expert, the other a detective, tried to uncover what happened that night. It is a riveting thriller that shows how a good cop solved a cold, hard case.
The story reveals how the investigation of sex crimes has changed for the better, and the importance of good police work - not only to solve crimes, but also to heal victims. A "must-read" story about police work at its best. Jessica Stern is a lecturer at Harvard Law School and a member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law and served as a staff member at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration.
Stern received her doctorate in public policy from Harvard. She is the author of Terror in the Name of God and The Ultimate Terrorists, as well as numerous articles on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites        
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