Dark and Bloody Ground

Kentucky never more deserved its Indian appellation "A Dark and Bloody Ground" than when a small-town physician, seventy-seven-year-old Roscoe Acker, called in an emergency on a sweltering evening in August 1985. Acker's own life hung in the balance, but it was already too late for his college-age daughter, Tammy, savagely stabbed eleven times and pinned by a kitchen knife to her bedroom floor in Fleming-Neon. Three men had somehow managed to breach Dr. Acker's alarm and security systems and made off with a substantial amount of the cash he had stashed away in a safe over his lifetime.  The killers—part of a three-man, two-woman gang of the sort not seen since the Bakers—stopped counting the moldy bills when they reached $1.9 million. They found that all the cash came in handy shortly afterwards, when they were caught and needed to lure Kentucky's most flamboyant lawyer, the celebrated Lester Burns, into representing them.