During WWII, Lithuanian collaborator Silvestras Griekshell had been plucked from a Nazi labor camp and sent on covert missions by his Allied handlers. Now during the Cold War, he'd been redeployed as Steve Griggs, a nondescript American husband and father of four serving stateside as a cook in the U.S. Army. Though still doing black-bag jobs on the side, this dangerous, volatile man was consumed by an insatiable appetite for sadistic violence and psychological torture. And now, his obsessions involved his own children. Our story begins just as Griggs and his lovely wife place Dianne and Steven in a secret multigenerational program for experimentation, study and training with psychedelic enhancement. With each episode the brave boy and his clever sister survive, we come to appreciate how they have managed to prevail, and like Hansel & Gretel, emerge from this matrix of horror, triumphant and transformed. SONDRA LONDON has published confessions of serial killers and researched some of the most depraved criminal minds of our time. After twenty-four years of studying the real-life monsters in cages where Murder Road comes to a dead end, Sondra declares that nothing in the true-crime genre compares to this vivid and intimate account of surviving mortal terror at the hands of the undetectable serial killer SILVESTRAS.
About the Author: SONDRA LONDON has appeared on national and international television dozens of times. She was the focus of a 2000 biopic by Errol Morris that aired in his First Person series in UK & USA. Sondra produced 5 exclusive stories for A Current Affair & associate-produced a 2012 documentary, My Brother The Serial Killer. Best known for her studies of serial killers, she co-authored books with two: The Making Of A Serial Killer and Killer Fiction. In 2003, True Vampires was called a classic by Harold Schechter & Colin Wilson, and "almost too good for the genre," by Jack Olsen. She has worked with co-author DIANNE FITZPATRICK on this story for 10 years. DIANNE FITZPATRICK relates her memories as the survivor of a homicidal father in a secret multigenerational military program. Born in 1955 at Camp Gordon, her family had moved to Germany and back by age 5. At 18 she married a surfer. They had a child, and then she was widowed in 1984. As she sold artwork at fairs, rode as a trail guide, crewed on a balloon, designed & built theater sets, and mentored troubled youth, she hid shocking memories of the horrors of her own childhood. Her recovered memories and those of her brother Steven Griggs led John Edginton to film a 2002 documentary about the case, Our Father the Serial Killer. Today Dianne is expanding her writing beyond memoir to historical fiction. She renovates houses, volunteers at an organic market, rides horses, and maintains an art studio. Dianne does not do the internet, she does not do email, and she does not do public appearances. She does, however, live close enough to the sea to surf the healing waves, and she has somebody to love.