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<p><strong>On January 9 2002 twelve-year-old Ashley Pond left her family's apartment in Oregon City Oregon to catch her bus to school. <em>She vanished. </em></strong></p><p><br></p><p>Ashley loved her single-parent mother but she hated her drinking and the father figures in her life had come and gone. So she had learned to rely on her friends.</p><p><br></p><p>Recently however things had become complicated: when she disappeared many people believed she'd simply run away.</p><p><br></p><p>But Janine O'Neill had prosecuted crimes against children in Oregon City for seven years. She knew with absolute certainty that a twelve-year-old in that community would never vanish unless something had gone terribly wrong.</p><p><br></p><p>Then another girl vanished and the son of a self-proclaimed serial killer identified himself as the prime suspect in both disappearances. O'Neill became obsessed with the story-so obsessed she eventually quit her fulltime job and set off on a multistate search into the past with one overriding question: Could anything be scarier than what the public believed had happened to these girls?</p><p><br></p><p>The answer she learned was yes.</p>