Smooth Talker: Trail of Death

One morning in July 1974 Anita Andrews the owner and bartender at Fagianis Cocktail Lounge in Napa California was found dead in her bar-raped beaten and stabbed to death in a bloody frenzy. Shed last been seen alive the night before talking to a drifter who sat at the end of the bar playing cards and flirting with her. But the stranger along with Anitas Cadillac had disappeared. Unable to locate a suspect police investigators sadly watched the case grow cold over the years.Meanwhile a month after Anitas murder young Michele Wallace was driving down a road in the mountains near Crested Butte Colorado when she gave two stranded motorists Chuck Matthews and a man named Roy a ride. Dropping Matthews off at a bar in Gunnison she agreed to take Roy to his truck. She was never seen alive again nor could a massive search of the mountains locate her remains. The trail leading to her killer also ran into deadends.Fourteen years later Charlotte Sauerwin engaged to be married met a smooth-talking man at a Laundromat in Livingston Parish Louisiana. The next evening her body was found in the woods; shed been raped tortured and her throat slashed. The police suspected her fiance Vince LeJeune though he proclaimed his innocence to anyone who would listen. Meanwhile the man from the Laundromat couldnt be located.The three murders would remain unsolved eating at the hearts minds and lives of the womens families friends and communities. Then in the early 1990s a rookie Gunnison County sheriffs investigator named Kathy Young began looking into the Wallace case and identified a suspect named Roy Melanson a serial rapist from Texas. SMOOTH TALKER is the story of Melanson his depredations and the intrepid police work that went into bringing him to justice.I originally wrote about the Michele Wallace case in 2002 as part of my book NO STONE UNTURNED: The True Story of the Worlds Premier Forensic Investigators. The book detailed the history and best cases of NecroSearch International a renowned group of scientists and law enforcement investigators who pool their knowledge and experience to locate the clandestine graves and remains of murder victims. Their first real success was locating the remains of Michele Wallace in 1994. However at the time the book came out no one knew about the true extent of Roy Melansons horrific rampage or the connection between the Wallace case and the murders of Andrews and Sauerwin. Its all pieced together in SMOOTH TALKER: Trail of Death in which the readers get two fascinating cold case murder investigations in a story filled with brutality grief forensic science at its finest and exemplary police work.