The Body on the Bed

<p><strong style=color: rgba(92 0 0 1)>Reporter Mary Fanning finds the body on the bed poisoned. </strong></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 55 0 1)>Mary finds the body on the bed in the house next door. Smart tough and inquisitive she covers the murder trial as the first woman reporter for the Kansas Daily Tribune. Amid the upheaval of post-Civil War Lawrence she unravels the diabolical plots and desperate lives that led to three dead bodies and a shocking last act.</span></p><p><br></p><p>Did a doctor's brazen affair with his patient's wife incite him to murder? On the morning of April 28 1871 the body of Isaac Miles Ruthman is found poisoned in his bed in Lawrence Kansas. His doctor John J. Medlicott a fervent churchgoer is arrested and charged with first degree murder. He's carrying a picture of Ruthman's wife Anne Catherine and two of her love poems in his wallet. He'd visited Ruthman the previous evening to give him a medicinal powder--a poison cocktail of deadly nightshade and morphine according to the autopsy. </p><p><br></p><p>Is it a coincidence that the doctor's wife Sarah died suddenly and mysteriously just four months earlier? Did Medlicott first kill her then Ruthman? Or did Ruthman commit suicide depressed over his finances and ill health--authorities had to break into his bedroom when they found the door locked from the inside.</p><p><br></p><p>Mary Fanning sharp strong-willed and the first woman correspondent for the Kansas Daily Tribune is assigned to report on the trial and investigate Ruthman's poisoning. Her independence leads her to fight for suffrage for women and Blacks in post-Civil War Kansas. Her ardor leads her into an illicit love affair with a woman. Her incisive mind leads her to uncover lives torn by lust obsession and deceit a trail of dead victims and the fiendish scheme behind the body on the bed.</p><p><span style=color: rgba(92 0 0 1)>A thrilling tale of murder and betrayal ... a defiant suffragist ... a lurid web of deceit ... impeccably researched.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(92 0 0 1)>~Kirkus Reviews</span></p><p><br></p>