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Hell in the Heartland
- Murder, Meth, and the Case of Two Missing Girls
- Narrated by: Amy Landon
- Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins
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Hell in the Heartland
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Publisher's Summary
"There is, in the best of us, a search for the truth, to serve the living and dead alike.... Jax Miller is one of those people and Hell in the Heartland is one of those books." (Robert Graysmith, New York Times best-selling author of Zodiac)
As seen in:
- Marie Claire's "Best True Crime Books of 2020"
- HuffPost
- OK! Magazine
- CrimeReads
- LitHub's "Best New Summer Books"
S-Town meets I'll Be Gone in the Dark in this stranger-than-fiction cold case from rural Oklahoma that has stumped authorities for two decades, concerning the disappearance of two teenage girls and the much larger mystery of murder, possible police cover-up, and an unimaginable truth....
On December 30, 1999, in rural Oklahoma, 16-year-old Ashley Freeman and her best friend, Lauria Bible, were having a sleepover. The next morning, the Freeman family trailer was in flames and both girls were missing.
While rumors of drug debts, revenge, and police corruption abounded in the years that followed, the case remained unsolved, and the girls were never found.
In 2015, crime writer Jax Miller - who had been haunted by the case - decided to travel to Oklahoma to find out what really happened on that winter night in 1999 and why the story was still simmering more than 15 years later. What she found was more than she could have ever bargained for: Evidence of jaw-dropping levels of police negligence, entire communities ravaged by methamphetamine addiction, and a series of interconnected murders with an ominously familiar pattern.
These forgotten towns were wild, lawless, and home to some very dark secrets.
What the critics say
"Jax Miller's Hell in the Heartland is the kind of 300 page book that would take a 300 page blurb to do it justice. There is, in the best of us, a search for the truth, to serve the living and dead alike, an obsessiveness that means never giving up, to balance the scale and give the dead their due. In the modern tradition of I'll be Gone in the Dark, Jax Miller is one of those people and Hell in the Heartland is one of those books." (Robert Graysmith, New York Times best-selling author of Zodiac)
"The title of Jax Miller's book is, believe me, no exaggeration. This writer marched straight into a piece of Oklahoma that can fairly be called Hell and didn't come out until she'd covered every track leading to and from an ice cold crime and relentlessly covered a whole lot of nasty possibilities. Murder and Meth are only the beginning. If this is the Heartland I'm taking a detour." (Beverly Lowry, author of Who Killed These Girls?)
"A top-notch true crime work shot through with desperation, paranoia, and regret. Reading this book feels like running headlong into danger, and Miller's writing is haunted and haunting. It's a patchwork of broken dreams, of secrets and lies, of trouble under the surface. Mesmerizing, raw, evocative, unforgettable." (William Boyle, author of A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself)