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PART ONE

They found her naked body 36 years ago now, her head sunk into a bathtub full of black water, hands tied behind her with a tank top. It was 1987, and in a God-fearing town like Stephenville, seventy miles southwest of Fort Worth, what had been done to Susan Woods was unimaginable, something you might expect in a fetid corner of Los Angeles or New York City.

She had been a quiet, shy woman, five foot seven, with lustrous brown hair cascading past her shoulders and an easy smile that friends didn’t see as much as they once had. Susan was thirty years old and living alone that summer, left by a biker-ish husband who had f

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