MURDERED: Bill & Peggy Stephenson

On a hot Sunday in May 2011, the congregation of a Florence, Kentucky church noticed something wrong immediately. Bill and Peggy Stephenson—he a deacon, she the organist—were never absent. When their daughter Beth called her husband to check on them, he found their condo's sliding glass door open and walked into a scene so brutal that fifteen years later he still cannot describe it. The Boone County detective who arrived called it a "1% kind of crime"—the kind you get once in a career, if ever.

A crime scene that didn't make sense

Detective Coy Cox found Bill and Peggy in separate rooms with multiple wounds, enough that the first word that came to him was "overkill." But the truly haunting detail was that the bodies had been posed in strange positions, with household objects arranged around them in specific ways. Nothing valuable was missing, but in every room, things were off—items moved or changed in ways that seemed deliberate. Some objects had markings that may have been left by the killer, and the arrangement appeared to indicate who the killer liked and who they didn't among family members and friends. The scene gave investigators a feeling of something ritualistic, though they couldn't tell whether it was a genuine ritual killing or staging meant to look like one.