Undercover officer George Raffield's job was to pose as a student in the small town of Midlothian, Texas and infiltrate the high school drug ring. When Raffield's cover became suspect, word spread through a small circle of friends that the young officer would pay with his life. No one stopped it. On a rainy fall evening in 1987, Raffield was lured to an isolated field. Three bullets were fired-one unloaded into his skull. The baby-faced killer, Greg Knighten, stole eighteen dollars from Raffield's wallet, divided it among his two young accomplices, and calmly said, "it's done." With chilling detail, Carlton Stowers illuminates a dark corner of America's heartland and the children who hide there. What he found was an alienated subculture of drug abuse, the occult, and an unfathomable teenage rage that exploded at point blank range on a shocking night of lost innocence...
"The most powerful aspect of Innocence Lost is Stowers's unusually skilled development of the drama's main characters...but most of all, the book is about the loss of innocence of a typical American small town, and the heartbreaking knowledge that a once pristine and comfortable society has been somehow and forever violated by an insidious enemy, powerful and evil. Innocence Lost is well-written a
Dallas Times Herald
"When the dust clears, a handful of writers will be recognized as masters of the true crime book. And Carlton Stowers will be at the head of that class...Stowers has a very special ability to create page-turning books that both fascinate and educate-conveying the human dimensions of crime and exploring the psychological complexities of good and evil. In innocence Lost he paints an unforgettable po
Jonathan Kellerman
"Stowers recounts in riveting detail the events leading up to the shooting. And then he explores in depth its impact of the guilty, the innocent, the investigators and the community itself...Stowers is rarely judgmental, yet spares nothing in describing the horror of the execution-style slaying and the flawed psyches of those involved."
