Book excerpt: In 1952 on a highway in the small Northern California mountain village of Chester, a local businessman and four small children are carjacked, robbed and savagely bludgeoned. Three of the children are killed. A year earlier, a Folsom gold mine operator had been murdered in a home break-in robbery attempt and five months after the Chester murders, the quiet Southern California city of Burbank is rocked when, during another home break-in, an elderly widow is found bound, gagged and brutally murdered in her own home. Thus begins the terrifying chronicle of the Mountain Murder Mobs deadly rampage up, down and through the Golden Statefrom the gritty back alleyways of the Los Angeles suburbs to the forested foothills of the Northern Sierrasa gang of ruthless killers ply their murderous trade by preying on societys most vulnerable citizens. And behind the scenes, the victims young wife and mother copes with the grief of a life turned upside down after her heartbreaking loss. Struggling to build a new life for herself and for what now remains of her devastated family, she leans on her unwavering faith and a deep reservoir of inner strength. A Massacre of Innocents is the previously untold true story of the Mountain Murder Mobs horrific crimes and how they ultimately paid for those crimes.