Book excerpt: Sex Slayings Throughout its long and colorful history, St. Augustine, Florida has been home to pirates and villains, marauders and despots. But it wasn't until the late 1980s that the city's red-light district, known locally as Crack Head Corner, became the hunting ground for a serial killer whose brutality knew no bounds. A Killer's Taunts On November 29, 1988, Anita Stevens, 27, climbed into a stranger's vehicle, thinking to turn a quick trick to fund her drug habit. She was the first to die. Over the next six years, six more prostitutes would fall victim to the same phantom killer, slain by gun, blunt objects, a strangler's noose--and the murderer's bare hands. His signature was the obscene poses in which he arranged his half-nude victims. Final Justice Frustrated by false confessions, investigators sifted through a myriad of suspects until a Christmas Eve, 1996 murder in Asheville, North Carolina led them to the real killer: William Darrell Lindsey. Twice-married, a father of five, Lindsey had drifted across the South for years. Wherever he went, rape and murder followed. He admitted to seven sex slayings, but experts believe that the death toll was somewhere between twelve and twenty. Here is the chilling true story of a fiend whose sadistic lust was the most depraved addiction of all. Includes 16 Pages Of Shocking Photos McCay Vernon, Ph.D., is a psychologist whose career has been concentrated in the fields of deafness and forensics. He is the author of seven books, over 300 articles, and award-winning documentary films and television productions in those fields. Although his path never crossed that of William Darrell Lindsey, Dr. Vernon attended the same high school, delivered the local paper to Lindsey's family, and shared many acquaintances with the killer. Marie Vernon is a freelance journalist whose columns, feature articles, and book reviews have appeared in such major newspapers at the Baltimore Sun, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Vernons live near St. Augustine, Florida.