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Sign up todayThree Sisters in Black
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Learn moreIn 1909, a bathtub drowning became one of the most famous and bizarre criminal cases in American history.
On November 29, 1909, police were called to a ramshackle home in East Orange, New Jersey, where they found the emaciated body of twenty-four-year-old Oceana “Ocey” Snead facedown in the bathtub—dead of an apparent suicide by drowning. There was even a note left behind.
But it would not take authorities long to discover that Ocey’s death was no suicide. And Ocey’s own mother and two aunts were far from the sorrowful caretakers they appeared to be.
In fact, behind the veils of their strange black mourning clothes, they were monsters, having tormented Ocey almost since birth in a sick pattern of both physical and mental abuse, after a lifetime of which the women planned to cash in on poor Ocey’s sad and inevitable death.
An Edgar Award finalist, Three Sisters in Black is the true story of a gothic, gaslight nightmare that fascinated, shocked, and baffled the nation—and the disturbed women who almost got away with murder.
Norman Zierold was born and raised in southeast Iowa. After serving in the United States Navy during World War II, he graduated from Harvard University and earned a master’s degree in English literature at the University of Iowa. Zierold taught English in France, and then moved to New York City, where he worked for Theatre Arts Magazine and SHOW magazine before becoming a full-time writer. His eight books include four histories of Old Hollywood—The Child Stars (1965), The Moguls (1969), Garbo (1970), and Sex Goddesses of the Silent Screen (1973)—and two acclaimed works of true crime—Little Charley Ross (1967) and Three Sisters in Black (1968), an Edgar Award finalist. Zierold’s most recent book, That Reminds Me: A Conversational Memoir, was published in 2013.
Gabrielle de Cuir, an Audie and Earphones Award–winning narrator, has narrated over three hundred titles and specializes in fantasy, humor, and titles requiring extensive foreign language and accent skills. Her “velvet touch” as an actor’s director has earned her a special place in the audiobook world as the foremost producer for bestselling authors and celebrities.
Reviews
“A criminal curio of bona fide fascination.”
“Fascinating detective work…An enigmatic case…Entertaining for the morbidly curious.”
“Zierold does a splendid job of reconstructing the events.”
“Suburban New Jersey has been the scene of some memorable homicides, but it would be hard to beat this 1909 beauty involving some of the best (or perhaps the worst) people.”
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