Who Killed These Girls?: The Unsolved Murders That Rocked a Texas Town Mass Market Paperback – July 25, 2017

So sad what happened to these girls. Reading this book and the way the investigators manipulated a confession out of the of the suspects was horrible. I hope they find out who really killed those girls. The book was great, it had a lot of facts in it and things taken from police reports, the investigators themselves as well as the families of the girls. I did skip over the last few parts when it was getting into the legal issues and became kind of tedious, it wasn't much that I skipped over so all in all a great read.

I've lived in Austin, Texas since 1976 and have followed the YSM case since the beginning. This book does a good job of laying out the evidence, or really the lack of, introduces pretty much all of the players in the case, and offers a glimpse of what Austin was like back in 1991. I had lots of friends who went to McCallum and the scene there was identical to what we had at Austin High around 1980: a decade later apparently nothing much had changed except there were skinheads in the mix. The writing style and narrative structure is a little odd in some places but overall it's a good read. A couple of small nitpicks - in 1991 Austin hadn't felt like a "town" for at least 10 years and no Austinite says "Highway 1": it's either "MoPac" or less commonly "Loop 1".

How is it that so many supposed professionals can look at a confession that has every indication of being coerced continue with a prosecution? It's unbelievable to me that so many detectives, prosecutors, district attorneys, judges, and jurors can be so incompetent that they can't use common sense when deciding someone's life. If a detective has to feed details of the crime to a person making a confession so that his confession matches the evidence, that is not a confession. If there is not one shred of physical evidence to back up that confession, it's a false confession.The same pattern repeats over and over again. One or more individuals is tried and convicted based on nothing more than a false confession. Years later, most often through DNA testing, it is discovered that DNA found at the scene doesn't match any of the people convicted of the crime. So what do the prosecutors and detectives and judges responsible for the mistake do? They claim that there must have been another individual involved and it doesn't necessarily mean that they made a mistake. They're still guilty because twelve jurors said they were guilty. What about the appeal system? A complete waste of time. Those judges are just as incompetent as the people who made the original mistake.A story like this takes years to run its course. Author Beverly Lowry spent eight years working on this book. She examines the crime, the murder and rape of four young girls in Austin, Texas on December 6, 1991, from every possible perspective. Through a very careful review of the record, she paints a clear picture of how so many people got so much wrong. If you stick with the evidence, it is almost certain that the two men responsible for this heinous crime were in the yogurt shop as the girls were closing up. They committed the crime, started the fire on the shelves where there were combustibles, and fled out the back door.As of right now, those two men are still at large. But they made a big mistake. They left their DNA. It wasn't mentioned in the book whether or not that unknown DNA was run through the CODIS database. Anyone searching for the truth would take this step. People who commit crimes like this don't lead exemplary lives afterward.I read the eBook version and listened to the audio version using Whispersyn. My only complaint was the lack of images. There's no excuse for that omission.

Just ok book, good story but written sort of jumbled. The outcomes were given away early and not knowing the entire course of events, it would have been a better read waiting until the end to find out what happened.

This $10 trap has worked better than anything we’ve done in the past! I am not a believer in poison so this has met my needs! It’s brutally hot and dry in Texas so they’re coming out of the green belts and everywhere for water, and this has already nailed four of them with only peanut butter.

Honestly this is one of my favorite true crime cases and I love reading anything about it, but this book is so poorly organized and all over the place that even someone who knows the case inside and out gets confused. The editor of this text needs a new job. Poor paragraph structure and excessive detail on some things that repeats over and over, while the true story as we all know it gets told in a scribbly, all over the place path that is frustrating to read and impossible to keep track of from chapter to chapter. My true crime book club members all agreed this was extremely poor writing.

If you like murder mystery, thriller with a twish, this is your book

Good read. I got more insight into the case than I ever knew before. It's my opinion that the killers are still out there and these four boys were probably innocent.

It is a very interesting story but I honestly don't think the author made the best job of it. There is a lot of work and research but I feel it could have "flowed" much better and made for a far better read.

Poorly organised, rambling and incoherent with too much speculation and irrelevant material. To compare this book to In Cold Blood is a travesty because of course Truman Capote was a great writer who just happened to invent a genre, but this is just another pale imitation.