In his true-crime novel, Eli Sanders addresses the actual crime case of the culprit Isaiah Kalebu and his two victims, Jennifer Hopper and Teresa Butz. On a summer night in 2009, Kalebu broke into the house of Hopper and Butz, an engaged lesbian couple, where he proceeded to rape and attack both women and, in the end, kill Teresa. From the beginning, Isaiah was portrayed as a troubled person who clearly struggled with a mental illness, and even though there should have been the possibility of counselling with every court appearance he had because he was clearly mentally struggling, he was never granted that chance and only fell into a darker path. In his novel, Sanders shows that Kalebu’s case is not an isolated incident and deals with an ongoing, ever-growing problem while giving Jennifer and Teresa the chance to spread their story. 

Novel/True-Crime · United States · 2016