Death benefit

For Steve Keeney, it began with a simple favor. A woman from Keeney's Louisville church, Bobbie Roberts, confided that her twenty-year-old daughter Deana had recently died in a cliff fall at Big Sur, California. Bobbie was now having trouble collecting burial insurance. Keeney, a successful corporate lawyer, agreed to help her cut through the red tape. The coroner's report stated that a couple named B.J. and Virginia McGinnis had driven Deana to a four-hundred-foot Big Sur cliff. The McGinnises said that when their backs had been turned, the girl had fallen "without a sound." Days after reading this report, Keeney was stunned to learn that Virginia had paid for a life insurance policy on Deana one day before the accident. Keeney suspected foul play, but Big Sur authorities quietly dropped the case: There were no witnesses other than the McGinnises. Undeterred, Keeney promised his client that he would try to find out the truth. A chilling portrait emerged. Virginia called herself a practical nurse, but people had dark memories of her "care." They recalled her three-year-old daughter, her husband, and her mother - all of whom died while alone with Virginia. A series of fires, thefts, poisonings, and insurance policies ran through her past. Keeney also discovered that both of Virginia's sons had been charged with murder. As Keeney was piecing the facts together, he realized he had uncovered a remorseless killer, one who beat the system for twenty years, collecting insurance along the way. Former prosecutor David Heilbroner, author of the highly acclaimed book Rough Justice, spent two-and-a-half years retracing Keeney's investigation, preserving accounts of many witnesses whose voices were never heard at Virginia's extraordinary two-month murder trial - a trial that literally took the jury to the edge of the Big Sur cliff. In Death Benefit, he crafts a meticulous account of both a killer's life and a Kentucky lawyer's dedication to decency and courage triumphant ov