In 1973, teenage girls began disappearing from Folly Beach, a small town on a barrier island in South Carolina. Initially thought by police to be runaways, the real story emerged when a police officer on patrol heard a cry for help and discovered three girls bound and gagged in an abandoned beach cottage. Further investigation turned up bodies buried in the dunes nearby.

The police reacted quickly and closed off the only bridge to the mainland, thereby trapping the townspeople with the certain knowledge that one among them was a serial killer. Everyone became a suspect, as neighbor turned against neighbor in an atmosphere of rapidly growing hysteria.

What do Jack the Ripper, The Son of Sam, Wayne Williams, Jeffrey Dahmer, The Boston Strangler, and The Coed Killer John Norman Collins have in common with this obscure case? What connects the people of London, New York, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Boston and Ann Arbor, Michigan to those in the tiny town of Folly Beach?

Drawing upon 20th-century media coverage and on 19th-century tabloid accounts of Jack the Ripper, the author constructs vivid and provocative portrayals of the ways in which some of the most notorious serial killers affected the communities they terrorized.