Something Happened to Grandma

by Elizabeth Engstrom

(A 70-page True Crime Short with photographs) One cold February night, two people on the way home from a satisfying dinner with friends were ambushed by a rain of gunfire from the balcony of their own home. When the killer was finished, both victims lay dying. He stood over the man and then his mother, and fired one last round in each to "end their pain." The murderer was a family man, a former police officer, and a former Mormon missionary. He then took his terrified wife and screaming daughter, and they ran, shoeless, into the night, initiating a nationwide search for the "armed and extremely dangerous" couple. Their cross-country trail of lies culminated in an episode of the television show America’s Most Wanted and ended in a SWAT-team assault on the other side of the country.





What pressure cooker exploded in that man’s mind that February night? Was it an impulse, the product of an emotional breakdown? Or had he harbored such deep-seated feelings of hate for so long that he carefully plotted this event over decades, working out his alibi far in advance of the court trial he knew would eventually take place?

ebook

First published December 15, 2011

About the author

Elizabeth (Liz) Engstrom grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois (a Chicago suburb where she lived with her father) and Kaysville, Utah (north of Salt Lake City, where she lived with her mother). After graduating from high school in Illinois, she ventured west in a serious search for acceptable weather, eventually settling in Honolulu. She attended college and worked as an advertising copywriter.

After eight years on Oahu, she moved to Maui, found a business partner and opened an advertising agency. One husband, two children and five years later, she sold the agency to her partner and had enough seed money to try her hand at full time fiction writing, her lifelong dream. With the help of her mentor, science fiction great Theodore Sturgeon, When Darkness Loves Us was published.

Engstrom moved to Oregon in 1986, where she lives with her husband Al Cratty, the legendary muskie fisherman. She holds a BA in English Literature with a concentration in Creative Writing, a Master’s in Applied Theology, and a Certificate of Pastoral Care and Ministry, all from Marylhurst University. An introvert at heart, she still emerges into public occasionally to teach a class in novel or short story writing, or to speak at a writer’s convention or conference.