Love Gone Wrong

Notorious USA

by Caitlin Rother, Gregg Olsen (Introduction)

New York Times bestselling Notorious USA series

Florida, Georgia, South Carolina

Welcome to Florida, the Sunshine state with a darker side than most. The mecca for wealthy retirees to enjoy their younger girlfriends, yachts and marble-floored mansions, where recreational drugs, sex and booze flow like the warm water that hugs the coast. Where teenage girls and their boyfriends kill their parents in the name of love, and women shoot their boyfriends then claim self-defense. New York Times bestselling crime authors Caitlin Rother and Gregg Olsen join to release this compilation of murder cases from the vacation destination that is home to Disney World and miles of beaches, yet also has more killers on its death row than any other state but California. This compilation pairs two sets of cases with similar circumstances but very different outcomes. In the first story, a former flight attendant murders her multimillionaire boyfriend of eighteen years, using a gun, a knife, a hammer (and possibly poisoned his gin as well), claiming he was abusive for years and put a loaded gun to her head. In the second story, a woman with a history of violent, drug-addicted boyfriends kills her latest lover after only a few weeks together, alleging that he forced a gun into her mouth in a drug-induced rage. In the third story, a 15-year-old girl falls in love and wants to have a baby with a boyfriend who is four years older. Her mother, who wants to end the relationship, ends up dead after being stabbed, choked, and injected with a syringe loaded with bleach. Finally, a 16-year-old girl and her 20-year-old boyfriend conspire to fatally bludgeon her disapproving father with a baseball bat.

Welcome to Georgia, where the all-mighty dollar trumps mercy and lawfulness on an all-too-regular basis. Where hit men can be hired for small sums and lovers can be manipulated into killing innocent people, all out of greed. In the first story, the socialite wife of a multimillionaire is fatally shot by a flower delivery man on the day of a key divorce hearing. After sending authorities on a global fugitive hunt, the man responsible is brought back to face justice twenty years later, wearing only one sandal on his gout-ridden feet. In the second, a crooked businessman trying to go straight is shot in his driveway by a hit man wearing a ski mask and camouflage gear—one in a nationwide series of contract-for-hire murders, advertised in the classified-ad pages of Soldier of Fortune magazine. And finally, a Gulf War veteran and father of three is kidnapped, beaten and stabbed by the lover of his on-and-off-again wife, who wants to collect life insurance benefits and pay off her house. The lover makes a deal for a life sentence and a chance at parole, while the wife gets the death penalty. She becomes the second woman ever to be executed in Georgia, even after the Pope, other faith-based advocates and two of her children fight for her clemency, citing her dramatic repentance and rehabilitation through religion.

And finally, in South Carolina, where racial strife and righteous, heavily-armed indignation leads to murder. Rother brings listeners a compilation of crime stories from this former Confederate the first woman in South Carolina to go to the electric chair after a vengeful feud over a dead calf turned fatal; the state's most prolific serial killer who managed to kill a fellow prisoner while on death row; and the young white man accused of trying to incite a race war by fatally shooting nine African-Americans during Bible study in a historic church.

Genres: True Crime, Nonfiction

227 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 8, 2016

About the author

New York Times bestselling author Caitlin Rother has written or co-authored 14 books, ranging from narrative non-fiction crime to mystery and memoir. Her newest book is DEATH ON OCEAN BOULEVARD: Inside the Coronado Mansion Case (April 27, 2021). Her backlist includes HUNTING CHARLES MANSON; SECRETS, LIES, AND SHOELACES; LOVE GONE WRONG; DEAD RECKONING; THEN NO ONE CAN HAVE HER; I'LL TAKE CARE OF YOU; NAKED ADDICTION; POISONED LOVE; BODY PARTS; TWISTED TRIANGLE; LOST GIRLS; WHERE HOPE BEGINS and MY LIFE, DELETED. A Pulitzer Prize nominee, Rother worked as an investigative reporter at daily newspapers for 19 years before quitting the news biz in 2006 to write books full-time. Her journalism has been published in Cosmopolitan, the Los Angeles Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The Daily Beast. She has done more than 200 appearances as a crime commentator on TV, radio and podcasts, ranging from "20/20," "People Magazine Investigates," "Nancy Grace," and "Crime Watch Daily," to shows on HLN, Oxygen Network, Investigation Discovery, C-SPAN, XM Radio and PBS affiliates. She also works as a writing-research-promotions coach and consultant.

Reviews

[Maureen Timerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Compelling read and three books providing in this set, and once you finish one you will be quickly on to the next. What a great buy, and makes a wonderful read for those who love non-fiction.
Kill Him Some More are true stories that make it even worse, you can’t imagine how these could happen.
If you were in your fifties and your beauty was fading would you kill your elderly boyfriend, no he never married you, now he wants younger woman, so she showed him. Then we have people on drugs, these people are so damaged by what they are doing to their bodies, and now they are killing one another. Justice, but who and what do you believe?
The tragedy are the young teenagers whom the parents have literally lost control of them completely, they do as they please, and may have you believing they are following the rules, but no, they are now facing murder charges. Follow these trials to the end, and yet where are the answers to preventing these horrible acts?
Caitlin Rother presents the facts here, you don’t have to do the digging, she has it all and it is not pretty, and how these people die is horrible.
A Complicated Woman: South Carolina, Notorious USA I didn’t know that the first woman who went to the electric chair was from South Carolina, nor that it evolved over the death of a calf. The cases in this book involve a famous Senator Strom Thurmond, and a serial killer Pee Wee Gaskin, who is even able to kill while in prison.
There is so little value in human life, and the last case tells about a resent man who killed the people who opened their church to him, and in the end they lived their faith and forgave him.
Such needless killings, and it seems there are different reasons, but mostly hate. So very sad.

Dead on Delivery has the State of Georgia in its mind, and the crimes have home in the Peach State. We find greed rearing its ugly head, and in one a wife planning the murder of her husband for a non-existent insurance policy, a war veteran who spends his day helping a friend.
I never knew, even if it doesn’t exist now, that there was a magazine people advertised in to offer their services as a sniper, murder for hire? We find this service being used, we also see a lot of missteps but in the end, it is all laid out to greed, and Caitlin Rother has brought all of this story to us, we don’t need to hunt through pages and pages of documents. I find it hard to believe that these things are happening, my head in the sand, yes.
Then we also have Mr. Wealthy, he doesn’t want to give his soon to ex-wife a cent, and so we do away with her. We watch how justice has a long time coming, but in the end we sometimes wonder if it has been served.
Compelling page turning read, and you will wonder if the death sentence should be used, while I agree with it, it is controversial.
I received this book from the Author, and was not required to give a positive review.

[Sheuringd1988 · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK book

OK true crime book about murders in the South. The accounts are general, mostly like reading news articles, without much depth. Formatting issues on the Kindle were distracting, along with some spelling and grammar errors. No photographs included, which would've added interest, and some of the stories that took place over a long period of time were rushed. OK for a quick read.

[Bonnie Kernene · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good book. It covered several different stories, mostly from Florida. Most of them are not high profile cases, which made them even more interesting. There was Bryan Sorendino, Vicki Robinson, Steve Schulhoff and a few others. I thought it was well-written and straight to the point. Each story gave all of the details without the fluff. It is a fast and easy book to read, and it was fun! I liked it and recommend it.

[Bettye McKee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three books in one volume

The stories in this volume cover crimes in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Believe me, there's not a bad story in the bunch. Mostly it makes you shake your head and wonder how people bent on committing a crime can be so stupid.

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[Janie Hickok Siess · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Love Gone Wrong, murders committed or commissioned by the victims’ significant others are spotlighted. Each story is fascinating, proving yet again that the old adage is accurate: Truth is indeed often stranger than fiction.

Kill Him Some More tackles the murder of Ronald Vinci, described by his attorney as “a man of integrity,” who built an empire from meager beginnings. He went to San Diego in the 1960’s with $1500 and some tools, but was a multimillionaire when in 2011, at age 71, his body was discovered in a Florida mansion. His girlfriend, former flight attendant Catherine Pileggi, spent eighteen years with Vinci in an on-again, off-again relationship that Vinci apparently had recently informed her was about to be off again. She admitted that she killed Vinci — after initially trying to convince a friend that Vinci had fallen down the stairs — but contended that she acted in self-defense. In a classic case of “overkill,” however, Pileggi didn’t just shoot Vince in the head. She also stabbed him in the chest five times, sliced his throat, and hit him in the head with a hammer. Next, Rother relates the story of Melissa and Bryan Sorendino, two drug addicted felons living on the opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum. Like Pileggi, Sorendino claimed her husband, from whom she had been estranged since shortly after the wedding, forced the barrel of the gun into her mouth, so she “had to stop him before he killed me.” She killed him by lodging a bullet in his chest at close range — as well as another in the back of his head that exited via the right side of his skull, just for good measure.

The other two Florida cases are particularly tragic because they involve parents dying at the behest of their children. When Chuck and Vicki Robinson divorced for the second time in 1994, their eleven-year-old daughter, Valessa, missed her father, who moved to St. Louis and remarried. Living with her religious mother, Valessa acted out by experimenting with drugs and sex. She fell hard for Adam William Davis, four years her senior, who had a criminal record and no plans or prospects for a stable future. Undeterred, Valessa was determined to become pregnant with his child and marry him. Her mother found and read Valessa’s journal, an act which proved to be her undoing. Vicki planned to send Valessa to a residential Christian school for troubled girls, but the plan never came to fruition. Despite a courageous struggle, Vicki was killed by Davis, at her own daughter’s urging, who took up residence on death row in January 2000. Valessa was sentenced as an adult and served fifteen years before being released in 2013.

Only ninety-five miles from the Robinson home, Courtney Schulhoff’s father attempted to keep her away from Michael Morin. In 2004, Courtney told police that her father, Steve, had beaten her because she stole his credit cards and used them without authorization, planned to drop out of school, and refused to stop seeing Morin. Courtney and Morin provided differing accounts of how Steve came to be bludgeoned in his bedroom with a baseball bat, his body wrapped in bedclothes and, like Vicki Robinson’s, stuffed upside down into a plastic storage bin. Courtney and Morin wrote love letters while awaiting trial, quoting “Romeo and Juliet.” After being sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, Courtney changed her story, taking credit for the killing where she had previously insisted that Moran killed Steve even as she begged him not to. In an attempt to free Morin, she testified at Morin’s trial that she beat her father to beat out of anger at Steve having raped her. The ploy failed. Morin was convicted of murder and, although not condemned, like Courtney, will never be eligible for parole.

Sometimes justice takes a long time, as in the case of the Georgia murder of Lita Sullivan, who was gunned down just inside the 17,000-square-foot mansion in Florida where she had been residing after finally ending her nine year marriage to the faithless Jim Sullivan. Seeing a flower delivery man through a glass panel in the door, Lita opened it — and was no match for the gun-toting assassin. She died at age 35 in January 1987, but her husband did not stand trial until March 2006. He was convicted of murder, but not sentenced to die since some of the jurors were opposed, on the basis of religion, to the death penalty (Rother does not expound upon why those individuals qualified, in light of their beliefs, to serve as jurors.) Initially lacking enough solid evidence to charge Sullivan with murder, he was first indicted in 1992 under federal law of using interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder for hire and three other charges, none of which stuck. However, luck and some attention from Hollywood, along with the dedication of seasoned investigators, finally resulted in a plea bargain for the hired killer in 1998. Sullivan, however, eluded capture until the case was featured on “America’s Most Wanted.” A tip permitted authorities to track Sullivan down, but they had to prevail in a lengthy extradition battle before Sullivan was returned to the United States and convicted of hiring an employee of a moving company to “take care of his wife” before the critical ruling in the Sullivans’ divorce proceeding. Sullivan was motivated to kill Lita because losing the divorce case was was going to “change [his] whole lifestyle.”

Rother also explores the convoluted tale of Richard Braun, who wanted to extricate himself from fraudulent business practices after giving up drugs and participating in AA meetings. A series of inept attempted murders, likened to a “comedy of errors,” appeared unrelated. But investigators got lucky when an employee of a murder-for-hire operation spanning Georgia, Florida, and Minnesota agreed to participate in a recorded telephone conversation with his boss. From there, details began to emerge and the puzzle pieces started falling into place, revealing “a crew of ragamuffin players” who, for the most part, never managed to carry out the murders for which they were contracted. The ringleader ended up serving a life sentence, while most of his crew brokered plea deals for themselves by revealing details. Soldier of Fortune magazine turned out to be a common denominator — the killers and would-be killers had been recruited through a “Gun for Hire” ad. The magazine paid judgments to the victims and ceased running those types of ads in 1986.

Lastly, Rother recounts the case of Kelly Renee Gissendaner, who found religion, demonstrated remorse, and completed a degree in theology while in prison where she counseled and assisted other inmates. Pleas for mercy from various religious groups, her own children, and even the Pope were futile. She was the second woman put to death in Georgia, the first execution of a woman having occurred seventy years earlier. Kelly married Douglas Gissendaner twice. After their first divorce, they both served in the U.S. Army. Eventually, they remarried. But they separated again after two years. Before they divorced a second time, Kelly fell in love with Gregory Bruce Owen, whom she convinced to murder Douglas so that she could collect the proceeds of a life insurance policy she believed existed. The policy limit was a mere $20,000 which Kelly planned to use to pay off the modest mortgage encumbering the Gissendaner residence. In the end, there was no life insurance policy. For Owen’s part, he was a willing participant in Kelly’s scheme because he figured that with Douglas out of the way, he would not have to fear that Kelly would again reconcile with her husband. And he would have a place to live.

In Love Gone Wrong, Rother employs the writing style that has made her a New York Times bestselling author. As usual, Rother’s thorough research of the cases she profiles is evident and her approach to each measured. Unlike Rother’s full-length books, each story is presented as a concise, quickly readable summary. Yet in true investigative style, Rother provides sufficient pertinent detail to provide her readers with an understanding of the major developments in each case, along with significant quotes from those involved, and an explanation of the ultimate resolution. She presents the legal bases for the defendants’ appeals and the results thereof using minimal “legalese” so that nonlawyers can appreciate the strategic machinations and their import. Most importantly, Rother makes no attempt to convince readers of the killers’ motives, instead including salient evidence that permits readers, like juries, to weight that evidence and draw their own conclusions. The cases of Vicki Robinson and Steve Schulhoff are the most emotionally wrenching give that they were victims of their own children and, in part, thanks to Rother characteristic restrained approach. With the death penalty the focus of intense scrutiny and debate, especially in California, Rother wisely concludes Love Gone Wrong with Gissendaner’s story, aptly titled Jailhouse Religion. Although each case is fascinating in its own right, it is Gissendaner’s that is the most thought-provoking and the one readers will likely find themselves pondering long after reading it. Once again, I find myself highly recommending Rother’s impeccable work. Love Gone Wrong is an enthralling and entertaining summer read.

[Bill reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rother has been coined as the new Ann Rule and it is a fair comparison. Like Rule, she sometimes writes compilation books. This one encompasses the South, Florida(drug and murder central), South Carolina and Georgia. Ronald Vinci owned nice things such as a mansion of 8,000 square feet and 80 foot yacht. As is common with rich men, he hooked up with a younger woman and it was to be a fatal mistake. The man was shot, stabbed, and struck with a hammer. The grieving widow did the foul deed and it deserves full length treatment. Storm Thurmond lived to the ripe old age of 100 and his life was colorful to say the least. He fathered a child with a black teenaged maid and while serving as a judge in the 1940's, had an affair with a woman, Sue Logue, who was executed for murder. Peewee Haskins also shuffled off this mortal coil via the chair, courtesy of South Carolina. Dylann Roof murdered black members of a church in order to start a race war. He must have read Helter Shelter. The state of Georgia provides entertainment with a woman answering her from door for a flower delivery, only to be gunned down in a murder for hire scheme. A messy divorce gave easy clues to a slow but final outcome. Kelly Gissendaner made the mistake of doing away with her spouse in Georgia. She found Jesus on death row and sang Amazing Grace as she left this world for the next one(and don't be late). Love Gone Wrong is a brief but good read.

[Briana Sutherland · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed the fact that this book had multiple true crime stories and many of them took place in my home state of Florida, which was interesting to read about as I could picture many of the locations mentioned. I gave this book two stars as I found many editing errors which was at times difficult to over look. Probably would have rathered watched a forensic files/law and order episode of these stories.

[shawna · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was good, can't wait to get more stories like this one.

[Charles Reimler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Magazine Style Of Interesting Variety Of Cases Are A Curious Mixture Of Stories!