Close to Home: Sexual Abusers and Serial Killers, Memoir and Murder

By: Janine O’Neill

Narrated by: Lee Ann Howlett

On January 9, 2002, twelve-year-old Ashley Pond left her family’s apartment in Oregon City, Oregon, to catch her bus to school. Then, she vanished.

Ashley loved her single-parent mother, but she hated her drinking, and the father figures in her life had come and gone. So she had learned to rely on her friends. Recently, however, things in her life had become even more complicated, so when she disappeared, many people believed she’d simply run away.

But Janine O’Neill had prosecuted crimes against children in Oregon City for seven years. She knew, with absolute certainty, that a twelve-year-old in that community would never vanish under the circumstances Ashley reportedly had unless something had gone terribly wrong.

Then, another girl went missing, and the son of a self-proclaimed serial killer identified himself as the prime suspect in both disappearances. O’Neill became obsessed with the story—so obsessed she eventually quit her full-time job and set off on a multistate search into the past with one overriding question: Could anything be scarier than what the public believed had happened to these girls?The answer, she learned, was yes.

©2023 Janine O'Neill Robben (P)2024 Janine O'Neill Robben

Relentless Quest for the Truth

It took a lot of guts to talk about sexual abuse within her own family. I liked how the author weaved in and out of her own life and the story of the others. Great listen, all around. Emotional, shocking, well researched, and well written.

Lots of boring narrative.

Didn’t like this book too much. Sometimes I wanted to say “cut to the chase”. The ending was dragging when the subject turned to genetics, chromosomes, and homicidal tendencies. It seemed unnecessary. At that point I just stopped listening.