Murder in Little Egypt by Darcy O'Brien

A compelling chronicle that uncovers the truth behind two ghastly crimes and lays bare the divided psyche of their perpetrator. Murder in Little Egypt encompasses “stunning material,” says Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney, that is “handled with justice and fastidiousness by a natural storyteller.”

Indeed, the unimaginable crime of filicide takes on the cast of tragic inevitability in this haunting true tale of violence, greed, revenge, and death. Fusing the narrative power of an award-winning novelist and the detailed research of an experienced investigator, author Darcy O’Brien unfolds the story of Dr. John Dale Cavaness, the southern Illinois physician and surgeon charged with the murder of his son Sean in December 1984. Outraged by the arrest of the skilled medical practitioner who selflessly attended to their needs, the people of Little Egypt, as the natives call their region, rose to his defense.

In the subsequent trial, however, a radically different, disquieting portrait of Dr. Cavaness would emerge. For throughout the three decades that he enjoyed the admiration and respect of his community, Cavaness was privately terrorizing his family, abusing his employees, and making disastrous financial investments as well as carousing, brawling, and womanizing. What was not revealed in the trial, however, was that seven years earlier, in a homicide that had never been officially solved, the body of Cavaness’s firstborn son, Mark, had been found shot dead in the woods of Little Egypt.

As more and more grisly details of the Cavaness case come to stark Midwestern light in O’Brien’s chilling account, so too does the hidden, gothic underside of rural America and its heritage of violence and blood.