Author's note: The investigation into the 1942 rape and murder of Ursula Ketterman went wrong from the start. The case is still listed as an unsolved homicide in Keaton County, California, where the spectacular court house in Tigh Harbor holds files of the two trials in the case. The first trial, in the summer of 1951, made national news. It garnered columns in Time, pages in LIFE, and exhaustive coverage in the Tigh Harbor Patriot, the newspaper of J. Kenneth Caulfield, Tigh Harbor's leading citizen. In comparison, the second trial, went almost unnoticed. You might well wonder why. Decades later, during a dinner party at our house in Newport Beach, California, a neighbor startled all of us with an astonishing story-a lurid tale of sex, rape, medical malpractice, newspaper wars, and murder. Our guest had grown up in Tigh Harbor, knew the secrets and hopes of its residents, and was now a successful Orange County business owner. She insisted that both the legal arguments and the coverage of the case in local and national media had missed the true story, and that everything she told us at the table that night could easily be confirmed. Easily? This didn't fit at all with Tigh Harbor's tony public image. Why, I asked her, was there never a word about this startling affair in the Patriot? Everyone looked in anticipation at our friend. Her return look was stark. "Isn't it obvious?" In these pages, another publisher, young, determined, impassioned, sets out to learn what really happened to Ursula Ketterman. Sarah Baker had compelling and very personal reasons to pursue the investigation, but little awareness of how hazardous it would become, or how its tentacles might wrap around the unlikely, especially those she loved. Names have been changed here, and you won't find Tigh Harbor on the map. But you can guess. The picture-perfect city where this story took place exists, right there on the craggy California coast.
