American Bluebeard

My great grandaunt Beatrice, a well-to-do young widow, met a man on a train in 1919, they were soon married, and that was the last anyone heard from Beatrice. It turned out he was a serial killer. James P. Watson traveled throughout Canada, the Pacific NW, and California by train or expensive automobiles, always staying at elegant hotels. He approached attractive and refined women with marriage proposals and promises of exotic travel; he ran lonely hearts ads in local newspapers. Watson married as many as 50 women, and after extracting their money, killed at least 22 of those "wives" and abandoned many more. He made a good living for twenty years at this career. But, it took only one suspicious wife to bring down his house of cards.

Alene Lorraine Burnett-Reaugh was born in Tacoma and grew up in Bellevue, WA. She studied Psychology at the University of Washington nights while workings full time as a Claim Investigator, a career spanning 40 years until she retired in 2013. In 1996 she married her best friend, Jim. They now live on the Oregon Coast near Newport, a beautiful quiet place to write. She has a personal stake in telling this story. Her grandmother Lorraine's Cornish aunt, Beatrice Maud Roscorla Andrewartha, disappeared in 1919 shortly after marrying a man she met on a train. The scandal of murder was a smudge on the respectfulness of the family, so it became a family secret. After twenty years of research, she can now expose this secret and lay the story to rest. This is Alene's first book.