With THE FORSAKEN’s publication just around the corner, I’m thrilled to pull back the curtain on a story that has lived in the shadows for far too long. Today, I’m honored to share a first look—an exclusive excerpt from the introduction—that captures the heartbreak, the mystery, and the haunting truth behind Rhonda and Donnie’s story.

These words mark the beginning of a journey through loss, resilience, and revelation—one that forever changed not only their family, but everyone it touched. As the release date nears, stay close… the full story is one you’ll never forget.

INTRODUCTION

“For the Lord loves justice; he will not forsake his saints.
They are preserved forever, but the children of the wicked shall be cut off.”
– Psalm 37:28

The rain began as a mist that morning in Newhall, the kind of reluctant drizzle that darkens stone and softens the silence of a cemetery. Eternal Valley Memorial Park, with its winding paths and solemn gardens, felt less like a resting place and more like a repository for stories that no one alive was meant to carry. I had come there searching—not just for a gravesite, but for courage. Beneath a pine whose needles wept with the weight of rain, two names waited for me: Rhonda Wicht, twenty-four, and her four-year-old son, Donnie.

Mother and child, bound in death as they had been in life—placed in the same casket after their murders in 1978. She, strangled with a rope looped twice around her neck; he, smothered with a t-shirt by a hand that likely belonged to someone they trusted. Their final breaths stolen, their futures erased.

It had been years since I last wrote about violent crime. As a reporter, I had covered horrors before, but nothing that pierced me so deeply, nothing that insisted I step closer when all I wanted was distance. This story did not arrive by assignment or curiosity—it found me through Shelley Hamilton, Rhonda’s sister and Donnie’s aunt. She reached out, desperate, determined, bearing a grief that decades had not dulled.

A man had already been convicted of the crime. He spent thirty-nine years behind bars before his release in 2017, walking free into the spotlight of vindication with a twenty-one million dollar settlement for what the courts called “wrongful imprisonment.”

To some, he became a symbol of injustice corrected. To Shelley, however, he was something more menacing: either a guilty man unshackled or the living proof that Rhonda and Donnie’s real killer still walks among us.

The case spirals outward in confounding directions—hero cops, controversial exonerations, the deafening roar of media praise for the man released. Lost in that noise, though, are the voices we should have never forgotten: Rhonda and Donnie. Their names, their faces, their memories have been buried beneath legal arguments and headlines that glorify everything but them.

And so Shelley asked me to tell their story. Not the story of the exonerated, not the self-anointed heroes—but of Rhonda and Donnie, whose lives ended too soon and whose absence has carved wounds into everyone who loved them.

I agreed, though the weight of it terrified me. Journalism teaches objectivity, the steady hand, the exacting eye; but who can remain neutral when confronted with the fingernail torn from a young woman in her final struggle, or the unbearable image of a boy gasping beneath the hand of someone he knew?

Still, I went. Rain dripping from the pines, mud clinging to their stone until I brushed it clean with my palm. I stood before Rhonda and Donnie and did the only thing I could—I spoke to them. I introduced myself as though they could hear, explained that I carried Shelley’s faith in me, confessed my dread at the enormity of what lay ahead. “Guide me,” I whispered. “I cannot do this without you.”

When I left, I carried no comfort, only a fierce clarity. At home, when I spread before me the photographs Shelley had entrusted—images of a smiling young woman and her golden-haired boy—I understood the true assignment. Not merely to retell the grotesque facts of one night in 1978, but to breathe back into history what was stolen: their humanity. In that moment, the work began; chapters unfolded, voices emerged, and yet one haunting question remained unresolved, crushing in its simplicity:
If the man convicted is innocent, then who killed Rhonda and Donnie? And why does no one still seek him?

I often wonder what they might have become. Rhonda—a radiant college student whose resilience hinted at a bright and determined future. Donnie—a four-year-old with blue eyes and the kind of grin that convinces you the world is still good. Their potential, obliterated. Their legacy, distorted by a system that celebrates warriors of justice while discarding its most fragile victims.

The truth is, the killer did more than end their lives. He severed timelines, destroyed possibilities, and set off shockwaves that will reverberate through their family, their community, and now through me—until their story is finally told.

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