A trail of corn

by Walker, Keith

How could a man be guilty of kidnaping and killing a 14-yr.-old school girl while on a fishing trip miles away when she disappeared? The district attorney claimed the suspect was a vicious sex killer who stalked the victim - and kept her possessions as a fetish. But Burton Abbott said he was 175 miles away when young, pretty Stephanie Bryan was last seen near her Berkeley, CA, home. And he had witnesses to prove it. Keith Walker's compelling story asks: Did Abbott leave a "trail of corn", showing evidence of his implication, as the district attorney claimed, or did someone else leave the "trail of corn", perhaps purposely? A phone call with only two minutes to spare, a mother's anguished cries, soil on boots nine inches down in the grave, human fingers protruding from under a trunk lid - these are some of the strange ingredients that went into this fascinating story. Burton Abbott was a tubercular ex-GI student at the University of California in Berkeley, CA, when Stephanie disappeared