About this ebook
For twenty-five years, Dr. John Story was the most trusted man in Lovell, Wyoming. He was the town's family doctor, a pillar of the community, a man who delivered babies, treated children, and cared for generations of the same families. He was also systematically raping his patients.
His victims were mostly Mormon women, raised in a faith that emphasized submission, modesty, and deference to male authority. When Dr. Story subjected them to lengthy, invasive pelvic examinations, always without a nurse present, they assumed it was normal. They trusted him. They trusted the church that told them to trust him. Some didn't understand what had been done to them until their wedding nights. Others suspected but had no language for what they felt, no framework for what they knew, and no one they believed would listen.
For years, the secret held. Then a woman named Arden McArthur began quietly talking to her neighbors, comparing notes, keeping score. What she uncovered was not one victim but dozens, spanning more than a generation. Women in their seventies. Girls as young as thirteen. All of them patients of the same trusted doctor in the same small town.
When the women finally came forward, they expected justice. Instead they found a town that didn't want to believe them. The Medical Board of Wyoming was hostile to their claims. Their neighbors turned against them. The community fractured along religious and family lines, with Story's supporters calling it a Mormon conspiracy. Women who had already survived years of violation now faced public humiliation, disbelief, and the destruction of lifelong friendships. One said she felt she was being raped all over again.
Dr. Story was eventually convicted and imprisoned. But the wounds he left behind cut deeper than any verdict could reach. Marriages buckled. Businesses failed. Families chose sides and held them for years. Lovell, Wyoming, the self-proclaimed Rose Town, would never fully recover.
Jack Olsen, the New York Times bestselling author known as "the dean of true crime," spent years and made ten trips to Lovell documenting every dimension of this story: the predator who hid behind a white coat and a community's trust, the courageous women who refused to stay silent, and the town that had to decide what it believed about itself.
As Publishers Weekly wrote, Doc is "as much a searching sociological study as a true-crime narrative." It is a story about power, faith, silence, and the devastating cost of speaking the truth in a place that would rather not hear it.
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About the author
Jack Olsen is the award-winning author of thirty-three books, which have been published in fifteen countries and eleven languages. Olsen’s journalism earned the National Headliners Award, Chicago Newspaper Guild’s Page One Award, commendations from Columbia and Indiana Universities, the Washington State Governor’s Award, the Scripps-Howard Award and other honors. The Philadelphia Inquirer described him as “an American treasure.”
Olsen was described as “the dean of true crime authors” by the Washington Post and the New York Daily News and “the master of true crime” by the Detroit Free Press and Newsday. Publishers Weekly called him “the best true crime writer around.” His studies of crime are required reading in university criminology courses and have been cited in the New York Times Notable Books of the Year. In a page-one review, the Times described his work as “a genuine contribution to criminology and journalism alike.”
Olsen is a two-time winner in the Best Fact Crime category of the Mystery Writers of America, Edgar award.
