Bones in the Desert: The True Story of a Mother's Murder and a Daughter's Search

Jana Bommersbach

Sep 2008 · Sold by Macmillan

About this ebook

Jana Bommersbach's Bones in the Desert is the shocking story of a devoted mother and daughter, a successful business, and the man who would do everything to destroy it all ...

Loretta Bowersock and her daughter, Terri, ran a multimillion-dollar furniture store based in Tempe, Arizona, where they were well-known and admired by many. Together, these two women seemed to be living the American Dream...until one man decided to take it all away.

Over the course of two decades, Taw Benderly worked his way into Loretta's heart, home, and business. Though the couple appeared to be happy, their lives behind closed doors told another story. Terri had always known that the handsome, charming, and usually unemployed Taw was manipulating her mother—but she did not know the extent of the abuse or how far he would go to defraud her. Then, just before Christmas in 2004, Loretta went missing. It would be more than a year before Terri learned the shocking truth: That, before killing himself, Taw murdered the 69-year-old Loretta and left her.

Ratings and reviews

Jana can get inside the subject's personality so deeply that it reads like a memoir.

The story dragged on

About the author

Jana Bommersbach (1945 - 2024) was an acclaimed Arizona journalist and author of The Trunk Murderess: Winnie Ruth Judd, which was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award and won Arizona's only literary prize. Named Arizona's Journalist of the Year, she won a Regional Emmy for her television writing and was honored with two lifetime achievement awards for her newspaper and magazine reporting. She lived in Phoenix.