Did a stealth & patient Serial Killer target James Duckett and years later his grandson in 2006? Maybe..Read my article in Issue #27 of Serial Killer Magazine...

In Issue #24 of Serial Killer Magazine, I waxed cryptic about the cataclysmic tragedies of the hard-luck Stayner family of Merced, CA. They are well known in the True Crime genre for the shocking 1972 kidnapping of 7-YO Steven Stayner and his creepy, serial killer, older brother Cary Stayner (The Yosemite Murders of 1999), who currently resides on California’s death row along with fellow inmate Scott Peterson. I would like to dissect another family full of bad fortune and calamity. The Duckett Family of Florida.

Most people will not know of death row denizen Jim Duckett, but they will be familiar with his daughter-in-law, Melinda Duckett, who was well known for her missing 2-YO son Trenton and her disastrous 2006 interview with HLN’s demonstrative crime doyenne, Nancy Grace. The conventional wisdom is that Melinda killed her baby Trenton and feigned a kidnapping in late August of 2006. Eleven days later she taped a heated interview with the pertinacious bulldog Grace, and the next day she was dead in her grandparents’ home in Lady Lake, FL.
Most believe she killed herself.

Not so fast, Perry Mason. Conventional wisdom is for the lazy, the bandwagon-brigade and somnambulant slags. Let’s follow the bloody trail of corn, instead. Was murder intrinsic to the doomed family or were the ill-omened Ducketts quarry for a canny and patient serial killer(s)? I’ll unpack my capacious bag full of stranger-than-fiction truths and let the reader decide.