THE MISSOURI BLOODBATH :The Colton Family Who Slaughtered 14 Men Over Stolen Horses

THE MISSOURI BLOODBATH :The Colton Family Who Slaughtered 14 Men Over Stolen Horses

September 2014. Sedalia, Missouri.
Ray Hastings has been a horse auctioneer for thirty-one years. He's seen everything—champion bloodlines sold for millions, broken-down nags going for dog food money, fortunes made and lost on four legs and a heartbeat.
But he's never seen anything like what he finds in the cardboard box.
A client has died—an old horseman named Virgil Prentiss who ran a breeding operation in Oklahoma for fifty years. His estate has sent Hastings a collection of photographs and documents for appraisal. Most of it is routine: registration papers, sale receipts, the ordinary paperwork of a life spent with horses.
Then Hastings finds the photographs.

Black and white images, faded with age. Horses he doesn't recognize at first, until he notices the distinctive markings, the conformation, the breeding characteristics that any expert would identify. These are Quarter Horses—expensive ones, competition quality, the kind that don't just disappear without someone noticing.

And beneath the photographs, a handwritten note: "Colton horses. Missouri Thunder and the mares. 1974. May God forgive us all."
Hastings knows the name Colton. Everyone in the Quarter Horse world knows that name.

He knows about the theft that destroyed them—three horses worth a fortune, stolen in the spring of 1974, never recovered.
He knows about the family that fell apart afterward, the breeding program that collapsed, the name that vanished from registration papers and sale catalogs.

What he doesn't know—what no one has known for forty years—is what the Coltons did when the law failed to find their horses.
What he doesn't know is that fourteen men died for those horses.
And the answers are in this box.