The Scientist and the Serial Killer

“Lise Olsen’s story of Houston’s Lost Boys gripped me from the first page. In raw detail, she describes the battle between a dead serial killer who targeted teenaged boys and a forensic scientist who sought to identify the victims—a battle between evil and science, and science wins. Olsen is vivid writer, finely drawing the victims and their families, the police and the scientists, and mainly, the obsessed murderer and the equally obsessed forensic heroine. This is a triumph of investigative reporting.”—Barbara Bradley Hagerty, New York Times bestselling author of Bringing Ben Home“A masterwork of crime writing … Lise Olsen has taken a fifty-year-old story and made it new and fresh and terrifyingly real. I hate to use the old cliché, but for anyone interested in crime narratives this is a must-read. Her brilliantly organized pages turn themselves.”—S. C. Gwynne, author of the New York Times bestseller Rebel Yell“Lise Olsen is not only a masterful investigative reporter, she’s one hell of a storyteller. Her sentences are completely dramatic, her character descriptions spot on. I felt a pit in my stomach reading this book.”—Skip Hollandsworth, author of the New York Times bestseller The Midnight Assassin“Lise Olsen has expertly crafted a fascinating, in-depth examination of one of the most horrific serial-killing sprees in U.S. history and the dedicated forensic scientist who unraveled a mystery that haunted Houston for decades… . A must-read for CSI and true crime fans, this book kept me up late into the night.”—Kathryn Casey, author of In Plain Sight“A master class in uncovering long-buried truths, this book illuminates one of Houston’s darkest murder cases. Olsen’s account of Sharon Derrick’s journey to restore the identity of these victims is revelatory and redemptive, with a page-turning narrative thrill.”—Kirk Wallace Johnson, author of The Feather Thief“This is essential reading, for the depth and precision of its meticulous reporting, for its gripping storytelling, and for its insistence on providing the long-overdue justice these Lost Boys never received in their own brief lives. Its elegiac power has stayed with me long after the final pages.”—Ellen McGarrahan, author of Two Truths and a Lie“It’s no surprise that Olsen, who has devoted much of her celebrated career in journalism to the missing, simultaneously delivers a murder mystery in reverse and a fascinating history of forensic science. But the most poignant aspect of this impressive work is its portrait of the secret lives of teen boys in the 1970s, when America was pivoting, for better or worse, between a postwar idyll and the wiser, less innocent world we live in today.”—Claudia Rowe, author of The Spider and the Fly“[Lise] Olsen’s mystery story is impossible to put down, but the families’ losses and her heroine’s persistence will stay with you forever.”—Mimi Swartz, author of Ticker

Lise Olsen is an investigative reporter and editor and the award-winning author of Code of Silence and The Scientist and the Serial Killer. Her reports have contributed to the prosecutions of a former congressman and a federal judge, inspired laws and reforms, helped solve cold cases and identify murder victims, and freed wrongfully held prisoners. Her writing has appeared in the Texas Observer, NBC News, the Houston Chronicle, Texas Monthly and elsewhere. She is featured in Netflix’s The Texas Killing Fields, Paramount+’s The Pillowcase Murders, CNN’s The Wrong Man, and the A&E series The Eleven. She lives near Houston, Texas, where she and her husband raised two boys of their own.