Here is how Tom French begins his seven-part series about the murder of a woman and her two daughters that took years to solve.

One year had gone by since the murders, and then another, and now the investigators were deep into a third. They were working day and night, working weekends, putting off vacations, losing weight, gaining weight, growing pale and pasty and haggard, waking at 3 a.m. with a jolt and scratching notes on pads beside their beds. Their sergeant did not know if they would ever find the answer. As far as he was concerned, the case was not even in their hands.

Ultimately, he believed, it was up to God whether they made an arrest.

A born-again Christian, the sergeant carried a Bible in his briefcase. He had no doubt that both heaven and hell were real. He saw good and evil not as theoretical or philosophical concepts, but as absolute realities walling upright through the world. He believed in the forces of light and darkness. He believed in demonic possession. He took it as a matter of fact that Satan and his cohorts currently reigned over the Earth.

"I believe there are demons all around us," he would say, "just as I believe there are angels all around us."

And when he looked at the evidence from the case before them now, studied the photos of the bodies and the ropes and the concrete blocks, the sergeant had no doubt that he and the other investigators were pursuing someone driven by Satanic forces.

Of course demons were real. They were hunting one now.

They Were on Their Way to the Magic Kingdom

The highways were filled with them. Couples in subcompacts, debating the wisdom of stopping at Stuckey's for a pecan log. Tour groups in tour buses, fleecing their companions at gin rummy and keeping an eye on their driver in case he nodded off. Myriad configurations of moms and dads and stepmoms and stepdads and napping toddlers and whining third-graders and sprawling teenagers in full sulk and mothers-in-law with pursed lips and embittered outlooks, all struggling for peaceful co-existence inside the air-conditioned confines of their minivans.

They were pilgrims, embarked on the same passage so many millions had made before. From every corner of the country they came, descending through the lengths of Alabama and Georgia until at last they reached the threshold of their destination.

Even then, they were not merely crossing state lines. They were slipping over to the other side, entering the isle of eternal youth, dominion of the sun, temple of the mouse who devoured the world, paradise of glistening beaches and murmuring waves and hallucinatory sunsets and oranges dripping with ambrosia and alligators smiling jagged smiles and snowy-haired seniors who play shuffleboard as they wait cheerfully for their collect call from God and intrepid astronauts who climb aboard gleaming spaceships, launched with a roar into a heavenly blue sky.

The ‘86 Oldsmobile Calais, pointed south on Interstate 75, was the color of that sky.

Inside the car, Jo Rogers and her daughters were making their escape. They were leaving the farm, leaving the sheriff's deputies and the counselors and the lawyers, searching for someplace warm and safe where they could hide and forget and find away back to themselves.

They had one week.

"We'll be back," Jo had told her husband. It's easy to picture her and the girls that first day. To see their two-door sedan climbing into the hills of southern Ohio, to hear the drone of the tires on the pavement, to sink into the quilted dark blue fabric of their bucket seats and gaze down the highway to the edge of the Earth, dropping off over the horizon.

Jo, tired as usual but glad to finally be off, was at the wheel, at least in the beginning; this much has been confirmed. Michelle, 17, the quiet one with the constellation of rings on her left hand, was probably up front as well, in the passenger seat. Christe, 14, the baby of the family, her father's favorite, the cheerleader, the one with the mane of mall hair and the trio of friendship bracelets on her wrist, most likely would have been in the back.

They had a road atlas, and as they drove, they must have studied it closely, plotting their path straight through the heart of the country. They had a long way to go.

It was the afternoon of Friday. May 26,1989. A few hours earlier, Jo and the girls had started out from their 300-acre dairy farm in Van Wert County, in the northwestern corner of Ohio. The night before, Jo had worked her usual midnight shift—she drove a forklift and worked the assembly line at Peyton's Northern, a distribution center for health and beauty products on the other side of the Indiana state line—and had come home around dawn to their double-wide mobile home and grabbed a few hours of sleep while Michelle and Christe finished packing. Finally, around 1 p.m., the three of them got into the Calais, and Jo backed it up to the milk house to say goodbye to her husband.

Hal Rogers was outside, unloading corn gluten feed, when Jo backed around. He stopped for a moment, and Jo leaned through the window and gave him a kiss.

"Have a good time," he said.

Hal had wanted to go with his wife and daughters. But the spring rains had been late that year, and there was still corn and wheat and soybeans that needed planting and 80 Holsteins waiting to be milked every day at 5:30 a.m. and again at 3 p.m., no exceptions. Somebody had to stay and keep it all going.

Jo and Michelle and Christe were determined to make the best of it, even without Hal. They had been buzzing about this trip for weeks, debating which theme parks to hit and which to avoid, logging sessions at a local tanning salon so they would have a good base of bronze to build on under the southern sun. They had good reason to be excited. This was the first family trip of their lives, the first time they had managed to free themselves from the daily rigors of the farm and get away together. Most years, the best they could hope for was a few days at the Van Wert County Fair.

"When you run a dairy farm," explains Colleen Etzler, Jo's sister-in-law, "you don't get a vacation."

Early on, when they were planning the trip, Jo and the girls had talked about visiting Gatlinburg or Gettysburg. But in the end they had decided to be more adventurous and make the thousand-mile journey to Florida...

Here is how French describes the women's disappearance and the discovery of their bodies:

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That weekend, Hal Rogers kept watching the driveway. He would walk out of the milking parlor, finished with another shift with the cows, and glance up toward the house, hoping to see the Calais.

Hal didn't understand it. He hadn't heard from Jo or the girls for several days, but he was sure that Jo had told him they would be back on Saturday or Sunday at the latest; Jo was due back at work on Monday, Michelle's summer school classes were starting.

He tried not to worry. He told himself everything was fine.

"They're probably just dinking around someplace," he said to a friend.

Still, it wasn't like Jo to be late. Wasn't like her not to call if the plans had changed or if something had gone wrong.

Where were they?

This one was floating to the north of where the first body had been sighted. It was 2 miles off The Pier in St. Petersburg. Like the first, this body was face down, bound, with a rope around the neck and naked below the waist. The same Coast Guard crew was sent to recover it, and while the crew was doing so, a call came in of yet a third female, seen floating only a couple of hundred yards to the east.

The three bodies were taken to the dock at the Coast Guard station to be examined and photographed by the police investigators already arriving at the scene. The bodies were bloated and had begun to decompose, but it was still possible to determine that they were white women who appeared to be fairly young.

The hands and feet of all three were tied and bound in the same manner, though the left hand of the second woman was loose. Before dying, she had apparently wrested the hand free. All had duct tape over their mouths: The second and third bodies had concrete blocks attached to the ropes around their necks. Though the rope around the neck of the first body had been cut by the Coast Guard, it was assumed that a concrete block had been tied to that line as well.

The First Sighting Was Early that Sunday Morning

June 4, another hot and beautiful day. The Amber Waves, a sailboat on its way home to Tampa after a trip to Key West, had just crossed under the Skyway when several people on board saw an object in the water. It looks like a body, one of them said.

It was a female, floating face down, with her hands tied behind her back and her feet bound and a thin yellow rope around her neck. She was naked from the waist down.

A man from the Amber Waves radioed the Coast Guard, and a rescue boat was dispatched from the station at Bayboro Harbor in St. Petersburg. The Coast Guard crew quickly found the body, but recovering it from the water was difficult. The rope around the neck was attached to something heavy below the surface that could not be lifted. Noting the coordinates where the body had been found, the Coast Guard crew cut the line, placed the female in a body bag, pulled the bag onto the boat and headed back toward the station. The crew members had not yet reached the shore when they received another radio message: A second female body had just been sighted by two people on a sailboat.

French goes to Ohio where the women lived.

Usually, when someone from Zion Lutheran Church died, the church would call a man who lived nearby and ask him to help with the grave. This man was a member of the congregation; more importantly, he had a backhoe, and opening the grave took him only a few minutes.

But in June of 1989, when they asked him to bring his backhoe for the burial of Jo and Michelle and Christe Rogers, he told them they would have to find someone else this time.

Like so many others in Van Wert County, Ohio, he had known the Rogers family for years. He was one of Hal's best friends—they had hung out together since elementary school—and Jo had been like a sister to him. Michelle and Christe had grown up in front of him, playing on his back porch; Christe used to help him load cows.

How could he dig three holes in the ground for them?

"No, I can't," he told the church. "I can't. I can't do that."

"The size of it, the depth and scale and unthinkable nature of it, was almost impossible to comprehend.

At first, when the bodies were being flown back to Ohio and preparations were being made for the funeral, family members struggled to come to terms with what had happened. They worried about what clothes Jo and the girls should be wearing in their caskets, then they remembered how long the three of them had been in the water and knew the caskets would be closed.

Somewhere in that fast numbing week, Colleen Etzler—married to Jo Rogers' brother, Jim—was sitting with Bill Etzler, her father-in-law and Jo's father, when Bill got this strange look on his face.

"Do you realize how many pallbearers we need?" he said.

No one was in greater shock than Hal Rogers. Even in those first days, when the news was all over the newspapers and the TV and the entire county was reeling, Hal managed somehow to keep the farm going. He got a couple of hands to help him and continued with the milkings and the feedings and whatever else had to be done. But inside he was lost.

Hal kept waiting for someone to tell him that there had been a mistake, that the bodies sent up from Florida weren't his family after all, but someone else. The phone would ring, and he would pick it up, expecting to hear Jo's voice on the other end of the line, apologizing for making him worry. In the mornings, he would come out of the milking parlor and look toward the house, hoping to see the Calais pulling into the driveway and Jo and the girls piling out, grinning and waving.

But no one called, and every time Hal checked the driveway there was no sign of the Calais, and the hole inside him kept growing.

One day he turned to Colleen Etzler.

"I should have went with them," he said. "This wouldn't have happened."

Colleen looked at Hal, enveloped in a loss that defied the imagination, and tried to think of what to say. What could anyone say? How was this possible? How could Jo and the girls be alive one day and then sealed inside their caskets the next?

No. It made no sense.

"Maybe it wouldn't have made any difference if you had gone," she said.

The pallbearers took up four rows of pews...

The service got under way. The congregation sang "How Great Thou Art," and when it was time for the sermon, the pastor asked aloud the question that was on so many people's minds: How could God have let this happen? That night out on Tampa Bay, when Jo and Michelle and Criste were praying for their lives, where was the God?

"Why? Oh, dear God, why?" said the Rev. Gary Luderman. "Where were you, God, when this was going on. What was God doing when this was going on? What in the world was going through God's mind when He decided to allow this to go on?"

The pastor told the congregation that God in fact had been with them on the water that night, watching over them as they moved not toward death but toward eternal life. If heaven could open up at this moment, he said, the congregation would see Jo and Michelle and Christe, bathed in joy and glory.

"Don't you see?" he said, his voice rising. "Don't you see how Jesus loved Joan and Michelle and Christe? Don't you see how Jesus loves you? How God must feel right now as he looks into our hearts and sees our pain and our sorrow and our grief?"

The church was silent, but from outside came the sound of a sparrow chirping. Luderman went on. God, he said, had not intended for something so horrible to happen. "He never meant for you to suffer this pain. He never meant them to have this death. He loves us." Here the pastor's voice dropped. "What a terrible thing it must be to be God. How in paradise at this moment He must be weeping with you."

In the pews, the congregation was indeed weeping. It seemed that tears were falling down every face. People were holding those sitting next to them, even if they did not know each other.

The most noticeable exception to these displays of grief came from Hal Rogers. Wearing his tinted glasses as usual, Hal did not show anyone his tears. He sat up front, his movements almost robotic, his face a blank and unreadable text.

The pallbearers stood up and carried Jo and Michelle and Christe down the red carpet of the center aisle and out the arched front doors. To the tolling of church bells, three hearses took the caskets to the tiny cemetery across the road where three freshly dug graves were waiting. As the final prayers were spoken and the bodies were ready to be committed to the earth, some of Michelle's and Christe's friends began to sob and cry out.

Hal walked over to the caskets, took some flowers from the arrangements, and handed them, one by one, to his daughters' grieving friends. When the service was over, he went back across the road.

"I just want to be by myself," he said. He went inside the sanctuary, walked across its old creaking floor to one of the pews and sat alone, leaning over, wrapped inside himself. A neighbor's son stood guard at the front doors to make sure no reporters or photographers disturbed his solitude.

Later that afternoon, Hal returned to the farm. He took off his pinstriped suit, put on his overalls, and went out to the barn to grind some feed for the cows. It was all he could think to do...