Gossip pushed the protagonist's brother into killing himself, and lies posted on the internet led vandals, stalkers, and burglars to the author's house, but the police won't help. Family dysfunction spreads across State lines to identity theft and internet crime.
"To the Chief of Pompano Beach Florida Police:
I am contacting you reference a possible cult disappearance/suicide. I live in Virginia. I have a 50-year-old disabled brother in very poor physical and mental condition, living in Portland, Oregon, who is currently missing...I have a sister in Pompano Beach, Florida who has her own cult of which my brother is a member...."
Thus begins the true letter to the police, and the true story, almost unbelievable, of the journey of one woman's struggle to clear her name and remain true to her faith in God. On this journey she encounters the dreadful truth about her childhood, and the conspiracy to make her lose everything at the hands of her family. It is one woman's jouney from the Bible Belt of Virginia, to California's Silicon Valley, to "la la" land in south Florida.
GOSSIP KILLS is a "whodunit"that explores the motive of the police for not helping the victim, and the basic anti-Catholicism that flourishes in our time. This nonfiction, true crime book shows you how one person, with a strong faith in God, survived a dysfunctional family's gossip gone public, including the eruption into internet-induced crimes and identity theft.
documents what the author had to do to survive the assaults and find out "whodunit." Simultaneously, she discovers the depth of betrayals interwoven in her family, is forced to become a detective of the internet, and must decide how to come to peace with the isolation created by gossip and suicide.
The book's subtitle, "The 9th/8th? Commandment," indicates the underlying conflicts between Catholic and non-Catholic Christian groups today that lead to public misunderstandings and controversies every bit as deadly as the ones in the author's family of origin.
Identity theft and internet-induced crimes make headlines almost daily. GOSSIP KILLS presents these two social and economic problems in a story that explains simply the complications of prosecuting such crimes. Victims, not-yet victimized citizens, and law enforcement personnel who read this story will easily comprehend the enormity of the problem, and focus on the solutions proposed. People of faith will be challenged to think how they live true to their beliefs.
Carole Fielder was born in Lynchburg, Virginia. She attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg and graduated valedictorian, magna cum laude from Lynchburg College in 1967. After a brief career with IBM in Huntsville, Alabama, she married and lived seventeen years in the heart of Silicon Valley before moving to south Florida in 1995 for health reasons. Carole was physically challenged with psoriatic arthritis in early adulthood, but she found that her faith in God and a passion for sailing kept her going. She named her small sloop "Fleur de Beaulieu" after the French Mediterranean village in which she once lived. These days she sails with a dog and two cats off the shore of Florida.
