1919.
A Year of Violence. Race, riots, anarchist bombings, and lynchings. Red Summer and the Red Scare. Boston's Great Molasses Flood.
And in a small Vermont town-Murder.
A young woman is strangled, her naked body left in a frozen back yard just a few streets from her home and her husband's church. Pastor's wife, Red Cross volunteer, and the loving mother who read scripture to her three children before kissing them goodnight, Rose on Saturday evenings met men for dates at a bordello.
On her last walk toward home death waited for her in the cold, fog covered night.
Her story, one of sex, infidelity, and corruption, gripped the nation. But seen now, over a hundred years later, Rose's murder and its aftermath are more than the titillating tale-thinly veiled for polite consumption as a cautionary moral lesson-newspapers reported at the time about this "sporting" woman.
Rose wasn't a "loose" woman, but a liberated one who the murderer made sure never told her secret. He silenced her voice. Until now, in
Body on Ice
.
The social turmoil in the country affected the investigation.
And the Great Molasses Flood?
Retribution from the grave.