On June 16, 1972, a Santa Barbara police officer was shot and wounded by a gunman fleeing the scene of an $11,000 supermarket robbery. Witnesses recalled the license number of the bandit's car, and it was traced to an address in suburban Goleta, occupied by 47-year-old Sherman McCrary, his wife Carolyn, and their 19-year-old son Danny. Evidence pointed to McCrary's son-in-law, 38-year-old Raymond Carl Taylor, as the trigger man in the robbery, and he was arrested days later, at his mother's home in Athens, Texas.

In custody, Taylor and Sherman McCrary pled guilty to three local robberies - the others netting $23,000 and $12,000, respectively - and they were handed prison terms of five years to life. Carolyn McCrary, son Danny and daughter Ginger Taylor each drew nine months for harboring fugitives, but investigators soon realized they were only glimpsing the tip of a sinister iceberg. Between August 1971 and February 1972, the nomadic McCrarys were finally linked with a total 22 kidnap murders, ranging from Florida to Southern California.

Alcoholic Sherman McCrary blamed his first Texas, robberies on a back injury, resulting in chronic unemployment. Later, he recruited son-in-law Carl Taylor for the "family business," with both men spending time in jail on charges of robbery, burglary, and forgery. When the heat got too strong around Athens, Texas, they pulled up stakes and started drifting in August 1971, settling in Goleta eight months later, using the proceeds from various holdups to purchase a home in the middle-class suburb.

Their first known victim was 17-year-old Sheri Martin, kidnapped from Salt Lake City in August 12, 1971, after a bakery holdup that netted the family $200 Martin's body was found a month later, near Wendover Nevada, where she had been raped and shot to death by her abductors.

On August 20, the McCrary's invaded Denver looting a suburban shop and snatching employee Leeora Looney. Three days later and 200 miles away, her naked, violated body was discovered by police. She had been executed with the same .32-caliber weapon used to kill Sheri Martin in Nevada.

The same pistol was used in Lubbock, Texas, on September 28, when the McCrarys robbed a restaurant at closing time, abducting waitress Elizabeth Perryman Her skeleton and scattered clothes were found by a farmer on December 19, her identity confirmed from dental records .

On October 17, Forrest and Jena Covey disappeared from their grocery store in Mesquite, Texas, the shop looted for money and cartons of cigarettes. Three days later, 16-year-old Susan Shaw was abducted from a bakery two blocks away, her ravaged body pulled from a nearby lake on October 24. The Coveys were found that same day, bound and shot with the familiar .32-caliber pistol in a barn near Quinlan, Texas.

The McCrary men and Raymond Taylor were indicted for Leeora Looney's murder, and forensic evidence established firm connections with eleven other deaths. FBI evaluation of the family's normal modus operandi made the killers suspect in at least ten other cases, most involving victims who were raped, but Carolyn McCrary and her daughter saw no reason to complain. "I love my husband very much," Ginger told interviewers from jail, "and it never occurred to me to do anything other than to stay with him."