The book is the story of a gruesome true crime, outlining the disappearance of Tom and Jackie Hawkins from their 55 ft trawler, the 'Well Deserved' in November 2004. The boat had been listed for private sale. When Tom and Jackie took 25 year old Skylar Deleon and his friends for a test drive, they were over-powered with stun guns and sent overboard with one of the ships anchors to drown.
The motive? Pure financial gain. Skylar Deleon wanted the boat and assumed, wrongly, that its owners must be rich. They weren't. As the boat name suggests, they had scrimped and save for years and then sold their home to follow a lifelong dream to go cruising. The birth of their first grandchild had convinced them to take up life as landlubbers again, putting the boat on the market in Newport Beach, California.
Today, Skylar Deleon remains on death row in Orange County, USA, after painstaking efforts by Newport police and family and friends of the Hawks to get justice for the couple. Their bodies were never recovered.
There is no lesson to be learned here; no 'moral to the story', unless you decide it is best to trust no-one in life, which would be a sad thing. Jackie and Tom Hawks were tragic victims of a sociopath.
Mind you, after reading this, I'd think twice about taking strangers for a ride on your boat...
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