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The hills around Galena, Kansas were once alive with the clang of picks and the promise of fortune, but beneath the rising dust and the maze of abandoned mine shafts lay a truth far darker than any miner suspected. From inside a patched-together shanty at Picker's Point, Nancy Wilson, known as Mother Staffleback, ruled a household steeped in violence, coercion, and death. For years men and women vanished into the labyrinth of shafts that surrounded the home. Some were travelers. Some were neighbors. Some were young women who had sought shelter and found only terror. It was a place whispered about in saloons and feared by those who lived closest, yet no one stepped forward until the day a miner's corpse floated to the surface. What followed shattered the region. Witnesses emerged from years of silence, the abandoned shafts were pumped for evidence, and the courts of Cherokee County uncovered one of the most chilling patterns of murder in Kansas history. Based entirely on surviving records, trial testimony, and contemporaneous reporting, this book tells the full and unvarnished story of the Staffleback family. It is a story of brutality hidden in plain sight, of the women who risked their lives to speak the truth, and of a town forced to confront the horror that had festered in its own backyard.

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