The Demon Next Door

Bryan Burrough turns his reporting on his own hometown of Temple, Texas, where a man he went to school with, Danny Corwin, lived as a neighbor while attacking women. Corwin raped and mutilated six of them and killed three.

The book asks how a killer stayed free for so long. Burrough looks at why local media passed over the early assaults, why a Presbyterian church tried to keep Corwin from being prosecuted, and why law enforcement struggled to stop him.

This is true crime, written by an investigative journalist with a personal stake in the place. It also works as a study of small-town Texas politics and of institutions that preferred not to see what was in front of them.

It was produced as a short Audible Original, running roughly two to three hours. A content warning applies for physical and sexual violence.

The question running through it is less who Corwin was than who around him looked away.