Trail of the Fox: The true story of a perfect crime

It is said that crime doesn’t pay. Here is the story of one that did – the extraordinary account of a successful murder, a story made all the more fascinating because it’s true, and all the more frightening because the killer is still a free man.

He called himself The Fox. He was attractive, charming and very clever about the law. He knew the difficulties of winning a murder conviction with only circumstantial evidence. And he was out to commit the perfect crime.
It is 1968. An aging California millionaire takes a three-day business trip to Montreal accompanied by her handsome young financial advisor. She makes a sudden detour to Europe and never returns. Her financial adviser is the last person to see her alive.

At first, investigator Bill Burnett thinks this is just a run-of-the-mill missing persons case. But the curious clues he begins to uncover convince him that Norma Wilson’s disappearance is far from ordinary. And despite pressure from superiors to abandon the investigation he persists, painstakingly reconstructing the threads of a cold-blooded murder – without the evidence of a body. After two years of eluding his pursuers, The Fox is at last accused, tried and convicted – and set free.

This amazing chronicle of the Devins investigation and trial, which captured California headlines for five years, has the elements of such high suspense reading as Blood and Money and Serpentine. At the same time it raises some hard-hitting questions about the legal processes that make it possible to get away with murder.