Frank W Blaisdell

Broken Doll Murders Frank W Blaisdell

THE BROKEN DOLL MURDERS Two mothers demand investigation of what they perceive is corruption in their schools. They feel that the politicians are stealing enough money to compromise the schools' viability. A subsequent state investigation of local school construction contracts agrees. The state freezes all contracts of the local family owned construction-company, which is now threatened with bankruptcy. This impoverishes both the free spending manager of the company and his gambler brother in law. The former, over his head in the stock market, decides on a fake kidnapping of his little daughter in order to extract enough money from his wealthy father-in-law to save his company. But, the wealthy patriarch of the family is injured during the kidnapping and is unavailable to provide ransom money or to rescue his ner-do-well son from the menace of the gamblers demanding payment of his debts. So, the son, in order to escape gamblers' threats, allies himself with a drug smuggler and uses his teen aged son to introduce narcotics into the local high school. Both schemes go catastrophically wrong. First, when the fake kidnapping turns into a real one and the kidnappers take the little girl to Mexico in order to escape federal authorities. The drug introduction plan is devastated, when a high school girl dies of a drug overdose. When the affluent father recovers from his injury, he refuses to part with with money demanded by the kidnappers or to rescue his son from the gamblers. He is subsequently murdered--poisoned with arsenic. A corrupt pharmacist and all family members are possible suspects. Police authorities are challenged to find the murderer or murderers and rescue the kidnapped child