True Crime Adults: The Bricca Family Murders

The True Crime Series welcomes special guest J.T. Townsend author of Summer's Almost Gone: The Haunting Case of the Bricca Family Murders.

It was an unbelievable crime – hideous, unexpected, baffling. A crime destined to become the most notorious and obsessive cold case in Cincinnati history.

On that long ago day in September 1966, we were horrified by the blaring Bricca murder headlines. Jerry, his pretty wife Linda, and young daughter Debbie were found stabbed to death in their home in the city’s Bridgetown neighborhood. Striking between the 4th and 5th slayings of the Cincinnati Strangler, the Bricca killer plunged a city already on edge into an abyss.

Yet opening up any cold case is daunting. Evidence is lost, buried, or forgotten. The truth is elusive, shrouded, or shameful.

Enter Cincinnati crime writer JT Townsend. The author of Queen City Gothic was given unprecedented access to the Bricca case file and formerly sealed information that never before saw the light of print.

In Summer’s Almost Gone, Townsend exhumes this 55-year-old murder mystery and arrives at the probable truth. For those of us who preserved this slaughtered family in our memory, it will never be too late to learn that truth.

There looms one huge, lasting question. Who killed the Bricca family?