On Sunday May 2, 1993 in Lantana, Florida, a town in the Palm Beach area, the naked body of ten-year-old Andrew A.J. Schwarz was found floating facedown in the family's backyard swimming pool. But how could he have drowned when the water level was only four feet deep? And why was his body covered with cuts and bruises from head to toe?
Suspicion soon fastened on the dead boy's stepmother, Jessica Schwarz, who boastfully described herself as 'loud and crude.' She was a brute and a bully - but was she a torturer and child killer? Investigators unearthed a pattern of nightmarish physical and mental abuse that she had inflicted on the boy, one that left even hardened police sleuths sickened.
During her trials, Jessica Schwarz was smugly defiant, until convictions for criminal child abuse and second degree murder wiped the smirk off her face. She is now serving a seventy-year prison term.
