In one of his later confessions, William Burke gave a brief biography of himself: Burke is 36 years of age, was born in the parish of Orrey, county Tyrone (Ireland); served seven years in the army, most of that time as an officer's servant in the Donegal Militia.  He was married at Ballinha, in the county of Mayo, when in the army, but left his wife and two children in Ireland.  She would not come to Scotland with him.  He has often wrote to her, but got no answer.  He came to Scotland to work at the Union Canal, and wrought there while it lasted.  He resided for about two years in Peebles, and worked as a labourer. He wrought as weaver for 18 months, and as a baker for five months.  He learned to mend shoes, as a cobbler, with a man he lodged with in Leith.

While lodging at Maddiston during his work on the Canal, Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire met Helen McDougal, a native Scot who was then, after separating from her legal husband, living with a man with whom she had two children.  Burke and McDougal left Maddiston together after the Canal work was done, apparently leaving the two children behind, and the couple journeyed to Peebles and Leith and then Edinburgh, scraping out a living by working on farms, selling old clothes, and mending shoes.

William Hare had also journeyed from Ireland to Scotland to work on the Union Canal, although it is not known if he ever encountered Burke there.  After the completion of the Canal, Hare went to Edinburgh and found cheap lodgings in the area known as West Port at the boarding house of a man named Logue and his wife Margaret, who was also an Irish native.  When Logue died in 1826, Hare provided enough comfort to the widowed Margaret that they were soon living as common-law husband and wife and running the lodging house as a married couple.  Hare never provided a biography as Burke had, but Hare was described in an 1829 issue of Blackwoods Magazine as: the most brutal man ever subjected to my sight, and at first look seemingly an idiot.  (His face) when he laughed which he did often collapsed into a hollow, shooting up ghastlily from chin to cheek bone all steeped in a sullenness and squalornative to the almost deformed face of the leering miscreantso utterly loathsome was the whole look of the reptile.

When Burke and McDougal moved to Edinburgh, they took up residence in West Port and by chance encountered Margaret Hare one day, who invited them back to the boarding house and introduced them to her husband.  Soon after, Burke and McDougal became paying lodgers of the Hares.  The four of them would quarrel often and could never be described as friends, but they became permanently linked by a shared fondness for whisky and the desire to make easy money no matter the method.

The Dalmane evidence was backed up by testimony about boarders who complained that Puente foisted medication on them. Puente had abundant sources for the drug, Wood writes. In addition to the Dalmane she acquired from her court-appointed psychiatrist, she got it from two other doctors as well.

Former resident  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire, who lived at the rooming house for the first half of 1987 before she was evicted, testified that she'd overheard Puente telling James Gallop he had to leave unless he let her take charge of his money. He later complained that Puente was giving him drugs that made him sleep all the time, she added, according to the Bee.

Alvaro "Bert" Montoya complained to an employee of a local detox center where he resided before transferring to 1426 F Street that Puente was "giving him a medicine he didn't like to take," according to the Bee.

When that employee, William Johnson, confronted Puente about the matter, she flew into a rage and asked him to take Montoya back to the detox center to live if he was going to meddle in her business. Johnson advised Montoya that he'd be better off at the boarding house than at the center.

"I told him, 'You'll be safe here,'" Johnson told the court. "I was wrong...I've got to live with this for the rest of my life."

Puente went to elaborate lengths to cover up Montoya's death. She paid Donald Anthony, a local halfway house resident, to help her flush out her story. Anthony called Montoya's social worker, posing as his brother-in-law, told her that Montoya had gone to live with his family out of state.

"I saw her standing behind a table holding a butcher's knife," Lynch confessed. "She was sobbing with fear and trembling violently. I hadn't been prepared for this so I just stood there staring at her. Then I yelled 'put that knife down' but she didn't move so I yelled again 'put that knife down'.

"She stiffened, her eyes bulging fearfully from their sockets, with a strange animal noise squealing from her tightly compressed mouth. The lobes of her nostrils were flared and she stood there impotent with terror.

"'Put that knife down,'" I told her. "'I don't want to kill you, but if I let you live you'll only put me away.'" I then ordered her to get down on her knees and pray as she only had ten minutes to live."

Lynch then took the terrified young girl into the bedroom and repeatedly raped her. "I then brought her back out into the kitchen and tried to comfort her saying that life was full of trouble and that she'd be better off dead. Then I mercifully distracted her attention and as she turned away I struck her with the axe and she fell dead without a murmur," he confessed.

Lynch then assembled the Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire family's bodies in the bush and set them alight atop a huge pyre. "They burnt like bags of fat," he said.

From then on Lynch's confession dealt with how clever he was at getting rid of the Lynch's possessions and taking over the farm as if it were his own. Every personal item and all of the dead family's clothing were burned. Then he inserted an advertisement in the Sydney Gazette stating that Mrs. Mulligan had left the family home without her husband's consent and that he, John Mulligan, wouldn't be responsible for her debts.

The ad gave the impression that the Mulligans had broken up, which would explain why the farm had been sold. Next Lynch, again under the name of John Mulligan, wrote to all his creditors telling them he had sold the farm to John Dunleavy for £700, and Dunleavy had taken responsibility for any outstanding debts. Then he forged a deed of assignment stating that John Mulligan had signed over the farm and all its affects to John Dunleavy.

Early on in a novel much concerned with the child-bearing and child-rearing practices of Manhattan's ultra-rich, protagonist Nan Hutchinson falls into conversation with a lawyer who explains to her the "in-vitro offset" in certain prenuptial agreements. Under such a provision, the lawyer says, a divorcing husband who has seen his wife squander a small fortune on fertility treatments "with no output" is entitled to deduct those costs from what he must pay his ex. In other words: No offspring, no full settlement.

For Nan, whom readers and moviegoers will recognize from the best-selling 2002 novel "The Nanny Diaries" and the film starring Scarlett Johansson, this legal gambit is a sign that little has changed since she fled the Upper East Side a dozen years earlier, disgusted by the way the well-to-do put a price on everything and neglect their children in the process. The lawyer's tutorial in "Nanny Returns" also signals that the authors—Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus—are back to what they do best: skewering the manners and mores of those with more money than God.

It starts with appearances. On a drizzly winter day at a Park Avenue lunch party, Nan—now in her early 30s, freshly armed with a graduate degree and trying to launch a business-consulting firm—notices that the middle-age women in attendance look identical. They all have ponytails and wear Anne Fontaine blouses, riding pants and rain boots. How do these women manage to march in such sartorial lockstep? "Is there a blue-blood bat signal that goes up?" Nan wonders. "A dollar-sign silhouette projected against the cloudy sky?"

Their children have their own tribal dress, as Nan learns when she starts consulting at a fancy private school where she has been hired to help the faculty work better with board members. (It's an implausible development, but then plot is not the authors' strong suit.) Boys and girls alike at the Jarndyce Academy favor black separates with pastel shirts and ties. The boys wear long hair that looks "as if they've found their grandmothers' bob wigs and thrown them on backward and slung to the side." Manhattanites will know what she is talking about: Walk down certain stretches of Madison Avenue on any school morning and you'll pass droves of preppy boys flicking hair out of their faces.

Nan tries to hold down her consulting gig and check in with the X boys—she clearly cares about them even though her nanny days are long past—while occasionally rushing back to the brownstone in East Harlem that she shares with her husband, the "Harvard Hottie" from "The Nanny Diaries." Hottie, also known as Ryan, is out of town most of the time working for the United Nations because he is so obviously a good person, which makes him different from just about every other character in the book.

In rare quiet moments at home, Nan stares out of her window at "the Key Food bags that appear to be blooming off the backyard tree" and worries about how the young Xes are going to survive their parents' breakup. Odious Mr. X has left his wife for an actress named Carter Nelson, who reluctantly allows the boys to come live with her in a glass tower in the West Village. But then Stilton burns his hand on the stove—which doesn't look like a stove because Carter has insisted on an artistically rendered kitchen. Nan chooses to take Stilton to the emergency room instead of waiting for the movie star's homeopath to tend to the wound. The indignant Carter announces that New York "may have been ruined" for her by Nan's impudence and decamps for the West Coast, leaving Mr. X and his sons behind.

Meanwhile at the Jarndyce Academy, a handful of students go online to attack their teachers with obscene videos and vicious insults. Some of the offenders are the children of board members, who block the students' expulsion and demand instead the dismissal of the teacher who was the main target of their campaign—and who happens to be one of the school's most effective and compassionate instructors. Nan, appalled, protests but cannot stop the sacking. As "Nanny Returns" moves toward its conclusion, Nan tries her cheerful best to counter the brattiness of the rich, both young and old, while chasing after her own dreams of a flourishing business.

Part of the appeal of "The Nanny Diaries" when it appeared eight years ago was voyeuristic. The authors, who had worked as nannies while they were students at New York University, clearly knew the world they were satirizing. Their underlying message—look how crass and unfeeling the folks at the pinnacle of financial success can be—was welcomed in boom times by those who hadn't made it quite so far. But the theme also has an inherent fascination, and the current financial downturn has not dampened the appeal of Nan's adventures.

Anyone who has read "The Nanny Diaries" will recognize the sequel as much the same in tone and structure. Happily, the detailed observation in "Nanny Returns" feels just as up-to-the-minute—with the earlier book's out-size success, the authors may have been able to do first-hand reporting from the wealthy, nanny-employing side of the equation. In this outing, though, it's apparent that Ms. McLaughlin and Ms. Kraus have thought harder about their material; the result is a novel that is more resonant and less glib than its predecessor.

At a Hamptons house party, the teenage Grayer gets drunk and acts loutishly to a woman about Nan's age. Rather than tell him off, the woman flirts with him. "This is how the Grayers become their fathers," Nan muses. "The women who should be keeping them in check were someone else's neglected daughters and their reflex is to flatter and cajole, no matter what asinine offensive thing trips from the guy's mouth." The cycle continues, even if the recession has dented the trust funds.

A few months later another family went to police about their missing daughter, 23-year-old Julia Turner.  The missing girl had also worked part time for Joe.  Sheriffs deputies again visited the tavern, but Joe claimed she had told him that she was having some personal problems and wanted to move on.  With nothing more to go on, investigators once again left empty handed.  Later, when they searched the home Julia shared with a roommate, it was discovered that she had not packed any of her clothing or belongings.  Investigators decided to return to the bar for another round of questioning.  This time Joe apparently remembered that she was in a desperate state and that he had lent her $500 because she was having problems with her roommate and did not want to return home.

Only known photo of Joe Ball

On September 23, 1938, Joes luck began to run out.   An old neighbor of his came forward and told investigators that he had witnessed Joe cut meat off a human body and feed the pieces to the alligators.  And, as investigators decided what to do next, a Mexican-American man approached Bexar County deputy sheriff John Gray and told him about a foul-smelling barrel Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire had left behind his sister's barn.  It smelled, he said, like something dead was inside.  The following morning, deputies John Gray and John Klevenhagen went to the barn to investigate, but the barrel was gone.  Nonetheless, Joes sister corroborated the man's story and the deputies decided to pay Joe another visit.

Bexar County deputy sheriff John Gray

When Gray and Klevenhagen arrived at the bar, they informed Joe that they were taking him to San Antonio for questioning.  Joe asked if he could first close down the tavern and the deputies agreed.  As the two men sat at the bar waiting, Joe grabbed a beer and quickly slammed it down.  He then walked over to his register and pressed the NO SALE button.  When the drawer popped open, he reached inside and grabbed a .45 caliber revolver.  He briefly waved it at Gray and Klevenhagen, who yelled, "Don't!" just as Joe pointed it at his heart. He then pulled the trigger and fell dead on the barroom floor.  Some later claimed that he had shot himself in the head, but no matter, it was a fatal shot.

Deputies from all over the region were soon going over every square inch of Joes bar.  Upon discovering rotting meat all around the gator pond and an axe matted with blood and hair, their initial theory was that Joe had mutilated his victims and fed them to his alligators.  Investigators also began to recall other disappearances, including two missing barmaids and a teenage boy who hung out at Joe's.  The sheer horror of the situation was beginning to set in and Bexar County deputy sheriff John Gray wanted answers.