New York, summer 1965. Ruth Malone wakes to find a bedroom window open and her two young children missing.

Detectives noting Ruth's perfectly made up face and provocative clothing, the empty liquor bottles and love letters that litter her apartment, leap to conclusions, fuelled by neighbourhood gossip and speculation.

'Soon as I saw her, I knew there was something wrong. The way she looked: makeup an inch thick, hair just so, clothes that showed everything the good Lord gave her. That's not a grieving mother. That's a woman who wanted to get rid of her children because they got in the way of her partying and her drinking. Of her men friends.'

'Almost a year and a half. Since last spring. And believe me she's making the most if it. Makeup, clothes, all that. She don't look how a woman should look when her kids go missing. She works nights. Two little kids and she's a waitress in some goddamm bar.'

Sent to cover the case on his first major assignment, tabloid reporter Pete Wonicke at first can't help to reach the same conclusions as the police but the longer he spends watching Ruth, the more he learns about the darker workings of the police and the press. Soon, Pete begins to doubt everything he thought he knew.

Little Deaths is loosely based on the true story of Alice Crimmins, whose two children went missing from her Queens apartment in 1965 and who were later found murdered. Tried in the media, for her looks and for sleeping with men who were not her estranged husband, as much as for the death of her children, Crimmins was found guilty of murder, although later released.

Left on a wall outside of Kingsway and Newton Residents Association, Kingsway, Chester.