In Cold Storage: Sex and Murder on the Plains
About this audiobook
In 1973 the small southwest Nebraska railroad town of McCook became the unlikely scene of a grisly murder. More than forty years later, author James W. Hewitt returns to the scene and unearths new details about what happened.
After pieces of Edwin and Wilma Hoyt’s dismembered bodies were found floating on the surface of a nearby lake, authorities charged McCook resident Harold Nokes and his wife, Ena, with murder. Harold pleaded guilty to murder and Ena pleaded guilty to two counts of wrongful disposal of a dead body, but the full story of why and how he murdered the Hoyts has never been told.
Hewitt interviews law enforcement officers, members of the victims’ family, weapons experts, and forensic psychiatrists, and delves into newspaper reports and court documents from the time. Most significant, Harold granted Hewitt his first and only interview, in which the convicted murderer changed several parts of his 1974 confession. In Cold Storage takes listeners through the evidence, including salacious details of sex and intrigue between the Hoyts and the Nokeses, and draws new conclusions about what really happened between the two families on that fateful September night.
About the author
James W. Hewitt is president of the Friends of the Center for Great Plains Studies and was an adjunct professor of history at Nebraska Wesleyan University and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the author of Slipping Backward: A History of the Nebraska Supreme Court (Nebraska, 2007).
Jim Seybert is an author, an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator, and a SAG/AFTRA member. He anchored radio news broadcasts from 1974 through 1992, led marketing for a nationwide group of independent bookstores, and is the PA announcer for a Collegiate League baseball team. A 2018 SOVAS Award nominee for Best Narration, he has published two books in leadership. He and his wife make their home in Arroyo Grande, California.
Ann Richardson is an award-winning narrator. With a background of drama and music prevalent in her Midwestern upbringing, she delights in narrating fiction and portraying characters with a variety of accents, including Scandinavian and Southern U.S. Being of Swedish heritage is an important facet of Ann's life, as her father was a Swedish immigrant, and she travels to Sweden every few years to spend time with family and brush up on speaking the language. In her spare time Ann is a volunteer narrator for Learning Ally (formerly Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic), and also enjoys sculpting, painting, long-distance running, and hanging out with her family in Northern California.
