Kathryn Canavan walked into a Trevose 7-Eleven on a Friday night in March some 50 years ago, she was simply looking to grab a soda and decompress from a long day at work. She came away with a Pepsi and a tip from the cashier about a horrific double murder. Then a 25-year-old reporter for the Bucks County Courier Times, she had a chat with the convenience store’s manager, who mentioned that two detectives had stopped in to ask if he’d seen anything out of the ordinary that day. He passed along what he told police and gave her the cross streets.
Canavan took it from there. Her arrival at Fleetwood Avenue marked the beginning of a story that would consume her work schedule for the foreseeable future. “There were more lights than I’d ever seen at a crime scene,” Canavan recalls of that night.
“Killer in the House: Ten Days of Terror in a Pennsylvania Suburb” (Brookline Books, 208 pages) is Canavan’s gripping look back at two multiple murders that occurred four miles apart in Bucks County. All the while, Canavan was living in a cabin near Neshaminy Creek about halfway between the crime scenes…