Bound in Silence

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2025 BookFest Awards First Place Winner in True Crime 

2024 The Author's Show Book Cover Award — True Crime

On a nearly moonless night in October 1943, a single gunshot rang out in Littlefield, Texas. A prominent Texas doctor and his wife were found bound, shot, beaten, and murdered. The only witness: their five-year-old daughter, who was bound to silence and refused to speak about what happened for 70 years.

For years, the courts tried to convict one suspect, but forensic evidence contradicted the prosecution’s case. Investigators, including the famed Texas Rangers, failed to bring anyone to justice. Eight decades later, the questions linger over the plains of the Texas Panhandle: who killed the Hunts and why?
 

Author and historian Christena Stephens spent more than a decade researching the Hunt murders, re-examining every twist and turn in the legal process, uncovering new evidence, and drawing new conclusions about who might have been responsible. The first to bring Jo Ann Hunt’s story to light after seventy years of silence, Stephens transports readers back to that tragic night—and through the decades of trauma that followed.
 

An astute examination of the failures of the criminal justice system and how a five-year-old girl was scared into a lifetime of silence, Bound in Silence is a true crime tour-de-force—a meticulously researched, impeccably told tale of unsolved murder on the High Plains.

Christena Stephens is a native Texan growing up amongst cotton field sand spending time exploring the nature of the Llano Estacado. After earning two Master of Science degrees, she started a project to preserve a historical Texas ranch, thus began her interest in history, research, and writing.