Purity Knight, stalked, abducted and buried alive.

Valerie Wilson's diary revealed that she had been adopted by a couple in St. Louis, Mo., shortly after her birth - and that her birth parents, Frank and Judith Knight of Mountain Home, Arkansas, had a second daughter, Purity.

During the months described in her diary, Wilson met her birth family and befriended Purity, then a high school student. At the time, Purity was pregnant after allegedly being raped by her high-school boyfriend. Wilson helped Purity abort her unborn child.

After Wilson's untimely death, Knight enrolled at Reed College, lived in a kibbutz in Israel, and left the community to travel Europe, finally returning to the United States in November of 1996.

Eerily, Knight decided to enroll at the University of Mississippi. She began classes in January 1997, living with her roommate, Lee Maria Perez, less than two miles from the site of her sister's murder.

Knight was an erratic personality, disappearing from the apartment for days at a time; when she disappeared after an apparent stalking incident outside the apartment on March 6, even Perez wasn't worried initially.

But as time went on, authorities began to fear the worst - that Knight was in mortal danger. A ransom note received by Knight's parents confirmed their suspicions, as did several cryptic messages sent to the Yoknapatawpha Sheriff's Department, and an intensive search was launched.

But it was too late. Knight's body was found June 9, 1997 buried in a wooden box in a forested area near the Fairlawn Cemetery. The body was badly bruised and beaten, suggesting torture, and the wooden box in which Knight was buried contained graffitied epithets.

Investigators' initial inquiries focussed briefly on Sheriff's Deputy David Anderson, who had known Knight during her months in Oxford. But that line of investigation soon stalled.

Purity Knight, captive

Meanwhile, Anderson, who had been suspended from active duty and had begun investigating the Knight case on his own, began receiving mysterious notes from a deranged individual Anderson identified as Knight's killer. Anderson's investigation resulted in a dramatic shoot-out September 5, 1997 on Oxford's main square, during which Anderson was injured and Edward Pierce, Lee Maria Perez's former boyfriend, was arrested.

A subsequent search of Pierce's apartment furnished investigators with all the evidence they needed to charge Pierce with the grisly death of Purity Knight.

Frank and Judith Knight have since gone their separate ways. They divorced in 1997. Frank Knight is now a municipal judge in Mountain Home, and Judith has written a book, The Next Step of The Way, which details how God sustained her through the tragedy of her daughters' murders.

But the tragedy of Purity Knight didn't end with her death: just as she was connected with the murder of her sister, so did mayhem follow Knight's own death. [ Continued --> ]