Books: Pennsylvania Death Trip

In 1979 the body of Susan Reinert was found stuffed into the wheel well of a Plymouth Horizon that had been abandoned at the parking lot of a Harrisburg, Pa., motel. She was a recently divorced schoolteacher. Her children Karen, 11, and Michael, 10, had vanished, most likely on the day their mother was killed. They have never been found, and are presumed dead. A seven-year investigation eventually led to the arrests and convictions of two men, former colleagues of Reinert's at the Upper Merion High School outside Philadelphia.

Given the public taste for upscale homicide, the case became known as...