Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell

Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. With a new introduction by bestselling true-crime author Ron Franscell.

For twenty-five years, Dr. John Story was the most trusted man in Lovell, Wyoming. He was the town's family doctor, a pillar of the community, a man who delivered babies, treated children, and cared for generations of the same families. He was also systematically raping his patients.

His victims were mostly Mormon women, raised in a faith that emphasized submission, modesty, and deference to male authority. When Dr. Story subjected them to lengthy, invasive pelvic examinations, always without a nurse present, they assumed it was normal. They trusted him. They trusted the church that told them to trust him. Some didn't understand what had been done to them until their wedding nights. Others suspected but had no language for what they felt, no framework for what they knew, and no one they believed would listen.

For years, the secret held. Then a woman named Arden McArthur began quietly talking to her neighbors, comparing notes, keeping score. What she uncovered was not one victim but dozens, spanning more than a generation. Women in their seventies. Girls as young as thirteen. All of them patients of the same trusted doctor in the same small town.

When the women finally came forward, they expected justice. Instead they found a town that didn't want to believe them. The Medical Board of Wyoming was hostile to their claims. Their neighbors turned against them. The community fractured along religious and family lines, with Story's supporters calling it a Mormon conspiracy. Women who had already survived years of violation now faced public humiliation, disbelief, and the destruction of lifelong friendships. One said she felt she was being raped all over again.

Dr. Story was eventually convicted and imprisoned. But the wounds he left behind cut deeper than any verdict could reach. Marriages buckled. Businesses failed. Families chose sides and held them for years. Lovell, Wyoming, the self-proclaimed Rose Town, would never fully recover.

Jack Olsen, the New York Times bestselling author known as "the dean of true crime," spent years and made ten trips to Lovell documenting every dimension of this story: the predator who hid behind a white coat and a community's trust, the courageous women who refused to stay silent, and the town that had to decide what it believed about itself.

As Publishers Weekly wrote, Doc is "as much a searching sociological study as a true-crime narrative." It is a story about power, faith, silence, and the devastating cost of speaking the truth in a place that would rather not hear it.