For her sixth book, Lebo author Sam Pierson switched from fiction to non-fiction, choosing to write a first-person account of a night she spent bound and blindfolded, listening as a group of strangers ransacked the house she shared with her friend, Ken Vitt.
The details of that terrible night and the resulting investigation and prosecution of two perpetrators make up the subject of Pierson’s new book, “Without Warning.”
She will be at Hastings in Emporia from 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday to talk with readers and sign copies of her book. Pierson’s books also are available at the Town Crier book store, 716 Commercial St.
The book opens on the day the crime took place, setting the stage for the moment a knock on the door roused the two out of bed and led to a night of dread, fear and heartbreak.
The intruders got into the house by asking to use the phone, claiming they were having car trouble. Once inside, they bound and blindfolded Pierson and Vitt at gunpoint, then spent the night rifling through drawers, closets and cabinets looking for anything of value.
“They went through the house all night and took everything, practically,” Pierson said of that night in early March of 1998. “It was a frightening episode because I didn’t know from one minute to the next what they were going to be doing.”
The intruders first hogtied Pierson and Witt with rope, but switched to duct tape when the rope started hurting their hands. Pierson said at least one of them acted concerned for her comfort; aside from the ordeal he was putting the couple through, he seemed to treat Pierson with respect.
“One of them talked to me all night long,” Pierson said. “He was overly nice to me.”
The intruders took guns, the TV and VCR, the microwave, buckets of tools from the barn and many other items from the home. When they learned Vitt had money in his checking account, they arranged to take him to the bank when it opened, where they forced him to withdraw $11,000.
As the intruders were leaving, Pierson asked them to give her back the rings they had taken. The one who seemed concerned about her gave them back.
“That one told me if everything went all right the next morning at the bank, then he would give me my rings back,” she said. “So when they were getting ready to leave I asked for them and he handed them over.”
Although neither of the two were hurt, the trauma of that night will continue to haunt them.
“It’s a terrible thing to sit in the house and listen to them go through your drawers and your cabinets and know the things they are taking, and it was quite an experience,” Pierson said.
DNA evidence from a cigarette butt eventually led agents from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation to Ronnie Sanders, who was in a Georgia prison for a similar crime when agents caught up with him. He implicated Kevin Barry as a co-conspirator. At the time, Barry was in jail in Missouri. After a trial, the two were sentenced to 180 months in prison. It took eight years for officials to track the two down and prosecute them.
Even though two people were prosecuted for the crime, Pierson believes more people were involved. She no longer lives in fear, she said, but the events of that night have changed her and Vitt in obvious ways.
“Terror is a terrible thing,” she wrote in her book. “It turns you into a different person. A once freedom-loving, independent woman can become a coward, someone afraid to drive the highways at night, or take long walks in the daytime. ... For a while, we missed the things they took from us, but they left us with the most important thing of all — our lives.”
Pierson said the book was more difficult to write than her previous books because of the effort involved in remaining true to facts and writing from court transcripts.
“I’ve always written using fiction and I just sit down and write what my mind tells me what to write, but here is a complete true story, and that’s hard,” Pierson said.
Pierson has been traveling to different cities for book signings, already appearing at the library in Burlington. On Saturday she will be in Topeka and later she will go to Lawrence to talk about her book.
Overall, Pierson said she is happy to have finished the book and to a large extent put the experience of that night behind her.
“I’m glad I got it done,” she said. “I think it’s a very pretty book, and my editor tells me it’s written well and everything flows, so I guess I’m proud of this one, a little more proud than I am of the others.”