Witch is a riveting read about a woman who undoubtedly killed at least two people - her mother and her former husband. She was never charged in the death of her ex, and she skated several years until the stench from a storage shed where she stashed the body of her mother put authorities on her trail.
Puit does a nice job of tracing the steps of Brookey Lee West, a tech writer/marble reader (she claims she can read the future using marbles)/daughter of a satan worshipper.
Witch was a quick read - I usually take my time with books, but this tale was compelling enough that I hardly put it down. It is somewhat gorey in spots, but well worth reading if true crime is your thing.

'Witch' book tells of matricide

Los Banos woman convicted after body found in garbage can

A true-crime book about a Los Banos woman who killed her mother and kept the corpse in a ministorage locker for three years hit bookstore shelves this week.

"Witch: The True Story of Las Vegas' Most Notorious Female Killer," follows a criminal web spun by Brookey Lee West, a successful Silicon Valley technical writer who lived in Los Banos for a decade.

"It was such an amazing and bizarre case, I became consumed by it," said Glenn Puit, author of the 325-page paperback published by Berkeley, a division of Penguin Books.

He first was assigned to cover West's criminal case in the spring of 2001.

Authorities had just discovered her mother's decomposed corpse sealed in a garbage can in a locker at the Canyon Gate Mini-Storage shed in Las Vegas.

Next to Christine Smith's body was a box of books, including "The Satanic Bible" and "The Geography of Witchcraft."

Puit, 35, a district court beat reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, said it was the most remarkable criminal case he ever had come across in his 13-year newspaper career. As the investigation widened, links to Smith's questionable past in Merced County surfaced.

Details about her father's alleged violent history, and dabbling with Satanism and white supremacy, also came to light.

While she never was charged with his murder, police said they believe West killed her husband, Howard Simon St. John, just weeks after marrying him. She also is suspected in the disappearance of her brother, Travis Lee Smith.

In 2003 and 2004, Puit interviewed West at the Southern Nevada Women's Correctional Center in North Las Vegas, where she is serving a life sentence in the killing of her elderly mother.

She denies being a witch, Satanist or killer.

But Puit said some of the details in the book, gleaned from two years of interviews and 3,000 pages of law enforcement and court documents, are "downright frightening."

Los Banos police Sgt. Carey Reed first made contact with West after her husband's body showed up in rural Tulare County in 1994.

While Tulare police served a search warrant on her house, Reed said he stayed in the garage and talked with West.

"She was strange," he said.

She told him about a business plan for making candy and didn't seem distraught that her husband had been found dead, Reed said.

A few weeks earlier, during an argument, she shot him in the neck, authorities said. He survived that shooting. West was booked into county jail on charges of felony assault with a gun and corporal injury to a spouse. She claimed self-defense and the charges never stuck.

Puit, who has a wife and two sons in Las Vegas, worked on the book in his spare time for three years.

"It's not your average crime story for Merced County," he said. "You don't see many cases like this."

This book, simply put, was riveting. I couldn't put it down and read it in about five hours. I would recommend it to anyone.
The book chronicles the crimes of Brookey Lee West, who killed her mother and stored her in a garbage can in Las Vegas for three years. She was also the prime suspect in her husband's murder but never charged, and her brother is missing.
In addition, Brookey's dad is a devil worshipper and her mother is a convicted felon who shot her married lover. The family background in this book is amazing -- it was obviously very well researched, yet it doesn't drag or slow down the reader.
The author did a real nice job of writing in a cliffhanger format. Each chapter gave you just enough information to keep you going on to the next chapter, and by the end, I was totally creeped out by Brookey's crimes.
The writing was a little simplistic and the photos are extremely gruesome and graphic, but the simple writing actually made a complicated series of events in the book easier to understand. If you like true crime, I'd definitely recommend this one.