The Back Bedroom: A True Story of Exorcism and Murder

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In 1976 someone finally opened the back bedroom of a small yellow house in Yakima, Washington, and found a three-year-old boy who had been dead for almost two months. The people on the other side of that door were not strangers to him. One of them was his mother.

Gregg Olsen has spent his career writing about crimes committed within driving distance of his own house, and this is the shortest and the hardest of them to shake off. It went to number one in true crime on Audible on pre-orders alone. What sells it is not the case, which has been on the record for fifty years. It is that the one woman who can describe that room from the inside has finally agreed to talk.

How a household talks itself into a killing

Davey Weilbacher was beaten to death slowly, and every stage of it was presented to the people watching as treatment. Leon Cunningham, a self-proclaimed prophet, had gathered a sheltered circle of family and friends around him and told them the boy was possessed by the Devil. Exorcism was the cure. The ritual escalated until Davey stopped surviving it, and nobody in the house stopped it.

Olsen is not interested in suspense about who did what. He settles that early. What he is after is the mechanism: how an ordinary group of adults hands its judgment to one man, and keeps handing it over well past the point where a child is dying in the next room. The unsettling part is how unremarkable they look from the outside.

The other half of the book is the fifty years afterwards. The blurb calls it one woman's long journey to tell the truth about what happened behind that door, and that is the reason a closed case from the seventies is worth publishing now. Having been in that house turns out to be a story of its own.

Karen Peakes reads it straight

Peakes is a stage actress before she is a narrator, twice nominated for an Audie, and much of her audiobook work has been for Brilliance Audio, which is producing this recording too. The casting fits the material. A story about people talking each other into something monstrous needs a level voice, because any push toward melodrama would turn it into something you switch off rather than something you finish. The recording is not out yet, so treat that as a note on the pairing and not a verdict on the performance.

The format helps as well. Amazon Original Stories are built to be finished in one sitting, so there is no room for the padding that stretches a magazine-length case into a full book. In true crime that is usually a mercy.

Olsen keeps coming back to Washington

Olsen started as a journalist in Seattle and has more than thirty books behind him, most of them true crime and a striking number of them set near the rural Washington home he shares with his wife. The one most readers know is If You Tell, his account of three sisters and the mother who tortured them in a farmhouse in Raymond. It sat on Amazon Charts for more than three hundred and forty weeks and was the bestselling Kindle book of 2020.

The family resemblance to this one is obvious: a closed house, one adult who controls what everybody inside it believes, and children whose word counts for nothing until decades have passed. What separates Olsen from most writers on this beat is patience. He arrives long after the trial coverage has left, and he gets the version nobody printed at the time.

The Back Bedroom is short and it is grim, and it never pretends the ending is a mystery. If If You Tell stayed with you, this is the same writer on the same ground at a fraction of the length. It is on Audible to pre-order, and the free trial covers it.

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