The Back Bedroom: A True Story of Exorcism and Murder

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Gregg Olsen has built a career on crimes committed in his own corner of Washington state, and The Back Bedroom is one of the shortest and one of the hardest to put down again. It is a true crime short from the Amazon Original Stories line, read by Karen Peakes, and it takes under four hours end to end. The case at the center of it is the death of a child in a Yakima house in 1976, inside a small group of people who believed they were carrying out a rescue.

It went to number one in true crime on Audible on the strength of pre-orders alone, which is rare for a piece this size. What sells it is not the length. It is that the one person who could tell the story from inside that house finally agreed to.

A sealed door in Yakima

In 1976, authorities opened a back bedroom in a modest yellow house in Washington state and found the body of three-year-old Davey Weilbacher. He had been beaten to death almost two months earlier. On the other side of that door was Leon Cunningham, a self-proclaimed prophet who had gathered a sheltered circle of family and friends around him, Davey's young mother among them, and convinced all of them that the boy was possessed by the Devil.

Once that idea took hold, everything after it was presented as treatment. Exorcism was the only cure, so what followed was a ritual campaign of abuse, control and violence that ended in a killing. Olsen reconstructs how a household talks itself that far, and why nobody inside it stops. The death is established early. The real subject of the piece is obedience, and how unremarkable the people who hand it over can look from the outside.

The other half of the story is what came after. The blurb calls it one woman's fifty-year journey to finally tell the truth about what happened behind that door, and that is what turns a closed case from the seventies into something worth publishing now.

Olsen keeps coming back to Washington

Gregg Olsen was born in Seattle in 1959 and studied journalism at Western Washington University, where he edited the campus magazine Klipsun and worked as managing editor of the student paper. His first book appeared in 1990. More than thirty have followed, most of them true crime, and a striking number of them set within driving distance of 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, Washington. It sat on Amazon Charts for more than three hundred and forty weeks and was the bestselling Kindle book of 2020. Put next to it, this new short has an obvious family resemblance. A closed house, an adult who controls what everyone inside it believes, and children whose word counts for nothing until decades have passed.

What separates Olsen from most writers working this beat is patience with the people who lived through it. He tends to arrive late, after the trial coverage has gone, and get the version nobody printed at the time. That is the whole value of a book like this one.

Karen Peakes, and a story that fits in one sitting

Karen Peakes reads it. She is a stage actress before she is a narrator, with a long list of regional credits including the Walnut Street Theatre, Delaware Theatre Company, the Arden and the Folger, and she has been nominated for an Audie twice. A good deal of her audiobook work has been for Brilliance Audio, which is also the company producing this recording, so the casting follows an existing working relationship rather than a hunch.

It is a sensible fit for the material. A story about a small group persuading itself of something monstrous needs a reader who can hold a level tone, because any push toward melodrama would make it unbearable rather than gripping. Peakes has spent years on stage learning that kind of restraint. The recording is not out yet, so treat this as a note on the pairing and not a verdict on the performance.

The format helps too. Amazon Original Stories are built to be finished in one go, and under four hours is a single afternoon or a commute in each direction. There is no room for the padding that stretches a magazine-length case into a full book, which in true crime is usually a mercy.

The Back Bedroom is short, it is grim, and it is exactly the kind of case Olsen has been documenting for thirty-five years. If If You Tell stayed with you, this is the same writer on the same ground at a fraction of the length, with Karen Peakes reading and Brilliance behind the recording. It is on Audible to pre-order now, and the free trial covers it.

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