When Karen and Sharon Sanders were abducted and brutally raped on a Louisiana May night in 1977, they were only fourteen years old. The aftermath of the rape and trial left festering scars that disabled these young women from leading normal lives. It is testimony to the inner strength of the Sanders twins and their close-knit family that they were able to overcome this crippling incident in their lives and even offer their abductor forgiveness when he faced his parole board twenty years later. The Sanders twins forgave but they never forgot. They carried their scars into adulthood, lugging fear and suspicion from what had been their idyllic childhood into adulthood, a weighty burden of innocence obliterated too soon, viciously and sadistically by a man with a past full of felonies. Fast forward to 1997, when a film crew visited Angola Prison in Louisiana to produce a documentary entitled The Farm about life in the controversial prison. The Sanders’ rapist then caught a piece of the spotlight. While the resulting sympathy did not gain him his parole, it did initiate an outpouring of sympathy – not for his victims – but, ironically, for the rapist himself. Suddenly the event that Karen and Sharon had tried to extinguish from their lives for many years became media wildfire. Karen Sanders would have preferred to forget, to obliterate any memories of the rape the same way her rapist had obliterated her innocence so many years before. Instead, Karen wrote her and Sharon’s story to share with the world. Raped: Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt is that story. Raped: Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt is not only a story about rape. It is about the many paths one has to travel to find healing. It's about pain, anger, fear, hate, and forgiveness. In the author’s own words, “My hope is that anyone who reads Raped: Beyond a Shadow of Doubt will find the courage and strength to fight. Whatever the battle.”