Momma Says: To Read or Not to Read: ✱✱Book Review✱✱ Blog Tour: Caitlin Rother's Dead Reckoning

DEAD RECKONING
Caitlin Rother
* True Crime *

Title: DEAD RECKONING
Author: Caitlin Rother
Publisher: WildBlue Press
Pages: 504
Genre: True Crime

Tom and Jackie Hawks loved their life in retirement, sailing on their yacht, the Well Deserved. But when the birth of a new grandson called them back to Arizona, they put the boat up for sale. Skylar Deleon and his pregnant wife Jennifer showed up as prospective buyers, with their baby in a stroller, and the Hawkses thought they had a deal. Soon after a sea trial and an alleged purchase, however, the older couple disappeared and the Deleons promptly tried to access the Hawkses’ bank accounts.

As police investigated the case, they not only found a third homicide victim with ties to Skylar, they also uncovered an unexpected and unusual motive: Skylar had wanted gender reassignment surgery for years. By killing the Hawkses with a motley crew of assailants and plundering the couple’s assets, the Deleons had planned to clear their $100,000 in debts and still have money for the surgery, which Skylar had already scheduled.

Now, in this up-to-the-minute updated edition, which includes extensive new material, New York Times bestselling author Caitlin Rother presents the latest breaking developments in the case. Skylar, who was ultimately sentenced to death row for the three murders, transitioned to a woman via hormones while living in the psych unit at San Quentin prison. Recently, she legally changed her name and gender to female, apparently a strategic step in her quest to obtain taxpayer-subsidized gender confirmation surgery and transfer to a women’s prison. Combined with Governor Gavin Newsom’s recent moratorium on executions, this only adds insult to injury for the victims’ families, who want Skylar to receive the ultimate punishment for her crimes.

“Rother gives readers compelling insight to an unthinkable American nightmare. A gripping read… frank and frightening… it sizzles.”
—Aphrodite Jones, host of True Crime on Investigation Discovery and bestselling author

★★★★★ORDER YOUR COPY★★★★★

Amazon → https://tinyurl.com/y3jr7mk3

WildBlue Press → https://tinyurl.com/yyj9xlvk

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Momma Says: 3 stars⭐⭐⭐

Admittedly, I don't read a lot of true crime stories, and there are a couple of reasons for that. First, we see enough real-life every day when we turn on the news, scroll social media, etc. So, I tend to stick with fiction for my reading time. Second, and probably the biggest reason, is that true crime so often comes across as documentary-ish. Thankfully, I didn't find that here. The author's writing style and storytelling created a pretty compelling read. A gruesome and often shocking story, but compelling nonetheless. There is plenty of the evils that men (and women) do in this one, and it's horrifying to think that people can have so little respect for human life. This couple ranks pretty high on the I can't believe they thought they'd get away with it list, and Caitlin Rother gives us the whole shocking tale from the beginning - even going back to Skylar Deleon's heartwrenching childhood. In the end, I can't say that this book had me reaching for more of the genre, but it did hold my interest from start to finish. Due to the content, and the fact that it happened, I struggle for the right word for this one. I wouldn't call it entertaining. I don't know, enlightening, maybe? Either way, it did catch my attention and gave me some food for thought.

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PROLOGUE



Alonso Machain was unemployed,
with bills to pay, so he took up his friend Skylar Deleon’s offer to help restore
a family boat at the Cabrillo
yard in Long Beach, California. 

As they were sanding the Hatteras together, Skylar boasted about his plans for fixing
up his new toy, which
he’d gotten from his grandfather. Then Skylar offered his
twenty-one-year-old buddy a much more lucrative job.

“How much are you talking about?” Alonso asked.

“A couple million dollars,” Skylar said.

“Wow.
How do you make a couple
million dollars without it
being illegal?”

“Well,” Skylar said, “it’s not really illegal,
unless you get caught.”

As Skylar’s
plan evolved in the coming days of October 2004, the promised payoff for
Alonso soon increased to “several million” dollars to help Skylar “take care” of some people who had done something
bad
and pissed somebody off. 

Skylar
wasn’t usually paid for these
gigs, he said, but he
got to keep the assets of the “targets,” who were typically
well-off. His first
contract, for example,
was a guy who’d been selling drugs in Huntington Beach
schools and owed
money to the wrong people.

Skylar said he’d split the proceeds of his next job
with Alonso, but didn’t give him much time to mull
it over.

“So, you want to do it or not?” Skylar
asked a couple days later.

Alonso wasn’t really
sure what to think. Skylar
was always talking
about how rich
he and his family were, and Alonso
believed him. Although he knew Skylar liked to tell stories, he never stopped to consider that the few times Skylar
had thrown him a mere twenty
dollars for the boat restoration work, they’d had to drive to an ATM to get it. 

After Alonso decided to take the job,
Skylar went into more detail about the plan, showing him photos of a yacht called the Well Deserved, whose wealthy owners had put it up for sale. Alonso’s
role was to help Skylar get “in” with the owners, Tom and Jackie Hawks, then hold them down. 

The fifty-five-foot trawler was moored
in the upscale community
of Newport Beach in
Orange County, a sharp contrast
to the sprawling mix of urban, industrial, and suburban areas
of Long Beach,
where Skylar lived with his
wife, Jennifer,
in neighboring Los
Angeles County. 

Unlike
the spacious homes in Newport,
decorated in the mute
beiges and sandstone of the wealthy,
home for Skylar
and Jennifer was
a cramped converted garage behind her parents’ duplex.
Space was so tight
the Deleons had to stack
their belongings on the floor and hang their clothing
from a pole lodged between
two dressers next
to the bed.
It was a far cry from the opulent
mansions featured on The Real Housewives of Orange County and
The O.C.

Contrary to the story he’d told Alonso about the $3 million
a month he’d earned working
with Ditech Funding, Skylar had been fired from his job as appraiser’s
assistant there and looked at his wealthier
neighbors in “The O.C.” with envy. He coveted their waterfront homes,
boats, and private planes that he couldn’t afford, and he lied to persuade
folks that he could. 

Although he wasn’t
anywhere near as smart or capable
as Bernie Madoff in building a complex
financial scheme, Skylar’s scam was just as—if not more— deceitful.
And when it came to lying and manipulating people, Skylar was pretty good at
that, too.

The next time he and Alonso met, Skylar said he’d
analyzed photos of the boat’s interior for radios and weapons, such as spearguns, and had determined the best way to overcome the couple. Using
stun guns and handcuffs, Alonso would grab Jackie in the galley while Skylar took down Tom in the stateroom, where no one could hear him scream.

Skylar said
he’d considered taking Tom scuba
diving and finishing him off underwater, but he’d realized
that would preclude the Hawkses from
signing over the boat title and power-of-attorney documents he was going to draw
up.

“What I’ll do is just take them out to sea and toss
them overboard,” he said.

They
purchased two stun guns together, then Skylar
sent Alonso, a former jail guard he’d befriended while serving time for armed burglary a year earlier, to buy
two pairs of handcuffs.

The next day, November
6, Skylar said it was time
to do the deed. By
now, Alonso felt it was too late to
extricate himself from the situation. If twenty-five-year-old Skylar
really was a hit man,
what would prevent him from harming Alonso?

As they drove to the dock, Skylar
stopped a couple
blocks away to scope out who was aboard, then
called Tom to pick
them up in his dinghy. The Hawkses were expecting them.

On board,
Tom proudly gave them a tour of his home,
but Alonso could see from Skylar’s tone
of voice and body language that he’d changed
his mind. Skylar seemed far too relaxed
to kill anyone as he chatted
with Tom for forty-five minutes
about possible modes of payment. Before
they left, Skylar
made sure that Tom and Jackie knew
he was definitely interested in purchasing the
vessel and would be back
for a lesson on how to operate it.

Skylar told Alonso
afterward that he’d changed his mind once he’d realized that Tom was too muscular for the two of them to overpower alone. They really needed a third man.
Skylar also sensed
some discomfort on the Hawkses’
part, so he called Jennifer
on his cell phone as soon as
they got back to the car.

“Hey, you need to
come down, take a look at the
boat, to make these people
feel a little more at ease,”
he told her.

After sending Alonso
on his way, Skylar
and his pregnant wife
went back on board, pushing
their ten-month-old daughter, Haylie,
in a stroller, to do just that.

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New York Times bestselling author Caitlin Rother has written or co-authored 13 books, ranging from narrative nonfiction to memoir and crime fiction. Her latest titles are the true-life thriller Hunting Charles Manson and her memoir short, Secrets, Lies, and Shoelaces. A former investigative reporter at daily newspapers for 19 years, Rother has been published in Cosmopolitan, the Los Angeles Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Boston Globe and Daily Beast. She has appeared more than 200 times on TV, radio and podcasts internationally, including Australian Broadcast Corp’s “World News,” “Crime Watch Daily,” “People Magazine Investigates,” “Nancy Grace,” “Snapped,” and dozens of shows on Netflix, Investigation Discovery, Oxygen, A&E, Reelz, C-SPAN and various PBS affiliates. Rother also works as a writing-research coach and consultant, leads writing workshops, and plays keyboards and sings in an acoustic group called breakingthecode. She is working on two new books, one titled “Justice for Rebecca,” about the Rebecca Zahau death case, and one about the San Diego Zoo’s Frozen Zoo. Please visit her on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter or visit her website at https://www.caitlinrother.com.