TURF WAR GROWS OVER CHILD-DEATH REVIEW PANEL
The Palm Beach Post
March 12, 1998
Author: William Cooper Jr.
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

A turf war is brewing between the state and a nonprofit group that is creating Palm Beach County's first child-death review committee.
Home Safe, an agency that provides space where abused children are interviewed, organized a 17-person committee that will meet March 25 to analyze 20 local child deaths that occurred in January. The deaths include everything from premature births to drownings.
The committee consists of the medical examiner, the health department, police and a host of other law enforcement and medical officials.
Home Safe's assumption of the lead in the reviews doesn't sit well with Ed Horton, head of the local office for the Department of Children and Families.
``Who empowered the people at Home Safe to be in charge?'' he asked.
Horton, whose agency investigates child abuse and neglect, agreed two weeks ago to work with the Children's Services Council to start a similar committee. The two joined forces after an internal DCF report was made public that showed 15 local children died of abuse or neglect during the 1995-96 budget year.
That figure was the highest in Florida at the time, and three times the county's annual average.
Horton questions whether Home Safe has the authority to organize a child-death review committee. He also has reservations about Suzanne Turner, Home Safe's executive director, leading the effort.
``They don't have the appropriate credibility,'' said Horton, who will take his concerns to the committee. ``If you look at the person who is the chief executive (at Home Safe), she was connected with the past child-abuse deaths.''
In fact, Turner held Horton's job from July 1993 until November 1996, when she was hired by Home Safe. During her tenure, the county experienced its highest number of child-abuse deaths, including the case of 10-year-old A.J. Schwarz, who died in 1993 at the hands of his stepmother.
DCF's handling of the Schwarz case led a county grand jury to conclude that abused children were ``at significant risk for further abuse'' after they entered the state's care. Turner could not be reached for comment.
In Home Safe's defense, State Attorney Barry Krischer, who is a member of the agency's board, said DCF and any other agencies had plenty of time to organize a child-death review committee.
``The fact is, everybody was talking about it, but Home Safe took it and ran with it,'' he said.
Krischer, meanwhile, took Home Safe's cause to Tallahassee.
He said Attorney General Bob Butterworth showed the most interest and agreed to help find either state or federal money to help pay for the project.

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MOM STRUGGLES TO SUSTAIN KIDS' ABUSE CAMPAIGN
The Palm Beach Post
April 20, 1998
Author: William Cooper Jr.
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Kathy Forrester, a stay-at-home mom upset about the number of local child abuse deaths in 1994, decided to do more than talk about the problem with friends over coffee.
She volunteered to help launch Our Community, Our Children, a nonprofit agency whose mission was to begin a massive child abuse prevention campaign.
Initially, the group flooded the community with blue and white bumper stickers, refrigerator magnets, T-shirts and tote bags promoting the agency's theme, ``No Excuse For Child Abuse.''
Public service announcements filled radio and television - compliments of the media. Local donations, totaling about $30,000, paid for printing and distribution of information fliers.
Now, four years later, much of that momentum has waned, and Forrester is struggling to keep the agency's doors open.
The organization was born out of the deaths of Christina Holt in 1994 and A.J. Schwarz in 1993.
``This organization exists because those children died,'' said Forrester, who now is serving as an unpaid executive director of the agency. ``I had to pay my dues, but while I'm doing that, people need to know that children are still dying.''
The turning point for the nonprofit organization happened in the spring of 1996, when Forrester submitted a $160,000 proposal to the Children's Services Council, which uses tax money to pay for new children's programs.
Forrester wanted the money to pay for staff, develop a public awareness campaign and to distribute information packets about parenting. CSC rejected it, saying Forrester's goals seemed too ambitious for such a young agency.
After that setback, several board members left or just stopped coming to the meetings, said Steve Vooglesang, a local tax attorney and original board member.
``I think everybody was a little disappointed,'' Vooglesang said.
The rejection touched a nerve with Forrester. From the beginning, she quietly questioned whether she was the person to lead Our Community, Our Children.
She was a homemaker, with no college degree and no expertise in children's issues. Yet being a new mother drove her to get involved.
In a matter of months, she went from being a volunteer to leading an agency that was charged to educate the community about child abuse.
Forrester now is distributing the ``Parenting Pouch,'' an informational guide for new parents. It has resources, including telephone numbers where parents can get advice or counseling about raising their children.
``I don't care how many doors get slammed in my face, I'm not going to stop trying,'' Forrester said.
Currently, she's applied for grants from the Community Foundation of Palm Beach and Martin counties and the Quantum Foundation so the agency can continue to distribute information about parenting tips and child safety to the community.
Over the years, the agency has survived on small grants from the Department of Children and Families. Corporate sponsors and efforts to raise money never have reached the group's initial expectations.
Tana Ebbole, CSC's executive director, said the intent wasn't for her agency or any other governmental entity to be Our Community, Our Children's sole source of financial support.
``That's why we titled the organization the way we did . . . ,'' she said.
Ebbole believes people in the private sector often are uncomfortable with talking about child abuse and do not get involved financially. Their uneasiness leaves the bulk of the responsibility to government agencies.
``We need to have an aggressive, ongoing community awareness campaign on child abuse,'' Ebbole said. ``It's every citizen's responsibility to send a message that we will not tolerate children being abused or being killed.''
Recently, Forrester took steps to revive Our Community, Our Children. She's gone from running it from her Palm Beach Gardens home to a West Palm Beach office at 2247 Palm Beach Lakes Blvd.
She's recruited new board members and is negotiating with new corporate sponsors.
Toby Chabon, owner of Chabon and Associates, a career development and human resources consulting firm, now heads the board. Chabon brings nearly 20 years of child advocacy to Our Community, Our Children, including serving on the county's Foster Care Review Committee and as past president of the Center for Children in Crisis, a nonprofit agency that provides counseling for abused children.
``I like challenges,'' Chabon said. ``This is an issue we all must be involved in on a regular basis, not when we're just reacting to startling headlines.''

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APPEALS COURT UPHOLDS MURDER CONVICTION
Sun-Sentinel
July 30, 1998
Author: Staff reports

An appeals court on Wednesday upheld the conviction of Jessica Schwarz, 43, who was sentenced three years ago to 40 years in prison for the murder of her 10-year-old stepson, only to claim that she was the victim of poor legal advice.
The 4th District Court of Appeal ruled that even if Schwarz's defense team allowed improper evidence to creep into the prosecution's case in 1995, it did not affect the outcome of the trial.
Schwarz's stepson, Andrew "A.J." Schwarz, was found nude and beaten in the family swimming pool in 1993. Prosecutors presented 20 witnesses who outlined how Schwarz humiliated A.J., making him eat meals next to the cat litter box or run naked through the neighborhood west of Lantana.
The testimony in question revolved around a medical examiner's conclusions, which were based in part on what he heard neighbors say, not his own work. But the appellate judges ruled that even if that testimony had been quashed, Schwarz still would have been convicted.
Schwarz, a former truck driver is serving an additional 30 years for abusing A.J. before his death.

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PROSECUTOR PENS STORY OF THE BOY HE CAN'T FORGET
Palm Beach Post, The (FL)
February 21, 2004
Author: Emily J. Minor

Scott Cupp remembers the details. The date of death. The address where the boy died. The neighbor's name and the sister's name and the doctor in Atlanta who performed the second autopsy.
Sometimes, he remembers these things all too well.
For years, Cupp, 47, has prosecuted only the tough, emotional cases involving the abuse and death of children. "I don't know why," he says. "Sometimes I wonder that myself." First, in North Florida, then in Palm Beach County, now on the west coast in Fort Myers.
When you're a prosecutor, you tend to see the awful side of life. And the awful side of life tends to stick.
Maybe you remember A.J. Schwarz? I know I do. There were other children who died in Palm Beach County in 1993 - children who might even be better-remembered than the slight boy with the abusive stepmother.
Christina Holt, the little girl whose mother pretended she'd been abducted from a Broward County flea market when, indeed, the girl was really dead - dead from a beating the mother had stood and watched. Pauline Cone, a foster child who died when a wood lid on her crib slammed down and hanged her.
On and on and on the list went. Mother after mother went to prison - including Jessica Schwarz, A.J.'s stepmother.
But it was always this case and that boy Cupp remembered most.
A.J. Schwarz was 10 years old when he died SunFest weekend. Investigators came to his house in Lantana on a hot Sunday morning, and it didn't take too long for everyone to figure out something was up.
The boy was found floating naked in the family's backyard swimming pool, his Ninja pajamas in a rumpled little pile inside a bedroom that was so dim and stinky and sparse that investigators would make note of it in their paperwork. He was bruised in odd places. In death, his body was frozen in a weird contortion.
'Am I doing the right thing?'
And as the questioning wore on, Cupp and his team would discover things were so bad - and Schwarz was so blatant with her abuse - that the neighbors could list example after example of abuse.
"I started to do something with this in, like, February of 2000," says Cupp, who left Palm Beach County in 1999 and is now chief of the felony division for the state attorney's office in the 20th Circuit.
"And there are times I wonder, 'Why am I doing this? Am I doing the right thing?' "
Then he remembers all those details.
"He was trapped," Cupp said. "He really was."
Now, Cupp and a coauthor are working on a book about it with Kensington Publications Inc. and hoping for a publication date of March 2005.
There was something sad, of course, about every one of the children who died that year. There always is. But for so many of us, the story of A.J. stuck. His stepmother hated him so much she made him eat from a bowl on the floor, next to the cat litter. He walked to school in the rain, but she always drove her own children - often whizzing right by A.J.
Perhaps worst of all, A.J. watched his sister, older and mouthier, get removed from the home - rescued, if you will - by state authorities while he was left behind, scared and silent. A state worker was later indicted for threatening to take a neighbor's children if the woman, who'd repeatedly reported the abuse, continued to meddle in A.J.'s troubled life.
"The kids' names change," said Cupp, who Friday morning clipped another story of another child's death from another Florida newspaper.
"It used to be A.J. and this one and that. Now there are just different names."
All this is in the book, the one he's afraid no one will read. "It's too awful," he says.
All this is in the book that Scott Cupp knows he has to write.
emily_minor@pbpost.com

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Prosecutor's book reveals insight on child murder case
By DENISE ZOLDAN
dczoldan@naplesnews.com

May 22, 2005

Former Palm Beach County prosecutor Scott Cupp stops talking for a moment. His voice cracks and he can barely keep from crying. It's been 12 years and dozens of prosecutions later, but the murder of A.J. Schwarz, a 10-year-old Palm Beach County boy, at the hands of his stepmother still rips Cupp apart. That's why he's written a book, "No One Can Hurt Him Anymore" — an insider's story about how politics and egos can thwart justice. And how a system that's supposed to protect children often fails them.

The book, published by Kensington Publishing Corp., went on sale in local book stores this month. "It bothered me what this kid went through. He was in the custody of (the state). He should have been saved. It was infuriating. It's still infuriating," Cupp said from his third-floor office in the Lee County Justice Center, where he has been a prosecutor with the Southwest Florida State Attorney's Office for 2½ years.

Last year, Cupp, known statewide among prosecutors and law enforcers as a fierce champion of children, was the lead prosecutor in the Nelson Faerber case. It was one of the most high-profile child abuse cases in Collier County history. Faerber, a former Collier County School Board member, was accused of sexually assaulting a boy for years. A lifelong Naples resident and criminal defense attorney, Faerber had ties to the legal community that created a sensitive climate. Cupp was an outsider. No ties. He was the right man. For months, Cupp pressed hard as officials gathered mounting evidence. State investigators had rounded up other alleged victims when Faerber, professing his innocence, ended it all by taking his own life. "It was a tragic situation all the way around," said Steve Russell, Cupp's boss and State Attorney for Southwest Florida's 20th Judicial Circuit. "But I thought Scott was on track." Almost three years ago, Russell persuaded Cupp to take the assistant state attorney position overseeing 28 prosecutors in the felony division of the Lee County office. Cupp already had left the Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office. He was gearing down and had moved to LaBelle, where he had started a private practice. But Cupp always had wanted to head a felony division. And Russell is glad Cupp didn't turn him down. "He certainly has helped me achieve my goals of prosecuting child abuse," Russell said.

In the case of A.J. Schwarz, Cupp was an assistant state attorney in Palm Beach County when the boy drowned in 4 feet of water in the above-ground pool in his own back yard. Cuts and bruises in various stages of healing covered his body. He was found naked with fresh abrasions on his face and arms.

But no one was going to answer for A.J.'s death. The medical examiner's office ruled the manner of death "undetermined," making it impossible to bring murder charges that would stick. "I don't know how you even present to a grand jury when the medical examiner's going to tell them he can't tell if it's a homicide," Cupp said. But Cupp couldn't take "undetermined" for an answer. As the head of the Crimes Against Children Unit in the Palm Beach State Attorney's Office, he would do whatever it took to get to the truth. Cupp took on the medical examiner's office, the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services (now called the Department of Children and Families), and a list of critics before leveling child abuse and murder charges against Jessica Schwarz, A.J.'s stepmother.

Then, in a dubious political climate, Cupp delivered an impossible case to jurors, exposed the medical examiner and the state's child protection system for what they were, and put Jessica Schwarz behind bars for 70 years. If it weren't for Cupp, A.J.'s case never would have been filed, let alone successfully prosecuted, said his former boss, Barry Krischer, state attorney for Palm Beach County. Voters had just elected Krischer to office in 1993 when A.J. was murdered. And Krischer had just brought Cupp down from the 3rd Judicial Circuit in Lake City, where he was making a statewide name for himself prosecuting crimes against children.

In 1992, Cupp successfully had prosecuted the Lake City parents of a disabled child who died because their End Times religion didn't believe in doctors. Before that, Cupp sent to prison David Lindsey, one of the first single men in Florida allowed to adopt children. Lindsey got 15 years for sexually abusing his adopted sons. Cupp doesn't even attempt to conceal his disdain for inept officials in authority who fail to protect children. "They were feeding (Lindsey) kids like they were cookies," he said of the adoption agency.

But years later it would be 10-year-old A.J. who would continue to rip at Cupp's heart. "I don't know what A.J.'s plight resounded with him, but clearly he felt driven to do something about what happened, to his credit," Krischer told the Daily News. It was A.J.'s suffering and humiliation from physical and emotional abuse, Cupp said. It was relentless. His short life was torture and it appeared his death mattered to no one. And his killer was going to get away with it.

"Why A.J.?," Cupp repeats the question. Cupp, 49, said he didn't suffer an abusive childhood while growing up in Pittsburgh where his mother was a housewife and his father was an engineer. But he focused on A.J. for several reasons. "In the beginning, the way it started out ... with the medical examiner not wanting to call it a homicide," he said. Cupp got Krischer to give him permission to have A.J.'s body flown to Georgia for a second opinion — unbeknownst to the Palm Beach County medical examiner. The brotherhood of medical examiners in Florida was tight at the time, so Cupp felt he had to go out of state to find a neutral opinion. Critics said he was committing career suicide to go up against such a popular medical examiner.

But, Cupp said, "We had to do something." "Everybody was pressing to find out as much as we could about (A.J.'s) background. We found out pretty quickly what this kid went through," he said. Jessica Schwarz had abused and humiliated A.J. daily, keeping him from school, forcing him to eat roaches, humiliating him publicly by forcing him to run down the street naked. She degraded him constantly and made him yell out loud while working in the yard that he was a stupid idiot.

Cupp was infuriated by the mental abuse A.J. suffered and he not only successfully prosecuted A.J.'s stepmother, but he got an HRS employee convicted for threatening neighbors because they repeatedly had called to report A.J.'s abuse. Although the book about A.J.'s life and murder, which was co-written with author Carol J. Rothgeb, is Cupp's first, it's not his first brush with publicity. The Sunday, April 16, 1995, edition of the Palm Beach Post featured a five-column front-page spread on Cupp. The headline calls him "Champion of the Children." He's pictured holding his two daughters, Kaitlin, now 16, and Elizabeth, now 14. His now 10-year-old son, Scottie, was just an infant at the time.

The article talks about a man "obsessed with fighting child abuse." But Cupp now says he never intended to become an advocate for children. He wasn't particularly interested in child abuse cases. He was merely following job opportunities. And he took the jobs that offered the most money. He has three children, he explained. And he makes no apologies for the reasons he wants to promote his book. He wants it to help pay for his children's college education.

But during his years of prosecuting, Cupp's passion for protecting children turned into a calling. He successfully prosecuted John and Pauline Zile for first-degree murder and multiple counts of child abuse in 1997. The Ziles made national headlines when they reported their daughter had been kidnapped from a flea market in Palm Beach County. Cupp has contempt for parents who abuse children — and for Pauline Zile in particular. She went on TV crying and asking for help. "She said the child was with her and then she disappeared. She was crying, 'Oh, my baby. Oh, my baby,'" Cupp said. A controlling John Zile had beaten the child to death while Pauline Zile did nothing. In such cases, child abuse prosecutions "get in your blood," Cupp said. And with the attitude of a man resigned to his destiny, he added: "Whether I like it or not, this is what I am suppose to do." The record shows he is good at it.

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BOOK DETAILS BOY'S SHORT, PAINFUL LIFE
10-YEAR-OLD A.J. SCHWARZ DIED AT HANDS OF STEPMOM.
South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL)
July 5, 2005
Author: Peter Franceschina Staff Writer

No one who knew the little brown-haired boy can forget him.

Before A.J. Schwarz became another emblem of Florida's troubled child protection system, he was anxious to please and starved for affection, yet he knew to keep his mouth closed when it came to his home life.

It has been a dozen years since his cruel stepmother made it her life's mission to punish 10-year-old A.J. in rough ways and further break him psychologically.

Neighbors saw A.J. edging the lawn with scissors; his stepmother made him run down the street naked, in front of classmates; she would swear at him and call him harsh names; she was seen cuffing A.J. about the head, even punching him. Some days, A.J. stood in the yard all day long repeating humiliating phrases over and over: "My name is A.J. I lie on people to get them in trouble. I will never do it again."

The stepmother told a neighbor she was going to kill A.J. one of these days. Then neighbors woke up May 2, 1993, to police cars and emergency workers converging on Triphammer Road in Lantana. A.J.'s bruised, abraded and naked body was found in the backyard pool, eight days after his 10th birthday.

"After A.J. died, I dreamed about him, dreamed about him and dreamed about him. I had to go to counseling. I think about him every day," says Theresa Walton, 21, a neighbor who knew A.J. "Now, as a mother myself, I think about it. I don't think you can ever forget about it."

That is Scott Cupp's hope for a larger audience. He was the Palm Beach County prosecutor who struggled to find justice in A.J.'s death, at a time Palm Beach County was seeing several high-profile child deaths. Cupp and a co-author recently published a book detailing A.J.'s short, painful life.

"This was a story that deserved to be told," Cupp says. "It was something that always stuck with me, and it probably always will."

The book doesn't read like a thriller, because the investigation quickly points to abuse by someone in the home. The storyline is drawn from Cupp's inside view of the investigation and thousands of pages of documents, witness statements and court transcripts. Cupp and Carol J. Rothgeb, a Missouri author who largely handled the writing, tell a straightforward horror story, one that could be ripped from today's headlines.

The book's title, No One Can Hurt Him Anymore, comes from case notes made by A.J.'s court-appointed guardian, who thought he failed A.J. by not pushing to get him out of the house. One entry read, "God was unkind to Andrew... No one can hurt him anymore. In the end, we all failed him. I should have saved him; now I must live with my failure."

The book is a harsh indictment of the Florida Department of Children & Families, then known as the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. The child-protection agency knew all about A.J., but its investigators couldn't save him. A grand jury highlighted the failures in A.J.'s case and made numerous recommendations to better protect children under state care.

Cupp, who now supervises felony prosecutions in Fort Myers, says the system has not gotten any better. "They just did a marketing change," he says. "They went from HRS to DCF. What has changed?"

Born and raised in Fort Lauderdale, A.J. and his stepsister were taken away from their natural mother, Ilene Soini-Schwarz, after the stepsister allegedly was abused by one of the mother's boyfriends. In November 1990, they were sent to live with A.J.'s father, David Schwarz, and his wife, Jessica, and her two daughters in Lantana. During the entire time, A.J. was supposed to be under the watchful eye of the social workers.

Despite eight reports that came into child-protection agency about Jessica Schwarz's abuse and bizarre punishments, Cupp writes that social workers thought A.J.'s meddling mother and nosy neighbors were making it up.

"We warned them over, over and over," says Soini-Schwarz, who was trying to regain custody of A.J., and has now become a social worker focusing on juveniles. "It's got to stop. Every time I turn around, another kid in state custody is dying."

Child-protection investigators found no signs of abuse. One social worker later was charged with threatening a neighbor with taking her children away if she made more abuse reports. By all accounts, Jessica Schwarz doted on her own two daughters. A.J.'s stepsister was removed from the home after complaining about abuse, but A.J. was left there.

"You think it's dangerous enough to remove her, why do you leave the other one there? They definitely failed him, definitely," says Walton, the former neighbor. "Now that I'm older and understand it better, it breaks my heart even more."

A.J. was seen in the neighborhood at 1:30 in the morning on May 2, walking the family dog. Another neighbor heard a boy's voice calling out in the middle of the night, "I won't do it again! I won't do it again!"

Jessica Schwartz, then a 39-year-old heavyset woman proud of being loud and telling everyone exactly what she thought, never shed a tear for A.J. -- until her ride to jail, after her second-degree murder conviction. It took prosecutors two trials to put Jessica Schwarz in prison for 70 years.

First, Cupp and co-prosecutor Joseph Marx, now a Palm Beach County judge, won convictions against Schwarz for six counts of child abuse. The murder conviction was based solely on circumstantial evidence. Schwarz adamantly, arrogantly, maintained her innocence.

"I wanted him to be happy and stay at the house and just grow up there with us," Schwarz told jurors in her first trial.

In the murder trial, Laura Perryman, a neighbor, testified Jessica Schwarz said she was going to kill A.J.

"I kept saying, `You don't mean that.' She says, `I do mean it,'" recalls Perryman, who still lives in the same house. "He was so quiet and polite. Whatever I saw of him was the sweetest kid."

While Perryman thinks often about A.J., and never without becoming upset, she says his memory has faded in the neighborhood. "The neighborhood has all turned over. No one around here knows about it anymore."

Jessica Schwarz's release date is set for July 2034, when she will be 79.

Andrew James Schwarz's memory is marked by a plaque at his school, Indian Pines Elementary. He is buried in Lauderdale Memorial Gardens, in Garden 26, Lot 3, Space 4.

Peter Franceschina can be reached at pfranceschina@sun-sentinel.com or 561-832-2894.
Caption:
NEVER HAD a CHANCE: The book, No One Can Hurt Him Anymore, is a harsh indictment of the DCF, then known as the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. The child-protection agency knew all about A.J., but its investigators couldn't save him. A grand jury highlighted the failures in A.J.'s case and made numerous recommendations to better protect children under state care. Staff photo/Scott Fisher

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Prosecutor details murder of boy, 10
Lee attorney covers abuse case in book
By GRANT BOXLEITNER
GBOXLEITNER@NEWS-PRESS.COM
Published by news-press.com on July 25, 2005

The daily torture and eventual murder of 10-year-old Andrew "A.J." Schwartz at the hands of his stepmother affected prosecutor Scott Cupp in ways he can't always grasp.

Cupp, felony division chief in the Fort Myers state attorney's office, was once awakened by a heart-wrenching dream about the slain boy, who lived in Lantana in Palm Beach County.

"The case got so ingrained in my mind," he said.

It has been more than 10 years since Cupp faced off against the stepmother, Jessica Schwartz, in the courtroom as an assistant state attorney in Palm Beach County during the high-profile trial.

Cupp successfully prosecuted the former truck driver on criminal child abuse and second-degree murder charges after everything seemed stacked against the state's case from the first autopsy. Schwartz is serving a 70-year prison term.

Cupp chronicles the boy's torture, the stepmother's penchant for abuse and all the courtroom drama in the book "No One Can Hurt Him Anymore."

Cupp, who took the chief of felonies post in the Lee state attorney's office in 2003, is part of the prosecution team in Donald Moringiello's second-degree murder trial.

The 65-year-old Fort Myers Beach resident is accused of shooting wife Hattie "Fern" Bergeler-Moringiello four times, weighing her body down with concrete and dumping it in Estero Bay in 2002.

The trial continues today at the Lee County Justice Center.

From 1993 to 1999, Cupp served as division chief of crimes against children and sex crimes unit in Palm Beach County. He earned the nickname "Champion of the Children" among some of his peers after an article about him was published in the Palm Beach Post.

Co-written by author Carol J. Rothgeb, Cupp's book doesn't mask the pain and sadness that accompanies child abuse. Rothgeb knew the painful topic could shrink the audience base for the nonfiction title, which is available at most book stores and Web sites.

Rothgeb said she made sure she stopped writing several hours before bed because she didn't want A.J. to be the last thought on her mind.

"I had to detach as much as possible," said Rothgeb, who also penned the true-crime book "Hometown Killer." "I call what Jessica did creative abuse."

One example of such abuse highlighted in the book is forcing her stepson trim the grass around the driveway with scissors.

But A.J. probably was punched and kicked before he was thrown in the pool to die, Rothgeb said.

Cupp said he wanted to write a book about the case sooner but said the timing didn't present itself until he came to Fort Myers. He used hundreds of pages of transcripts from the trials, building the book's credibility with documented testimony.

Cupp decided to let a co-author help him write it, he said, because he knew he could not remain objective when it came to A.J.

"At least justice was done for A.J." Cupp said. "Jessica could have easily gotten away with murder."

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