Former San Jose Mercury News Reporter Releases Book About Brutal Murder of 19-Year-Old Stanford Resident, Arlis Perry

“Murder Under God’s Eye” by Scott Herhold, is the First Detailed Account of the 44-Year-Old Case That Stunned the Nation

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, USA, May 24, 2023/EINPresswire.com/ — Early in the morning on Sunday, October 13, 1974, a security guard found the body of 19-year-old Arlis Perry under a pew inside the Stanford Memorial Church on the Stanford campus. The body was laid out in a ritual fashion after she had been strangled and an ice pick was thrust into her brain. The book is the first comprehensive account of what happened on that fatal night and what led to the eventual solving of the case 44 years later.

A native of Bismarck, North Dakota, Arlis was the deeply religious wife of Stanford sophomore, Bruce Perry. She had gone into the church to pray late on Saturday evening following a dispute with her husband. Detectives pursued serial killers like Ted Bundy and David Berkowitz but the case was not solved until 2018 when advanced DNA was able to identify the suspect. When the cold-case detectives showed up at the suspect’s home and knocked on the door, the suspect shot himself in the head.

“Murder Under God’s Eye” is both a detailed whodunit and an exploration of the impact the case had on the campus and the broader community. “No one knows more about the murder of Arlis Perry inside Stanford Memorial Church than reporter Scott Herhold,” said retired Stanford police Captain, Raoul K. Niemeyer. “It’s a fascinating chronology of a diabolical crime.”

The title of the book is taken from a fresco of a huge eye painted by Jane Stanford in the church’s tower when the sanctuary was completed in 1903. Known as “God’s Eye,” the fresco collapsed in the 1906 earthquake.

The book is available at Amazon or Barnes and Noble for $27.99. A Kindle version is available for $9.99. For more information, go to murderundergodseye.com

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About the Author

Scott Herhold, a Yale graduate, spent 40 years as a reporter, editor and columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. Herhold became interested in the crime after he joined the newspaper’s Peninsula bureau in 1977 while the case was still fresh. Herhold gave a speech about the still-unsolved crime at a Palo Alto Historical Association meeting in 2017, before retiring later that year. In 2003, Herhold was a finalist for the George Polk Award in Journalism – a series of American journalism awards presented annually by Long Island University in New York. The award judges place a premium on investigative work that is original, requires digging and resourcefulness and brings results.

Elaine Sullivan
SullivanWorks
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