The mother who forced her 5 children to breed — until they chained her up in the “breeding” barn.

By 1890, the McKenna farm had become an impenetrable fortress. Delilah’s personal ledger, later seized by authorities, listed September 15, 1890, as the official beginning of her reign of terror. On that date, she recorded in chilling, almost clinical detail the first forced intercourse between her eldest son, Thomas, and a young woman she had lured to the farm. Delilah considered this event “the blessed beginning of God’s pure lineage.”

What followed was a decade of systematic and unchecked horrors. Sheriff William Crawford, the local lawman, began to suspect that something profoundly wrong was afoot in late 1895. In the span of just six months, three healthy young women from impoverished families vanished without a trace while traveling the mountain roads near Milbrook Hollow. One of the victims, nineteen-year-old Martha Henderson, disappeared while riding her horse to visit relatives. Her horse was found wandering aimlessly near the edge of the McKenna property.

When Crawford questioned Delilah, her composure was eerily perfect. She claimed she hadn’t seen anything. But the instincts of a seasoned sheriff told him something was wrong. He began to piece together the chronology of the disappearances and realized that the victims shared specific characteristics that made them vulnerable, and that their paths mysteriously crossed near the McKenna farm.

In the spring of 1896, Crawford received an anonymous letter delivered after dark. The terrified author, later revealed to be neighbor Samuel Briggs, claimed that on certain nights, coinciding perfectly with the lunar cycle, terrifying screams could be heard echoing from the McKennas’ barn. Briggs described the sounds as a mixture of women screaming in despair and chains dragging across heavy wooden planks.