Burned Alive: Kimberly Antonakos | True Crime | Book Review
Burned Alive: A Shocking True Story of Betrayal, Kidnapping, and Murder (Amazon Associate Program) — okay, this was the only book that I could find about this true crime.
As with most true crime fascination of mine, I discovered this one because I was watching one of my shows on the ID Network (as usual). There were several shows that had this crime on it. It was especially of interest to me because the crime was in NYC (I mean, there's tons of crime in NYC, but this one related to me more than gang violence, drug crimes, terrorism, human trafficking, etc.)... she was so young too.
20-year-old Kim Antonakos was returning to her Brooklyn apartment after a night of clubbing with a friend. She was the envy of those who knew her personally, and a true daddy's-girl, but on her way home in the early morning of that year's Ash Wednesday, Kim was abducted — and her mysterious kidnappers turned out to be those she welcomed into her home.
Kim's father, a well-to-do businessman named Tommy Antonakos, had no idea that her abductors and murderers were right under his nose. A loser "mastermind" had organized the abduction of Kim... she was bounded, gagged, and left in the freezing basement of an abandoned house in a Queens neighborhood — all in the wasted expectation of trying to extract ransom from her father.
However, the dumbass called from a payphone, and as soon as it sounded like the receiver was picked up, dumbass would hit the play button on the recorder, playing a pre-recorded ransom demand — only, senõr dumbass didn't realized that he had pressed play with the recording talking over the answering machine greeting (he didn't wait until after the beep, if you need me to spell it out for you). See, this mastermind was actually really stupid. When the plans fell through, he and his other loser friends panicked, returned to the basement and doused an almost frozen Kim with gasoline, setting her on fire.
When the fire was extinguished, all that was left were her charred, lifeless remains. You know, I really doubt that the girlfriend didn't know what was going on — I mean, she was basically living in that apartment too! There's no way she didn't know what a creep her baby's daddy was... and the real sad part was that one of the guys that she used to see was a part of it too.
Kieran Crowley is a New York Times bestselling author and supposedly an award-winning reporter for the New York Post. According to his author bio, his investigative reporting on a series of dismemberment murders of prostitutes helped lead homicide detectives to serial killer Robert Shulman; it also claims that Shulman told police after his arrest that he halted his killing spree when he read a description of himself and his car in one of Crowley's stories. It's also been stated that Crowley has covered hundreds of trials and thousands of murders... I will say though, that in a few of the ID shows, he is one of the people that are continuously interviewed as a contributor; especially for this crime, as well as other crimes in the NYC area.
I got the Kindle version of this book because the printed version wasn't available on Amazon anymore (but from my experience, the hard copy is always better than the electronic version because sometimes the electronic version doesn't have the photos that are usually accompanied with books like these); anyway I became interested in this story from watching like 3 different shows do re-enactments of this horrible murder on the ID Network. I started Googling to find out more and decided to read a true-crime book about it instead (Truman Capote really made a sensational literary genre out of it back in the 1960's).
The book is very intriguing, but it's not Capote's true crime writing, let's just say — but I still enjoyed it a lot. I put it up there with A Thing of Beauty (the biography on the supermodel Gia, which was made into an HBO movie starring Angelina Jolie). You'll definitely enjoy this if you enjoy reading other true crime books though.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3BiKuqyOxBgeIBhH5HHCse?si=5KcR8qmWRfObFBc4wYDKIQ
