Chase the Devil

A police detective and an investigative journalist team up in secret to try and solve a series of rapes and murders from the early 1980s on Florida’s Gulf Coast hoping to solve the cold case that has been passed through generations of detectives.

On December 31, 1984, Tonya Ethridge McKinley was out with friends celebrating New Year’s Eve and the start of her new life in Pensacola, Florida. Finally free from an abusive relationship, she was just weeks from her 24th birthday and moving toward becoming the person she’d always wanted to be, which included crafting a future with her 18-month-old son.

When Tonya’s body was found dumped on the side of the road, half-naked, raped, beaten and choked to death in the early-morning hours of New Year’s Day, it was the first of two unsolved rapes and murders in the same area in the first two months of the year.

The cases would go unsolved for decades, leaving one generation of detectives after another passing the case down. When it landed on the case of a legendary detective at the beginning of 2019, his unorthodox approach would set off a chain of events that would eventually bring him and those closest to him face-to-face with an unimaginable evil.

Chase the Devil takes readers back to that rainy night on December 31, 1984, and barrels forward like a freight train, moving across the decades, diving into the details of the crime and inside the lives of the victims and their families, the suspects, and the law enforcement officers who kept the case alive.

With original reporting and unprecedented access to investigators, case files, and FBI reports kept hidden for decades, investigative journalist Tony Adame takes us inside the investigation and tries to answer the question of what really happened to Tonya that night and who took her life.

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