Foss Man, highly sensitive fifteen-year-old Luke Foster, was routinely putting his bike in the remote storage shed when he walked in on Ron Ferguson, the notorious 230-pound town bully, who was violently raping Catherine, his screaming petite eighteen-year-old sister. With blind rage running through his veins, Luke impulsively grabbed a baseball bat and rushed the unsuspecting giant from behind and viciously pummeled the back of his head. The medical examiner pronounced the seventeen-year-old Ferguson dead at the scene a short time later.

Eleven years earlier, Luke (Foss Man) had blamed himself for letting his two-year-old sister Carol drown when she slipped from his frozen hands and was thrown overboard from their grandpa's fishing boat during his desperate attempt to save the Foster family from the worst storm and spring flood in decades.

Coupled with the built-in insecurities related to the Foster family's financial struggles, Carol's tragic death was the first of a sequence of traumatic episodes that undermined Luke's natural fun-loving free spirit and produced endless long nights filled with torturous nightmares. His exceptional performance in the classroom and athletic prowess helped level the playing field, but all that was countered when he was the persistent victim of bullying at the hands of the infamous Ferguson boy.

Seizing the golden opportunity to make a name for himself, the young and ambitious county attorney was convinced Luke's drastic actions in the shed that day were totally unjustified and simply provoked by the history of bad blood between the two childhood rivals. The immediately attorney filed manslaughter charges against the confused and badly shaken teenager. The sensational nature of the circumstances surrounding the pending trial created an unprecedented ambush of reporters and cameramen from the local and national media. The once proud and pristine small farming community of Jefferson, Iowa, would never be quite the same.

Pitting the two proud and determined brilliant young legal minds in the same courtroom before the residing strict, no-nonsense Judge Cooper, the stage was set for the inevitable fireworks for what proved to be the most spectacular trial in Wright County history.