To Mary With Love

To Mary With Love is a haunting true story of deception, ambition and the quiet endurance of a woman who never stopped hoping. In 1905, Sylvester Earl fancied himself more than a man---he was a genius doctor, a master surgeon and according to his own bold claims, the possessor of a cure for cancer. But there was one critical problem: he had no medical education. Fueled by ego and delusion, Sylvester bluffed his way into an Indiana hospital and the operating room itself. What happened next shocked even the most seasoned professionals---and sent him fleeing from the law. He vanished without a trace! Left behind was Mary, his young wife and the mother of his two children. Though abandoned, humiliated and burdened with secrets not her own, Mary never wavered in her love. She spent the rest of her life wondering what became of the man who walked out of her life taking with him every answer. Drawing from family records, oral histories, and many years of painstaking research, To Mary With Love unearths the astonishing truth behind a century-old mystery. It is not just the tale of a con man-it is the story of a woman's quiet strength and the legacy of unanswered questions. For readers of The Stranger Beside Me and The Glass Castle, this is biography at its most intimate and unsettling. Some stories are too strange to be fiction and too important to be forgotten.