Sam Pierson remembers that the evening of March 1, 1998, started out cold and quiet. She and her friend Ken Vitt sat toastily snug inside his warm and secluded Lebo, Kan., home, while freezing winds and snow flurries mingled outside.

The quiet was cloaked in an ominousness that only Mr. Vitt's large black dog, Blue, could sense. But it wouldn't be long before the dread manifested itself in a knock on the door.

What follows next is a harrowing story of Ms. Pierson and Mr. Vitt being held hostage and robbed of their belongings.

"Without Warning," Ms. Pierson's sixth and first non-fictional book, details that ordeal and its conclusion with the capture and conviction of the two intruders.

"I started it about two years after (the robbery) and just put it on the shelf because I didn't have an ending until about seven years later, when they found one of the guys down in Georgia and he ratted on the one up here in Missouri," says Ms. Pierson, a former St. Joseph resident.

She said she wrote the book as a cautionary tale, and as proof to those people who doubted the robbery actually happened.

"The agent said people didn't want to believe it happened to us right there, because then they would have to be afraid it could happen to them," Ms. Pierson said.

She will sign copies of "Without Warning" at noon today at Hastings Books Music and Videos, 605 N. Belt Highway.

Alonzo Weston can be reached

at alonzow@npgco.com.