Is The Lovely Bones based on a true story?

The Lovely Bones movie was
ambitiously directed by Peter Jackson, who brought us The Lord Of The
Rings and Hobbit trilogies. In the movie, the pedophile
character, George Harvey, rapes, murders, and dismembers 14 year old Susie Salmon; Susie
is lured into an underground den when she takes a shortcut home from school one day. The
story is set in the year 1973. While George Harvey is a fictional pedophile, his profile
is a composite of many of the nation's most heinous child predators. His victims,
including Susie Salmon, are mostly young girls and female teenagers (again, all the
victims are fictional composites of actual serial killer
victims).

The author, Alice Sebold, was herself a victim of
rape. While returning to her college dormitory room one evening, she was brutally
assaulted and raped in a tunnel to an amphitheater. She was later to find out that a
young woman had been murdered and dismembered in that same tunnel. Later, Sebold took
the stand at her rape trial, and the rapist was given the maximum sentence for rape and
sodomy. So, you could say that, for Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
was personally cathartic. The novel started out as Monsters,
and was briefly named This Wide Heaven before it
became The Lovely Bones. Writing provided an avenue for Sebold to
deal with her own pain and anguish. At the same time that she acknowledges that her
novel is a work of fiction, Sebold allows for the fact that her readers will be tempted
to explore the link between the novel and her own rape. She realizes that it is only
natural that her readers would want to make sense of the
connection.