A Partnership in Crime

by Stephen Singular

The night we met in the fall of 1990, Joyce and I spoke about my first book, Talked to Death, which chronicled the 1984 neo-Nazi assassination of Denver talk show host Alan Berg. She said she wanted to read it and a few days later I gave her a copy.

Independently, we’d early in life developed an interest in non-fiction crime books by reading Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and one day we’d journey together to Holcomb, Kansas, and the infamous Clutter farmhouse. After I gave her the Berg book, we started dating and launched a partnership in crime writing that has expanded over the course of two decades and 19 more books.

We were fascinated by the psychology of real crimes more than the violence, and in exploring that place the Italians call chiaroscuro, where the darkness meets the light in human behavior. During 1992-93, we got married and had a son, while I worked on a book called Sweet Evil. It was about Jennifer Reali, a young wife and mother in Colorado Springs who’d dressed up in her husband’s camouflage army clothes and gunned down Dianne Hood, the wife of her lover. Jennifer had two young children and her victim had three. Joyce, a new mother herself at the time, attended Jennifer’s sanity hearing and the trial of Brian Hood, who’d used seduction and religious manipulation to get Jennifer to murder his spouse.

The hearing was packed with females of every age and description, who’d come to the courtroom to study the kind of woman capable of firing two shots into chest of another young woman very much like herself. Joyce spoke with the women in the hallways and restrooms, getting their impressions of the killer and victim, taking notes and adding them to the book’s research. She picked up details I’d missed and provided insights into Jennifer’s psychology, which were unique to her experience as a female. Like many women observing the legal proceedings, Joyce viewed the shooter in a highly negative light.

In subsequent years, we worked on a book about Jill Coit, the “Black Widow” killer from Steamboat Springs, Colorado, who’d murdered her husband Gerry Boggs and may have been behind the deaths of several of her other spouses. Joyce attended Coit’s trial while I was busy with another project. We wrote about John Robinson, the first known serial killer in the history of the Internet, who went online and lured several women to a Kansas City suburb before ending their lives. This book, Anyone You Want Me to Be, was written in conjunction with ex-FBI profiler, John Douglas, but Joyce again attended Robinson’s trial and provided input on how he was able to manipulate so many females into extremely dangerous circumstances. She played a similar role in the creation of Unholy Messenger: The Life and Crimes of the BTK Serial Killer, which came out in the spring of 2006. In looking at complex criminal situations involving the interaction of the sexes, we found that the combined male and female points of view always added to our understanding of a killer and his or her victims.

Right after Unholy Messenger was published, Joyce suggested we drive down to southern Utah and look into the case of Warren Jeffs, who’d just made it onto the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list as a fundamentalist Mormon polygamist accused of forcing underage girls into marriage and other crimes against women. I took her advice, resulting in the 2008 book, When Men Become Gods, the story of Jeffs’ and his capture and conviction. Joyce sent a copy to Harry Reid (D-Nevada), the Senate Majority Leader and highest-ranking Mormon in American history. He found the book revelatory about how women were being abused inside a religious subculture and invited me to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 2008, where I talked about alleged federal crimes associated with polygamy. Going to Washington, meeting Senators, and speaking to the committee were among the highest of our highlights as book-writing collaborators.

Around that same time, we were contacted by someone who’d been in prison and gotten to know Jennifer Reali, now doing a life sentence in a Colorado penitentiary. He wanted several copies of Sweet Evil to give to her now-teenage daughters so they could know who their mother was before she disappeared from their lives (one daughter would later visit her in prison). Almost 20 years had passed since Jennifer had killed Dianne Hood and the man who contacted us suggested we go see Jennifer. This presented a unique opportunity because it had been almost impossible for us to interview killers, even after they’d been convicted, let alone have a chance to talk with one who’d read a book about them. The appeals process keeps most offenders silent for decades.

As we drove to the penitentiary, Joyce reiterated how much she’d disliked Jennifer during her long-ago trial and wondered what she’d feel about her now. After three hours of our face-to-face discussion, we were both taken with her intelligence, sensitivity, and efforts to understand her crime and help herself and others not to follow her path. Eventually, she asked us to look over the manuscript she was writing about her childhood, relationships with men, and what had made her so vulnerable to Brian Hood’s scheme to kill his wife. While Jennifer had received a life sentence, Hood was given 37 years, but eligible for parole after twelve years.

Joyce (left) and Jennifer have been working on her book for about a year. Joyce feels her story is important to help women grasp what can happen when they give their power and identity over to a man in the name of love. This fall Joyce and I will be featured on a Discovery Channel program about women who kill. I’ll discuss the Jill Coit case and Joyce will speak about Jennifer.

Over the years we’ve constantly found that in the process of researching and writing books about crime, two heads and two perspectives, the male and the female, are better than one.

Stephen Singular, a two-time “New York Times” bestselling author, has written 20 books about high profile crimes, social criticism, and business and sports biographies. He’s appeared on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” “Anderson Cooper 360,” FOX-TV, MSNBC, COURT-TV, ESPN, and many other media outlets. His latest book, THE WICHITA DIVIDE, about the assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller, will be published by St. Martin's Press in early 2011. He and Joyce live in Denver with their son.

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Why I Write True Crime

by Kathryn Casey

Over the past couple of decades, the prestige of true crime writing has taken a hit. When In Cold Blood was first published in 1966, Truman Capote was lauded as a visionary who'd pioneered a new type of book, one that told a true story by exploring the human condition through the events surrounding one tragic murder case. Of course, Capote's book is still considered a classic, but something has happened. The prevailing sentiment has shifted. There are those who now look askance at true crime and at those who write it.

Especially since I've started writing fiction, I've had people question why I continue to write true crime. Some charge that I'm making money off the misery of others, even insinuating that I somehow bear a portion of the blame for the tragedies I write about. Yes, I make money, that's true. I sincerely wouldn't be able to afford to write true crime books if I didn't. I work hard and like most folks, I have bills to pay and a family to help support. As for true crime writers being somehow responsible for the crimes, I'm sure you understand that's flat out ridiculous.

When I hear those criticisms, I admit that I sometimes get a bit tongue-tied trying to explain why I write true crime. So I was particularly pleased when a reader sent me a recent e-mail. Her name is Meredith Appel, and she contacted me about my first book, The Rapist's Wife, now published under the title: Evil Beside Her. The book explores the case of Linda Bergstrom, a Houston woman who married a shy factory worker with a terrible secret. That's Linda's photo on the right. Lower left is her now ex-husband, James, holding their daughter, Ashley. What you'll note is what a great guy James appears to be in the photo. He's not. James Bergstrom is a very dangerous man.

The reason I'm sharing Meredith's e-mail is that she explains better than I can why I continue to write true crime. On one level, I hope the books are interesting to read, full of personalities and drama, true stories that take readers inside sensational crimes. But on another level, I know they can do so much good.

With Meredith's permission, here are a few paragraphs from her e-mail:

Ms. Casey,

...I'd written to you once before... when I was reading Evil Beside Her in college. I wanted to let you know more about that... I majored in criminal justice at a small private college, Saint Martin's University, in Washington State. The criminal justice department is expanding to include new types of courses that explore different angles on criminology, and every other semester a course in victimology is offered. The class turned out to be more of a psychology class than anything and even more than that the class was centered on victim impact. More than learning victim statistics, we listened to speakers who had personally survived a crime or were family members of someone who had been victimized.

What we learned is that it is important to take measures to protect ourselves, but at the same time we can't be expected to be responsible for identifying who is capable of committing crimes. In other words, although there are warning signs that are worth paying attention to, the only thing that ultimately determines who is murdered or raped is which person gets in the car with the murderer or rapist, which is something that no person can exactly predict beforehand, since it all depends on the psychology of the perpetrator. I say all that to say this... our teacher used Evil Beside Her as required reading for our class as an example of the impact that a perpetrator's choices have on those around him/her.

Domestic violence was a big section of our studies, and the main reason we read your book was to attempt to gain an understanding of the complexity behind the answer to "Why doesn't she just leave?" The James Bergstrom case and the way you portrayed it was a wonderful example for our class to learn what it feels like for a person to be right in the middle of a situation and to learn that things just aren't as simple as they may look to the objective person on the outside.


As Meredith so eloquently explains, we can learn a lot from an in-depth look behind the headlines, one that answers all the questions, including the all-important "why?" Not all true crime books are good true crime books, but the quality ones dissect the facts from all sides, explaining not only what happened, but what that particular set of personalities and circumstances says about all of us, who we are, where our society is going, what we believe.

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When Is It Too Early to Publish a Book?

by Laura James

Long gone are the days when a true-crime author—like William Roughead, or Truman Capote more recently—waited until after the verdict to write the whole story (or, in Capote's case, after the hangings). In the instant era, books speed to release, and the publishers are becoming even quicker about releasing true-crime titles in particular.

Readers seem to be of two minds when it comes to quick releases.

Many say they won't read a book that comes out before the trial even starts. Others hold that a book can be quickly written and still be well done. But if put out early, the timing of the release will dominate all reviews forever.

Some readers are really unhappy.

On a book about Laci and Scott Peterson: "This was obviously written BEFORE the trial and has no pertinent information at all about what happened after Scott's arrest. Hardly the 'whole story' advertised."

On Robert Graysmith's book about Bob Crane: "We learn nothing about Carpenter's trial (an integral part of this entire story) because Graysmith and the publisher couldn't seem to wait until the trial was over, to send this book to the press."

On another true-crime title: "I also don't understand why this book was written before the trial."

The booksellers who specialize in true crime consistently tell me that many true-crime fans buy not the first book about any given case but the fourth or the twelfth or the twentieth. Many of us who study human depravity for a pastime or a career find a case that especially intrigues us, and we read everything we can about it. Some cases that have inspired such intense study are Lizzie Borden, Bruno Hauptmann, Jack the Ripper, and so on. So the first book a reader buys may well not be the last, particularly if the first isn't entirely satisfying.

Readers are fickle and inconsistent, simultaneously lamenting early books while snapping them up. . . . One writer recently picked up an early book out about Austria's Fritzl case and reports: "If you want to read Monster, I'm afraid I bought the last copy at Borders. But just wait a month or so, and I'm sure there'll be more comprehensive alternatives. It's perverse, I know. But I can't wait."

Though quickly produced true-crime titles will always have their critics, in the end it is the quality of the publication and not its release date that matters the most, don't you agree? Is there a line to be drawn? After the verdict? After sentencing?

Readers, writers, and publishers can't seem to make up their minds, but one thing is certain: more of these quickly produced books will be on the shelves in the future (and Kindles, and cell phones. . . .)

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Halloween Movie Picks from Women in Crime Ink

by Vanessa Leggett

It's that time of year. For kids, Halloween night means dressing up and venturing out for candy. For party-pooped adults, it means dressing down, staying in, and watching a scary movie.

If you don't like scary movies, you're not alone. Neither does our Texas prosecutor, Kelly Siegler, who put it more bluntly: "I hate scary shows."

And it's little wonder. Like other criminal justice professionals who write for WCI, Kelly might be one of those who look to movies for escape from the real-life horror she encounters day in and day out. Right now, watching a scary movie would be last on Kelly's to-do list. Our "prosecutor for hire" is in the middle of a capital murder trial, where a film of a game warden's shooting death is wearing like the Zapruder reel.

Sounds Like Halloween

If, like Kelly, you don't spend your free time watching scary movies, but your significant other does . . . don't count on shutting your eyes to keep from jumping out of your skin. Usually it's what we can't see that's more frightening—the closed closet door . . . the lengthening shadow of something around the corner . . . the creaking floorboard. . . . Sounds, in fact, can be more frightening than anything seen or suggested on-screen. It only takes two notes from an oboe in JAWS to send chills along the spine . . . or shower sounds and a few strains from the violins of Psycho . . . or a phone's shrill ring, as in When a Stranger Calls and on the other end of the line the killer breathes "Have you checked the children? . . . "

Most of us here at Women in Crime Ink enjoy scary movies, and we like to watch with our eyes open. For Halloween, we polled our contributors for their favorites.

Our Favorite Classics

Every Halloween, Donna Weaver looks forward to her annual dose of Arsenic and Old Lace. Two of Diane Dimond's favorite classics: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Rosemary's Baby. Scary-movie lover Tina Dirmann highlighted Wait Until Dark among several others. And Stacy Dittrich gave Burnt Offerings as her favorite scary movie, while Pat Brown picked The Haunting of Hill House.

"I always thought Shirley Jackson wrote the creepiest stories—more mentally creepy than physically," said profiler Pat, who recalled "the part in The Haunting where the walls are going 'boom, boom' and one woman tells the other to hold her hand until it stops and then, when the noise ceases, she opens her eyes and realizes the other woman is sleeping in a bed all the way across the room . . . eeowww."

No one could argue with Pat that "anything Hitchcock" is scary. Pat liked The Birds while Diane Fanning cited Rear Window as a favorite. Fanning also mentioned "An Unlocked Window," from the TV series "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." That episode is about a killer on the loose, a man who slips into the cellar window of a medical ward and poses as a female nurse. "That still gives me shivers," Diane said. The chill factor might have been spiked by the set, which was the same house used in Psycho. The Master of Suspense enjoyed tapping into the collective unconscious; he understood the timelessness of terror. Tina Dirmann rents Psycho every year.

Scariest of Them All

But the "scariest movie ever," according to Tina, is The Exorcist. I agreed, as did Connie Park and Cynthia Hunt. The film was based on the William Peter Blatty novel of the same title. Blatty wrote the book and Oscar-winning screenplay, drawing inspiration from actual exorcisms he'd studied, especially the documented exorcism of a 14-year-old boy in 1949. Actress Linda Blair was cast at the same age. (She is probably still in therapy from that childhood role from Hell.) Because of death threats after the film's release, the young actress had to hire bodyguards.

What made The Exorcist, so scary? Perhaps surprisingly for a "supernatural movie"—its realism, thus the threats against the life of an actress whose lines came from a script, not from possession.

"Nothing is scarier," said Cynthia, "than the reality that there is a demonic spirit world that exists alongside us and that the enemy, Satan, is constantly trying to defeat, infect, and destroy everything that is good."

Fear Factor

A modernized battle between Good and Evil can be found in the 1991 remake of the '60s Gregory Peck classic Cape Fear, which was Katherine Scardino's favorite. It's no mystery our defense attorney found this film scary, since the movie depicts a realistic nightmare of every criminal advocate: A vengeful client who blames his lawyer for a stiff sentence. In Cape Fear, an attorney breaches professional ethics by purposely offering a less-than-zealous defense to a vicious rapist, who, upon his release from prison, stalks the lawyer and his family, targeting the attorney's teenage daughter. . . . Equally afraid of a predator's release would be the D.A. who put him away, so it's no surprise that Cape Fear was also a top pick of our sex-crimes prosecutor, Robin Sax. The 1991 version of Cape Fear was a popular choice among several contributors, including Kathryn Casey. (Other thriller picks: Jagged Edge from Robin Sax, and Andrea Campbell recommends Fallen.)

A number of us found favorites in movie adaptations of novels by Stephen King—Carrie, Misery, and Michele McPhee's favorite, The Shining. Who can forget Jack Nicholson as a madman driving an ax through a bathroom door, announcing "Heeeeerz Johnny!"

An earlier Jack Nicholson scene our resident psychiatrist would rather forget: When Nicholson's character is lobotomized in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. "I can't watch that part," said Lucy Puryear.

Another hard-to-watch lobotomy is found in Hannibal, the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs. The FBI agent played by Ray Liotta is lobotomized by cannibal psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

The Power of Silence

The majority of our contributors ranked The Silence of the Lambs as their favorite scary movie. Based on Thomas Harris's novel of the same title, the film, like the book, is more thriller than horror flick. While this film is one of my all-time favorite thrillers, I would not classify it as a "scary movie."

That said, out of all the horror films I can conjure, the climax to The Silence of the Lambs contains one of the most frightening scenes ever to flicker across the big screen. You remember the scene, when FBI Agent Clarice Starling faces off with serial killer "Buffalo Bill" in his dungeon-like basement.

Sidebar: Buffalo Bill was based on a real serial killer, Edward Gein, a quiet Wisconsin farmer who dressed his victims like deer—using their skins and bones for furnishings (like lamp shades and cereal bowls from skull caps) rather than for actual dresses, or female "body suits," as in Thomas Harris's story.

For both Buffalo Bill and Hannibal Lecter, Harris borrows traits from Gein (pictured above). Like Gein, "Hannibal the Cannibal" ate his victims' body parts. Edward Gein also reportedly served as Hitchcock's inspiration for Psycho—filmed a couple of years after Gein's crimes were discovered—as well as "Leatherface" in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which chilled our cold-case detective, Connie Park.

But back to the scene from The Silence of the Lambs. You would be hard-pressed to find an actor who has captured the emotion of fear better than Jodie Foster did as Clarice, when her face is framed in the grainy green light from the killer's night-vision goggles. Again, it's what we can't see that makes the heart pound. Don't take our word for it. Watch for yourselves. (Warning: This scene contains language and violence unsuitable for younger viewers.)

Our True Crime Favorites

While The Silence of the Lambs is loosely based on a real villain, there are a number of other films directly adapted from true stories and true-crime books. Since a number of us write fact-based books, this post would not be complete without mentioning our favorite scary movies based on real stories. Here they are, with contributor nominators in parentheses: The Amityville Horror (Tina Dirmann, Vanessa Leggett, Connie Park, Donna Pendergast); In Cold Blood (Jenna Jackson, Vanessa); Helter Skelter (Tina); The Honeymoon Killers (Susan Murphy-Milano); and The Onion Field (Diane Dimond).

So find yourself a scary movie and enjoy the holiday weekend. Now that you know our favorites, we hope you'll share yours with us. A safe and happy Halloween to everyone.

For best-reviewed scary movies, check Rotten Tomatoes, the definitive movie review site: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/

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Once Upon A Crime . . .

by Vanessa Leggett

This month is the 39th anniversary of the Manson slayings. When Helter Skelter was published in 1974, I was one of countless children entering grade school—as the child of Roman Polanski would have been, had his pregnant wife Sharon Tate not been murdered.

I was not old enough to read Helter Skelter during its first print run. In fact, I have no actual recollection of that crime or of any others detailed in true-crime books that inspired me. What I can recall are three of my favorite opening paragraphs from classics in the genre:

"During the night, an early spring rain washed the city and now, at dawn, the air was sweet and heavy. Remnants of fog still held to the pavements of Houston, rolling across the streets like cobweb tumbleweeds, and the windshields of early commuters were misted and dangerous. The morning seemed sad, of little promise." (Thomas Thompson, Blood and Money)

"The Village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call 'out there.' Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them." (Truman Capote, In Cold Blood)

And, finally, the night that hatred painted the “love house” at 10050 Cielo Drive:

"It was so quiet, one of the killers would later say, you could almost hear the sound of ice rattling in cocktail shakers in the homes way down the canyon." (Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter)

Each of these haunting openings taught me something about setting. The first two could have come from any novel. Okay, not any novel. The point is that the first paragraphs of Blood and Money and In Cold Blood were written in the style of fiction. What made the opening of Helter Skelter most chilling was its skillful blend of fact and imagination.

A maniac bent on murder would not likely remember—much less describe—the sound of "ice rattling in cocktail shakers." The magic of this opening lies in the promise of the pages to follow: "one of the killers would later say . . ." And so we turn the page.

Since I read that book, whenever I hear the music of a martini mixer on a summer evening, I don't think of the drink. I remember Helter Skelter and that unquiet night on August 8, 1969.

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