You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
and murders, and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group
together with Kristin Dilley. My name is Kristin Dilley. I'm a writer,
a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the
social media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my
partner in crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to mind Over Murder. I'm Kristin
Dilley and I'm Bill Thomas, and we're joined today by author Ron francel journalist
and best selling author of his most recent book, Shadow Man and Elusive Echo
Keiller and the Birth of FBI Profiling Run. Thank you for joining us today.
Hey, thank you Kristen and Bill for having me. I appreciate it.
Go ahead and start by telling us a little bit about your educational and
professional background. You're a prolific author, so we'd love to hear about your
books in particular. It's funny people use that word prolific, and when you're
actually doing it, it doesn't feel like prolific. Feels like it's coming way
too slow. Yes, I've written in books published Number nineteen is coming in
February, not a true crime, but a crime fiction. So that'll be
an interesting little diversion in my path. I'm a lifelong journalist. I ultimately
was a senior writer at the Denver Post, where I was charged with covering
the evolution of the American West, and it kept me on the road constantly
looking for those places where the past, the present and a few you're intersected,
telling the stories of where we've been, where we are, and where
we're going, so that it was a complex kind of mission. It ultimately
led on the nine to eleven to me being dispatched to the Middle East to
cover the beginnings of the Terror war in the Middle East, using some of
the same techniques that i'd been practicing doing that beat, this narrative journalism,
telling stories in a little bit different way than people are usually accustomed to seeing
in a newspaper. Early in my career, I wrote a couple of novels.
So what you do in that narrative journalism, and what I was doing
was trying to tell these completely true stories using a few of the tools from
a novelist toolbox, so that what you ended up with was a story that
had the feel and the texture of a novel. It was a story.
It had foreshadowing, it had characters, had dialogue, but it was utterly
true. And that's what you see there in Shadowman is this idea of telling
a true crime story but telling it in a way that you might expect to
see in a mystery novel. It's an interesting background to have to be telling
true stories in a novelistic style. It was pioneered by the very first writer
of true crime books, Truman Capodi, and that's what in Cold Blood was
an attempt to blend journalism with storytelling. The fact that Capodi was himself a
novelist and a fiction writer trying to do journalism in a creative way has I
think, over the years, evolved in my mind too. I think it
would be better done by a journalist who's learning the fiction, rather than the
fiction writer learning the journalism, because I think where Capodi made some errors in
Cold Blood, it could be attributed to that it was a lack of basic
grounding in journalism. But what I've done, of course Capodi might quarrel with
that too. I came up as a journalist and I took some of those
tools to use to do my journalism. And again that's what you in Shadowman,
in the book before that, Alison jar a homicide love story in my
very first true crime, The Darkest Night. I've actually just been talking to
my ap language in composition class about this very topic with in Cold Blood,
which is the blending of fact and storytelling, and we were definitely talking about
the fact that Capoti took some liberties in ways that he definitely should not have.
So I actually did recommend to my kids today that if you want a
good example of nonfiction narrative, I actually recommended your book, and this is
a great approach to it. It's interesting because true crime, in my mind,
breaks down into two major subgenres, and one is the commercial and it
was typically the kind of books we're seeing in supermarket shelves, and they're fairly
formulaic. There's a crime, there's an investigation, there's an arrest, there's
a trial, and there's a verdict, and the bad guy gets what's coming
to him. They are often centered around domestic violence of some kind, and
they're aimed directly at today's modern true crime reader, which is eighty percent of
female market. Yes. The other subgenre, though, is the more literary,
and a capodi today would fall into that. But we also see people
like David gran with Killers of the Flower Moon and John Barrant with Midnight in
the Garden of Good and Evil and Eric Larson in The Devil in the White
City, which are bigger's stories. They have that storytelling element, they have
a more literary quality, and the crimes are usually much more complex. So
it's the I won't say the least popular of the genres, but I will
say the commercial is the one that makes all the money. And you just
listed a whole bunch of my very favorite true crime books there too. Yeah,
and this is definitely I'm also I'm taking notes here so that I can
take this back to my Apline class as well unfolded into my lecture. So
thank you for helping me do my job appreciating well, I'm happy to help
I was laughing quietly when you were talking about Capodia a few minutes ago.
I know that Kristen uses in Cold Blood as one of the books that her
students study, but I was also thinking about Capodi as a kind of a
personality to watch them on talk shows when I was a god. And when
you said you thought that Capodi might have argued the point, I thought to
myself, Brent, watching him, one probably was a Dick Cabot or something
like that. He probably would have loved to have argued the point, because
man that he could talk. No, he really could, and he's one
of those people who I would love to have a beer with. It's simply
because his mind was working in a way that nobody's mind was working at the
time. He could have continued to be the successful novelist that he was.
He was already a known quantity in Hollywood. He had this idea of taking
a true story and using his novelistic talents to structure it. Norman Mailer was
doing the same thing at the same time. We're both just waiting for a
story to come along that would be that story. The Clutter family murders in
Kansas came along Capodi saw them in the backs back pages of the New York
Times, and he just became first. But Mailer had this same idea and
it was going right at the same time. And these are two great thinkers.
Of course, Mailer then comes back with the Executioner's Song another ten or
fifteen years, and that becomes one of those narrative nonfiction true crimes too.
I would love to talk to Capodan get a little bit of whatever he had.
So let's go and pivot to the case that's at the heart of shadow
Man, and that is the case of Susie Yager. How did the Susie
Yeager case come onto your radar at first? Let me start by saying that
the secret of my success as a writer has been that I never pick a
story I can screw up. Let's give it. The shadow Man fell into
that category. I first came across it when I was doing that job at
the Denver Post and Chris crossing the West and listening to these marvelous stories of
the past in all of these corners of the West where where we don't often
poke our noses, and the story as it was presented to me at that
time was a little tourist girl was camping in a tent in a state park
in Montana when one night somebody cuts into her tent and steals her away,
and without any evidence, without any suspects, the FBI turns to this idea
of criminal profiling and actually creates its first ever criminal profile. That was it.
I didn't know what happened to the little girl, and it just didn't
fit in the journalism portfolio that I had at that point, but I filed
it away. Later when I looked more closely at it, I'm seeing something
very different than that little crazy that I was given to me. It had
a power that was had this universal stuff like perverse love and persistence and devotion
and a mother's anguish. By the time I circled back to it and realized
that it was more than a kidnapping, it was this grotesque series of crimes
in a part of the country where I grew up, and it was a
turning point in forensic history. And nobody had ever told the story. In
fact, most people outside of Montana, even crime buff friends of mine,
had never heard of this. No, it's not a well known story at
all. So let's place some of this in time The original horrible case takes
place in nineteen seventy three. When did you first hear that sort of capsule
version of the story at its most basic level. How many years later would
that about? It would have been maybe two thousand and two or three there,
so we're talking thirty years later when I hear this little tidbit and I
file it way. It's another ten years before I come back to that and
decide to dig a little bit deeper, and I find all of that other
stuff. The more I dug into it, the more I wanted to know.
I was finding this history in a very peculiar place, and so there
were all kinds of these little parallel dramas going on in it, But it
all came back to this little girl that got snatched in the dark from her
ten in a campground in the summer of nineteen seventy three. I want to
be a little bit literal here for a second. When you say you filed
it away, do you mean you actually wrote something down someday I want to
explore this case, or did you just put it in the back of your
mind. No, I actually wrote something down, and I'm an old school
journalist. I maintain what I call a future's file, and a future's file
is simply a collection of notes to myself to check back in on this at
some point. It's not working right now, doesn't have a news peg there.
Maybe it's just an interesting person whatever it is, but right at the
moment, I can't use it, so I stick it in that future style.
And you're right, it's usually can be a handwritten note to mysell check
back on this at some point in the future. To this day, still
go back to a folder like that and check my whole card. Basically,
yes, what do I have here? When you said old school? Are
we talking three by five cards or eight and a half by eleven usually whatever
piece of paper I could find at the moment. But probably, and I
believe in this case, it's true that it was a page from my reporter's
notebook that I had heard this story, possibly a lunch or from a sor
somebody I was run into, and I just scribbled down the very basic bones
of the story. At some point when I was back in civilization, I
tore the page out and stuck it in that folder. This is such an
interesting story, and as you said a minute ago, it is really not
something that has had a lot of coverage outside of Montana and then of course
outside of this book. But David Meyerhoffer, your shadow man of the title.
He's horrifying, He's insidious. And I was sitting there reading over this
and going, why have I never heard this case before? This is crazy,
especially given that it really is the first time that the FBI used profiling
to solve a case. Why is it? Do you think that certain perpetrators
and cases rise to the top of public consciousness and stay there, whereas others,
like the Meyerhoffer case don't get the same amount of notice. Let me
address the Meyerhoffer case first, and then let's take off on some of the
others. It happened at the beginning of our awareness of serial killers. This
is nineteen seventy three and seventy four. We don't even have the term serial
killers. We don't even have the term criminal profiling. Yeah, back then,
these guys were called mass murderers or chain killers. But there wasn't yet
any solid scientific suspicion about their motivations or behavior or psychology until around this time.
And that's when Howard Teeton and Pat Mullaney, a couple of FBI ages
very accomplished guys had been brought into the training new training Academy at the FBI
in Quantico, Virginia. Mullaney was trained in psychology. Teton was one of
the FBI's really expert crime scene analysts, and so they were brought into teach
workshops in both of their expertises. They noted together by the way, they
happened to be there together, and when they met, they started talking about
this idea. It wasn't popular. J Edgar Hoover himself hated the idea.
He thought it was hopecom. He thought it was black magic. He thought
it was stupid. And so they weren't given permission to continue, but they
continued regarding this case, why isn't it better known? It's in the summer
of seventy three. It's a mere kidnapping in a rural corner of the West.
For more than seven months, it was only a kidnapping. There were
suspicions that maybe it was worse, but officially it was a kidnapping. So
two reporters and editors it was a local story that didn't warrant national headlines.
The interest ticks up a little bit when another case happens about nine months later,
and they appear to be entangled. Even then, it wasn't big news
outside of Montana and Michigan, where little girls Susie Yeager lived. We also
have to remember that back then the news media was nowhere near as prevalent and
sensational as it is today. We were deeply mired in Vietnam and all the
turmoil it was causing. Here Watergate is happening, Manson has scared the Bejesus
out of everybody. Just within the last couple of years. Before this,
domestic terrorism by groups like the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers, these were
scaring the socks off of people in places like Manhattan, Montana, and outside
of Manhattan. Outside of Montana, a couple of stories about a couple of
unsolved crimes about two girls going missing just never got on the radar of big
city editors. Another thing is that, without spoiling too much here, is
that the suspected killer was arrested on a Friday afternoon. On Saturday, he
confessed to killing both of the two that the FBI was interested in, and
delivered two more that nobody had been looking at. Within the next twelve hours
he's dead. He hangs himself in his cell. For further truths we might
have pursued out there, they died with him, and the case was closed.
That these four cases were closed. Today there's a suspicion that there are
many more, but for reasons maybe too complex of going to at this moment,
he only talked about these four when he was gone. They closed the
book on this, and so a lot of the reporting never got out there.
And again, like I say, it happens before the words serial they're
the phrase serial killers. And then we still haven't clicked at that moment,
we haven't clicked to this fascination that we have with serial killers in this country
right now. And I think in nineteen seventy three, it was possible to
have a regional story like this that might have even created a significant amount of
coverage in Montana, but somehow didn't make it onto the national radar exactly.
And you're exactly right about that, And it's in fact not just possible.
It's likely that an editor in Miami or Chicago or la is just not going
to see the kind of quality in this story for his or her reader.
Today, you think about the number of media sources we have at our fingertips
literally on the Internet. Back then, that just wasn't the case. Remember
that, even then we had three TV networks and that was it. And
you might read your local paper. But if the local paper didn't pick up
the story, you don't know about it. And it just didn't have that
national kind of feel. And if the wire services back then didn't pick up
a story, it really didn't go national. It remained a local story.
And unless AP or UPI or one of the newspaper groups picked up the story,
it just it might have been very important news, and it probably was
quite chilling for a lot of parents and people that lived in Montana, but
beyond that, not so much. Beyond and I try to put myself in
there. I was alive during that time. I was a kid growing up
in Wyoming. I just am aware that from places like Casper, Wyoming,
or Manhattan, Montana, or any number of small places in throughout the West,
throughout the United States, really people could look out there and think the
world is going to hell, and they everything they read was scaring them.
And this kind of didn't rise to the level of Vietnam and Watergate. This
was or domestic terrorism or andy war protests or bombings or anything. It just
never got there for whatever reason. We look back at it now and say
to you, that probably should have been bigger news, but that's a difficult
call them. It's great that you're able to place this in the canon of
BSU history. At this point, let's take a minute and kind of talk
about and again without giving too much of the book away, because we do
want our listeners to buy the book and support your amazing efforts here, but
talk a little bit about what were some of the big strides that were made
in policing as a result of the profiling work that was done for this case
in particular. Of course, today there's hardly a primetime TV crime drama,
movie, mystery, or crime thriller book that doesn't feature profiling in some forms.
Easy to think that cops have just always been intuitive about the bad guys
they're chasing, and that this science has always been laying there, But in
fact, it was less than fifty years ago that these two FBI agents formulated
the idea that if you looked at crime scene evidence in the right way,
you could see a lot about the behavior and the psychology of the perpetrator,
and I'm telling that story in there. When we go back and we look
at this very first effort by the FBI, I won't say off the radar.
By the time that Teaton and Mulaney create their profile, Hoover has died
and a little more progressive leadership has come in at the FBI, and they're
letting them have a little longer leash. But it's still an unproven thing,
and there's still plenty of pushback in local law enforcement, even inside the FBI
among agents. And I will say that even today, there is pushback in
local law enforcement and among FBI agents about profiling. It's not the deadlock that
we think. It might be the same thing with DNA, by the way,
and we tend to give it the gold standard label and it's certainly useful,
but it is not infallible that applies to profiling. And you know,
a lot of lucky stars aligned over this. Tragically unlucky little Susieger just happened
that the timing was right, or you might argue the timing was all wrong
and that we wish we never needed to do this, But in her case,
their profile eventually proved to be a useful tool, and it has been
a useful tool in many cases, not all, but many cases, and
Bill, you're familiar with one where it has not been especially successful. And
as an aside, I'll mention something that just resonated with I'm not going to
go into a lot of detail here, but I spoke at length with the
case agent and my sister Kathy Thomas's and her girlfriend, Rebecca Dowski's murder.
This is just the other day, and that case agent made dismissive. I
was going to say disparaging, I'm going to go with dismissive, which I
think is a little more accurate. Comments about profiling and DNA, so that
skepticism on the part of law enforcement. I'm just going to use this one
example of two one hour conversations back to back. Very interesting here it is.
It's all these years later, it's late twenty twenty two, and I'm
still running into that attitude. Dismissive comments about not wanting to hear anything more
about profiling regarding my case, and kind of openly dismissive about the potential for
DNA to provide a breakthrough in the Colonial Parkway mourners that might take it too
far for my comfort. Profiling and DNA are very good tools in the toolbox
of the investigators and of the FBI. Part of what might have been on
this particular agent's mind is that a lot of law enforcement has put too much
emphasis on DNA and profiling DNA. We think DNA will solve any crime.
There's even a word for a phrase for it called the CSI of fact.
Yeah, we've talked about that, that the general public thinks that it proves
everything. Ay, it's not infallible, but b DNA plays a role in
about one percent of violent crime investigation. The rest of it, the fingerprints
are more important in investigation today and break more cases than DNA does. Profiling
is also sold on TV. And you know something that it is not right.
What your agent might have been reacting to is probably pressure on law enforcement
of all kinds by the general public to hurry up and solve these things.
You use DNA, use profile that those are more more important than they really
are. You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back after this
word from our sponsors. We're back here at Mind over Murder. Look at
the Idaho college murders right now. I was just thinking something. Days into
this, we've heard a few profile a few of the profile elements, but
they still don't have their guy. And I think too. And it's actually
this was alluded to in the book. I think a lot of people still
have this kind of profound misunderstanding of how profiling actually works. I know that,
and we don't. Popular media doesn't actually help that either. I was
reading and it was in the book that Howard Teaton went on to be a
creative consultant on Profiler, which was a late nineties TV show, the earliest
to depict profiling, that it was the inside of this violent Crimes task force.
I watched the show and I loved it, but a lot of times
and now that I do go back and watch it, it really is presented
as like almost Harler trick, and that's not what it is at all.
That is not the way that profiling works. But it was definitely presented in
that way because it's fun for us to talk about some of the odd,
the odd profiling elements that can come out there. They can look at I
don't know, I don't even have one on the tip of my tongue right
now, but look at a and say, oh, this person is left
handed, and how I think John Douglas in Ted Bundy at some point looked
at something and said, oh, he probably drives the Volkswagen. Yeah,
or like the Mad Bomber, somebody knowing the Mad Bomber was going to be
wearing a three piece suit with a button. Yeah, exactly, And we
think that's really cool. So then we think that's how it works, that
they can look at some apparently inconsequential piece of evidence and come up with a
case breaking revelation. And that's just not true. In this original profile in
shadow Man, we have about fifteen to twenty elements in that original profile.
They added a few as they went, and I think it started at twelve
or thirteen, and then they were adding. And it's interesting that Teeton and
Mulaney were absolutely correct on nineteen of the twenty and the twentieth. They weren't
wrong. It's just that we never knew wease circumstances in the case overtook our
ability to know what the answer was. Of What went into this initial profilers
was experience, It was logic, and a little bit of it was guesswork.
You might remember that Teton and Mulaney had no rulebook, had no system.
They were experts separately in psychology and crime scenes, but they had no
model on how those things should work together. Some of their profiling was based
purely on what they knew from their experience, and some was just low hanging
fruit. For example, today we all know from TV that the typical serial
killer tends to be a white male in his twenties. That's because we have
more than fifty years of data. Today's profilers have a database a thousands of
intensive and expert interviews with these killers. Teton and Mulaney had visited with a
couple of them, and they had no database, So they merely deduced that
the killer in these cases was a white male in his twenties. Because the
crimes required an astounding degree of stealth and strength that suggested the killer probably had
military experience, which was largely male during Vietnam, and that it required knowledge
of the surroundings and local law enforcement, which suggested that he was local,
which is a ninety nine percent likelihood in Gallatin County, Montana, that he
was white in this rural, mainly white county. They believed one thing they
believed mainly from talking to Emperor's one of their only real good sources as they
were thinking about that. Believed the suspect or the perpetrator in the case of
Suzie Yager and Sandras Mulligan that his psychicopathy was based on conflicts or flawed views
about sex. But they admitted that was just an educated guess based on what
ed Kemper told. I thought they did a marvelous job. And they did
an amazing job. It didn't rise to the level of the Mad Bomber case,
where some of the elements of the profile were truly apprehensible. How they
arrived at it, And it's worth noting that the NYPD didn't go back and
successfully use profiling after the Mad Bomber case. Just that happened and everybody said
wow. And it's not until here in nineteen seventy four that Millennium Teton bring
it back. How does the FBI come to be involved in what was originally
the Susie Yegger case. How did they get involved in a case that's in
Montana, in a rural area. How did that get moved onto the FBI's
radar. Blame Charles Lindberg in the thirties, when Lindbergh's baby is kidnapped,
local law enforcement is in over its head. The delay between the kidnapping and
the local law enforcement asking for help was probably fatal, and so a law
was passed that said, anytime a child is kidnapped, anytime there's a possibility
of a ransom or crossing state lines or anything like that, the FBI has
to get involved within twenty four hours. Only in this case they would have
been involved within twenty four hours. But this happened in a rural place,
a small state park near Manhattan, Montana and near Three Forks, Montana that
had actually been donated to the state for the state park by a family that
had homesteaded there. A son of that family was now an FBI agent in
the area. And it's one of the weird little things that happened in this
case. But the notification was made within a couple of hours and the FBI
was on the scene within four They were there by law, but they were
there as the agent in charge really had a personal interest in all of this.
Let's talk a little bit about your research process. You've said you're an
old school journalist, and I know that means pounding the pavement, knocking on
doors, and doing a lot of one on one interviews. But I also
know there's more to it. When you are focusing on a crime, especially
one as old as this one. Tell us a little bit about your research
process for digging into the particulars of the Shadowman case here. I've worked with
a lot of reporters more recently that are perfectly okay with doing interviews on Twitter
or buy email or text. I'm not that way. It's about the sensory
details, especially for narrative nonfiction. You need these details that bring it to
life. So I need to be there. For me personally, it's about
standing there and listening and tasting and smelling and hearing everything that I can,
and talking to these people face to face, and more than one hundred and
fifty people in this particular case, it's absolutely necessary in the kind of writing
that I do, just my obligation to telling a story honestly, that I
can look these people in the eye and judge what they're telling me, and
then they can judge me. We were saying off air that neither of us
are particularly extroverted individuals. Was talking to one hundred and fifty people about this
case a hardship, or do you actually enjoy the process so much that it
becomes easier to do. It's easier when you know you have to do it,
and you know what you're going after, and you're knowing the essence of
the story you're trying to tell makes it easier. And frankly, most people
that somebody walks up to on the street and says, Hi, I'm a
reporter and I want to talk to you about this serial killer, they're not
much more extroverted than I am. So there are moments when you have to
rely on old fashioned just keep talking and see you'll get to it. In
terms of looking at what must have been some pretty horrific crime scene photos,
how do you process all of this? Every author that we've talked to talks
about processing in a little bit of a different way, and how they have
to get out of their head at certain points just to cope with the material.
How do you cope with this kind of dark material? I recently did
a book in twenty sixteen called Morga Life and Death, and I did it
with one of the world's great medical examiners, doctor Vincent to my own to
tell stories about thirteen cases that were significant in his career. I had to
wade through a lot of those photos of autoxies and that sort of thing.
I won't say it was easy. I will just say that a journalist,
cop, a medical examiner, surgeon, we all have this quality or we
won't be successful of being able to compartmentalize these things. And so I can
look at this stuff and say this is it's important for me to do my
job in a subtle way to say, this is my job. I have
to look at this. I'll cry later. In fact, at my website
at ron Franzel dot com, I have a blog that I wrote about compartmentalization,
about oh reapproach these things, and how when I'm doing my work,
I can see these grizzly things. I can hear these grizzly things. I
can talk to mothers, and I can protect by say putting it over here
in this bucket, that's my job, and that I can tell myself listen,
cry later now. I will tell you that later has never come.
And maybe that's one of the dark sides of this on people like me and
cops and victims families have to wait around in this stuff. You get desensitized
to it. I just never want to be desensitized to the point where I
can't see these things and be moved. But I don't want to be at
the point where I'm stopped dead in my tracks either. One of the most
chilling things in the book is the point that you make about writing about David
Meyerhoff the killer, you also learned that his brother Alan became a serial sex
offender known as the North End rapist. It's just so horrifying to learn something
like that. What do you make of that? How do you think that
happens? Something was happening in that family, something happened to them. I
don't know what it is. I could never get to that. Again,
circumstances overtook our ability, mine the FBI's, the world's ability to know all
the facts here. Nonetheless, I plunged into that. I did an interview
with this serial child rapist brother who exhibited many of the same behaviors. It
suggested something that I couldn't fathom. Actually, I asked, in one of
the most surre interviews of my life, when you're sitting talking to a serial
child rapist about some of these things and about his brother and is growing up,
I'm not a forensic psychologist. I wish that I could put this fellow
with a forensic psychologist like Richard Walter and have somebody tell me what's likely.
But we never got to that. Never got to that, and that's a
disappointment. And it's part of the psychopathy that Teaton and Mulaney identified ahead of
time, before they knew who the killer was here. They told us he
was going to try to take control of everything before this is over. And
they made the warning and it went unheeded. The control that David meyer Hoffer
exerted leaves us without a lot of answers. It is an absolutely fascinating book.
It is one of the more bone chilling cases. And I Bill will
tell you, I've read a ton of true crime. It probably more than
it is good for me. Definitely more than it's good for me. But
this is your job. Yeah, but boy, this is one of those
books that once I started reading it, and I also listen to the audible
version, couldn't put it down. And it was absolutely blood chilling. And
so kudos to you for an absolutely amazing book. What is next for you
in terms of projects? I don't know how you're going to top this one.
I really don't what are you looking at next? COVID drove me indoors
and all of that boots on the ground research that we talked about. I
couldn't do it. I couldn't get into motels, couldn't eat in restaurants,
couldn't get into libraries or court houses. I certainly couldn't talk to people.
So I stayed at home and I wrote a murderment That Murder Mystery is coming
out in February, and I'm working right now on a sequel. I've got
my eye on several cases that I might like to jump into. The problem
one of the problems is that modern true crime publishing wants resolution. Yeah,
a lot of pieces like Colonial Parkway. If they don't have a resolution,
they lack some interest among the people who bring these books to the world.
I think that's unless it's Jack the Ripper, the Black Dahlia or something like
that. They aren't interested until somebody gets what's coming to It's funny. I've
told Kristen this. I wrote a manuscript about the last several years of the
Colonial Parkway murders investigation and sent it out to agents and publishers, and I
got very good feedback, and people said, you're actually a very good writer.
We really like this story. But and it's funny how people I don't
think they mean for this to sound as called as it did to me.
They said this story would be so much better if it had a happy ending,
and they seem to lose sight of the fact that we're talking about the
Colonial Parkway murders, which I have a direct family connection to. Of course,
I'd love for it to have a happy I'm putting air quotes around that
ending where bad guys get walked into jail and handcuffs, But we're not there
yet. And I said to Kristen at the time, welcome to my life.
Well, it's not an ending, No, it's not real. Sixty
percent of homicides in America today or solved or closed. Forty percent of homicides
in America today are unsolved. They go unclosed, unresolved. And how can
we honestly say that isn't true. I want to write true crime, and
that might mean that this case has ruined lives, has upended our laws,
has upended our communities, but we don't know who did it. In modern
publishing today, it's more likely that book could not be published because of the
lack of resolution. Yeah, Death Row is your next book. So this
is a work of fiction. This is a murder made of the fact that
your publisher has decided to put it out on February fourteenth, which I think
is very romantic. You know, if you're looking for a gift for Valentine's
Day, the mystery lover in your life. Ron, It's been a real
pleasure having you on and we can't thank you enough for your insights. The
book can be found where everywhere anywhere you buy books everywhere, Amazon, Walmart,
local bookstore. God bless you. If you can walk into a local
bookstore and buy books, that's what you should do. Ask for shadow Man
by name, please do. That's going to wrap it up for this episode
of mind Over Murder. We'll see you next time. Mind Over Murder is
a production of Absolute Zero and Another Dog Productions. Our executive producers are Bill
Thomas and Kristin Dilley. Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois. Our theme
music is by Kevin McLeod. Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with Coral
Space Media. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. You
can also follow our page on the Colonial Parkway murders on Facebook, and finally,
you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at Bill Thomas. Five six.
Thank you for listening to Mind Over Murder.