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
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 the Mind of Her Murder. I'm Kristin
Dilley and I'm Bill Thomas, and we're joined today by bestselling authors Eliza Rodman
and Jennifer Jordan, authors of The Babysitter, My Summer with His Serial Killer
jenn and Lies. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for
having me us. We're very excited to have you. It's great to have
you back. Can you guys take a minute and just remind our listeners who
you are and how you are ultimately involved in the true crime space. We'll
start with Eliza and then moved to Jenna. Hey, as you said,
my name's Liza Rodman. This is my first book. It's also a memoir,
The Babysitter, My summers with a serial killer. And Jenna and I
have been friends for forty five years, and so we co arthured and that's
how we ended up here at Mind Over Murder and I am Jennifer Jordan's my
fifth book. Liza. I can't believe it's been forty five years, but
she doesn't lie, so it must be. And I come to this story
not only as a lifelong friend of Liza's, but as an investigative journalist.
And so when Liza discovered this amazing story in her life, at one point
in her sketching it out, realized she needed some help with a narrative,
and I offered to be that help. And here we are. And I
love being called a best selling author. Thank you for that. That just
brains just I'm going to put it on my next and my next Facebook post.
You don't get tired of that, That's okay, you really don't it's
a tremendous book currently out in paperback correct and maybe has anybody reached out to
you about optioning it for a TV series or something, because I think it
would be awesome if it was. We are in negotiations. That's fantastic.
I love that. I know it's exciting. Liza. The reason we reached
out to you and Jen to join us again on the podcast is because you
had posted an article from Sarah Winman in The New York Times that I also
found very interesting. And when I commented, oh, did you read that
too, you had said yes, and we should come back on the pod
to talk about it, and we wholeheartedly, enthusiastically agreed. So for anybody
who has not read this article by Sarah Wyman, can you give us just
a quick rundown of Sarah's major concerns with the idea of truth in the true
crime space. I think that was it wasn't it that people who are writing
true crime are getting just a little too far away and this is just completely
simplified, but a little too far away from the true part of true crime.
She has a lot to say about that. It's a guest essay in
the New York Times and it's worth the read because she's right. Truth is
a funny thing to talk about. Jen and I had a lot of conversations
about that topic as we were writing, because as memories ready watery, so
as we were writing The Babysitter, it came up over and over again.
So just and Sarah blurred the Babysitter, so I follow her on her social
media post, so it was really interesting too. And Jenn and I have
talked a lot over the two years that the book's been out about the misinformation
in the Costa case alone. And the Costa case is a small, relatively
speaking case. So if there's a junk, I call it the sewer of
misinformation. And if there's junk in the Costa case, you can imagine the
kind of untruths that come with a big case like Ted Bundy or somebody like
that. Before we move into the junk in the Costa case, which is
a fascinating conversation in and of itself, help us out with blurbed, you
said, Sarah Wyman, Blurbed, explain for our listeners what that means.
So what that means is that when you write a book, advanced copies go
out to other authors in the genre in which you're writing, and the publisher
will ask that they read the book and provide just a few sentences about the
book, how they felt about the book, what they think about the subject
matter, just a quick few sentences, and it's known as a blurb in
publication talk, and it'll end up on the back cover or it'll end up
in an advertisement somewhere. Well, that's the kind of thing, and Sarah
was one of the people who was kind enough to do that for us.
And the larger the personality, the closer to the front of the book,
and the larger the type it will appear in. If you can get Barack
Obama to blurb your book, it's going to be bigger than the title,
right, and certainly bigger than the author's name. If you can get Oprah
to talk about I laughed, I cried, I lost control of my bodily
functions. That would be ideal. You can get Oprah's name on that book.
It's a bestseller before it's published. And then sometimes if I didn't realize
it, we tried, we tried, we tried, Yeah, we tried,
yeah, And people call it it's a blurb. It's a couple of
sentences about just how great this book is. That's right, why you should
read it. Yeah, let's actually go ahead and start talking about this sewer
of misinformation. And I love that term. And Jim, with your background
and investigative journalism, I know that you're probably very aware of how important it
is to que as close to the truth as possible when you're telling a story.
What are some of the issues that you're aware of or that you're seeing
as a reader of true crime, not just related to the Tony Costa case,
but just related to crime in general. For it is not even hewing
to the truth. I mean, if it's not the truth, I,
as a journalist can't won't print it. And in fact one and I will
refer to the Tony Costa case just briefly, one of the cold case scenarios
that Lies and I were able to solve started with the fact that I was
not able to write the sentence or repeat the sentence that every single article about
Tony had stated that and these three girls were never seen alive again. As
I got to that paragraph and tried to write that, as can't do it,
I don't know that they're not alive because their bodies were never found.
So long story short, we discovered that in fact, Tony did not kill
them, that they were all dead, but not by Tony's hand. So,
I, as a journalist and now in the true crime genre, which
I have not been in before, have been just astounded by how it's not
even true crime that's selling. It's the sensationalism and the salaciousness of true crime
that is the perhaps the root of the story that then is just exploited to
sell the books and to sell the film and to you know, take it
to Netflix. And I haven't been in on those conversations, but I've been
in on enough of lies as in my conversations with would be producers, to
know that it's really about how how huge and how electric and how explosive the
story is that they're interested in. They really don't care that the facts might
not be as grotesque as laurd, as sellable as the truth is. So
it's been for me as a journalist in many different fields. We could go
down the list of the news every night and you just know that it's not
one hundred percent that the reporters are having to cut corners because the producers are
like, oh, yeah, but that'll really that'll flash big on the banner
of the five o'clock news. So the stories are considered not sensational enough.
Therefore we have to jazz them up with crap that didn't happen. Because a
lot of people, a lot of murders happen, and a lot of murders
gruesomely happen. But in order to make it a book, make it a
film, it's got too unfortunately, in too many cases, got to include
a few little tidbits that who's going to check and who's going to know in
the long run anyway, who's going to care? We see it all the
time in other genres besides true crime. Then we see all the changing the
genres to memoirs, true crimes nonfiction just have two. They're based in a
story. But then the writer just uses the uses the license of I did
the research I could, and I talked to the people I could. But
oh, there's something somebody else that says something else. I'm not interested so
much in that part of the story. So it happens all the time.
The story, of course, that tends to come to my mind the most,
and that just tends to be because I teach this in my AP courses.
I do tend to think about Truman, Capote and in Cold Blood and
the art artistic license, I guess is maybe the politest way to put it,
that he took with a lot of aspects of those stories and about it
he was arrogant about he was creating a new genre. You see some of
that now too, See some of that now, yeah, And I won't
belabor this, but what got me into all of this nonfiction writing after the
journalism was Into Thin Air by John Krakauer. Yeah, interviewing every single person
who had that I could find that was still alive from that nineteen ninety six
expedition that told a totally different story than the one he made a best seller
out of. And so it was following those threads of that truth that led
me to this kind of holy shit, what is going on here? The
whole thing was like a journalist's account, not so much, not so much
as one of the people there said to me, he's a good writer of
fiction. But it happens in all genres. And I think the true crime,
given how popular it is, ironically popular it is these days, it's
just it's just rife with fraud. We may need to have a conversation about
that. Crack. Our book isn't something I'm considering teaching. Thing. Oh
and I loved the book. I thought it was fantastic. But I did
too until I started digging into this story. Wow, oh wow. Okay,
now I'm curious about whether or not there are issues with Into the Wild,
because that's why I am teaching for next year. Oh my god,
we need to have a conversation of heaven. Yeah, we could go on
the other side of that argument, though, jen is, for instance,
the story about when we worked on the Babysitter together and my siblings all had
different perspectives of what had happened. So there's that too. In addition to
outright fraud, there's the issue, and it's a big one. It's really
a big one that everybody who got a family of six siblings can all have
a different experience about the same thing. Liza, you referenced that a moment
ago, and we should talk about that for a second. Here are incidents
that happened years ago, maybe more. It is a valid point that here
you are with all of your siblings, and everybody's recollections were very different,
even if you're not going to wear the fiction writer hat and say I'm going
to embellish the crap out of this thing, and I'm gonna make up stuff,
and I'm gonna describe scenes that never happened. Even going with an effort
to tell the story as accurately as you can, all the different perspectives of
the people that lived it are different. And that's why in The Babysitter,
what we did was is I took everybody else's memories and mine and put together
a composite so that, for instance, my brother had some great memories that
I'd forgotten, but as soon as he mentioned them, I remembered them,
because of course I was the oldest and so I had more recall than any
of them. So we did it. I did it that way because I
knew what my memories were, I knew what my images were. I knew
how creepy it felt, even though I never really understood why. I thought
it was my mother that was a creepy part, which was the great irony
in the book, because indeed she was preppier than him. But that is
such an important point about perspective, and especially now, especially when we're dealing
with alternative facts in the world, I know, but you have to if
we're going to talk about truth, we have to talk about a lot of
people have a lot of alternative facts, and they run the gamut, and
I think that it's hard to nail them down. It's hard to nail down
sometimes in writing. When you're writing memoir, what how you line up against
it? And you better be careful when you're writing and you're writing true crime,
you better be careful. Rather than alternative fact, it's alternative memory,
okay, yeah, yeah, The fact is the fact. You know,
I'm talking about the world, world and alternative perspective. Yeah, and in
that case, an absolutely alternative perspective. They tend to overlap though, right.
There tends to be some threat of truth in each one. And if
you can find that in the place where they overlap those memories, then you
can enter the story. And that's how we did it. What are some
of the issues with truth as part of the sewer of misinformation that you are
familiar with, specifically in the Tony Costa case, which of course is the
basis for the Babysitter. For anybody who hasn't read it yet, and if
you haven't, I don't know why you haven't go run. I think I
think there are so many examples in this case, but one of the examples
is, so, what is the name of the show? I'm sorry,
but it's escaping me American horror Story? Is the name of the shop?
I think it was. Season ten was supposedly based on the Tony Costa case.
Ryan Murphy has a house in Provincetown and it was shot in Provincetown,
And the premise of season ten was that the main character was a vampire,
and all the press on Tony Costa at the time of the case called him
the cape Cod vampire. Absolutely untrue, complete and utter rubbish. And Jen,
you want to you were the one that discovered this. Yeah, that
started with the press conference with the district attorney from the county telling people bodies
have been found and that there were evidence on the corpses of having been chewed
and not just the corpses but the organs too. Remember what happened. What
we realized was this man didn't know the difference between incisor wounds and incision wounds
from miised wounds and incised wounds of the night, and incisor wounds are made
with teeth, So this district attorney didn't know the difference, so he thought
an incised wound had been made by teeth marks, and that you can imagine
the guys and the reporters in the room were just, oh my god,
we not only have a killer, we have a man who choose the body
parts. And that went viral and viral for nineteen sixty nine, but it
went viral and twenty twenty it still viral. Yeah, and it persisted.
Yeah, there were just Asliza said, there were so many. The three
women that we discovered that he did not kill that are still in the books
as three of Tony's victims, although the bodies were never seen, women were
never seen alive again. And yeah, there's just a list of inaccuracies that
people didn't dig any further or didn't have the resources or the knowledge or the
impetus to say, I wonder if that's true'll look it up. So it
became part of the history and remains of the serial killer. Yeah, so
we touched already on the fact that this isn't just an issue that is happening
now, like it's been around since Penny Dreadfalls. Early broadsheets, and it
perpetuated with Truman Capote. But why is it that we are Why do you
think that we're starting to see more focus on truth in true crime like now
today? What is the impetus for this? Do you think? I think
you and we are focusing on truth in true crime. But I don't think
the world at larges. I think they're just swallowing whatever they're given. And
the more as I said, the more salacious, the more sensational, they're
all over it. So I think it's just those of us that care about
the truth and lies, and I in particular about the truth in this story
that are raising red flies, going wait a minute, that's just not the
way it happened, and for you, and I'm thinking typically of a man
who's written another book or creating a story out of hull cloth, just creating
a narrative that has sold your book and that now has sold your film.
It's just whoa, it's funny how lies and I now feel this personal relationship
with, if not protection of Tony Costa because the story is going to change
before our eyes, a story that we in particular Liza research to the I'm
sorry for the pun to the death and to have somebody come in and say,
Okay, I'll take these parts of it, the vampire part and the
drugs and the hippies and the sixties genre of pe tone and all that,
and I'm gonna juice it up. I'm gonna juice it up with some very
famous names and just I'm going to drive that train right to the bank.
There's something else going on as well, which we've actively been participating in discussions,
which is four contemporary cases. Family members like myself as the brother of
a murder victim, and a number of other people, some of whom we
regard as our allies and friends, are very disturbed by the coverage that these
cases have received because they feel that not only are the stories not adhering to
the truth, but they're very much veering off into disrespectful and sensationalized aspects of
the story that may or may not be based on reality. That there's just
people throwing in all kinds of crap. And you see it even in new
murder cases that have happened recently, this Idaho four case, what the four
college students being killed. We've just seen someone indicted in that case, and
yet the sensational aspect of that case and the embellishment. It's already starting about
money. Yeah, it's about money, and it's about readership and clique send
viewership and just advertising driving audiences. But no one seems to be particularly concerned
that some of this coverage could be very hurtful to the families of the victims,
and that victims are being treated in a very disrespectful way. That's a
responsibility of the writer who's writing about it. We had this issue, obviously,
with the cost of book and the victims and all we could do.
We went to great lengths to talk to the family, to interview the family,
to get the family perspective, and not just the family perspective of Tony,
but of the victims. A lot of them are, at least we
cases this old are deceased, and those who are not deceased, I can
tell you one in particular, which I don't want to give a name,
but I do want to say, lives were ruined by these murders and by
the heinousness and the horridness of these crimes. Lives were ruined and people I'd
like to use this metaphor of going into my bed and pulling the sheets up
over my head. A lot of the victims families in this case did exactly
that, and there are a few. From what I know, there's a
woman now who's actually just dealing with it, who was part of this case
when it happened. But when Jen and I tried to talk to victims families,
we were threatened. They were angry, and you can get it.
The whole town is traumatized. They did not want us writing about this.
They did not want us writing about their loved ones. And Tony's family didn't
want us writing about them too. So here's the question, what am I
to do with my truth? So we struggled with that as well. A
lot we talked about it. We went back and forth about it, and
I needed to tell the story that happened to me and to this day.
And Bill, I think this is as somebody who has been a victim or
been a victim's family, I think that there's so many aspects to what goes
on here. There are so many peripheral people and again, so many perspectives,
and you do the best you can, but it's it's a tough call.
Because I needed to write my book. I needed to it grabbed a
hold of me and wouldn't let me go. Whose truth am I going to
tell? How am I going to go around that? So we tried to
be as respectful to the victim's stories without getting any feedback from the families because
they didn't want to cooperate. I imagine you could in these cases the families
have their own truth too, and it's equally as interesting, and it's often
incredibly different from what happened to, for instance, me as a kind of
a person on the sidelines. I don't know that that answers your question or
not, but I think it's so complex, and I think that there are
writers out there who don't care, and I think there are writers out there
who do, And there's probably writers in the middle too, who are going
to tell the story no matter what you say, and tell it their way.
So I hope I answered your question. And I would also say that
it's not only on the writer's plate. It's the editor's plate, okay,
editor who you know is sending these reporters out and then allowing an underreported,
sloppily reported, cut and pasted report to go on the air and in the
newspaper and in the magazine and to answer directly Bill one of your questions,
I think the reason is money in that research costs money. Having a reporter
on a story on those Idaho murders and only on those Idaho murders is very
expensive, and in a lot of cases, too many cases, the reporter
is just going to go and talk to the same people that everyone else to
talk to, and then read everyone else's story, cut and paste to change
a few words and put it and put it in circulation. So it's a
combination of real reportage costing a lot of money that less and less news outlets
are able to pay. A lot of those students coming out of journalism school
are being taught that there's not a lot of money and cutting corners is what
sometimes has to be done to get the story on the air. Then you've
got editors who are being yelled at by shareholders saying, how much did you
spend in that story? Wait a minute, you know that, Why didn't
we just use so and so and lead and go with that. But I
think ultimately just comes down to money. There's less and less money in the
pool to pay people to do the kind of research that is necessary, and
details are expensive and sitting in Moscow, Idaho for month on end to get
to the truth of a story. It's not going to be done, which
is why salacious cells because they can repeat it over and over again. NSG,
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. To what extent
is the twenty four hour news cycle and the drive for clicks and reporting that
comes with social media. To what extent is that making these issues worse?
I think to a huge extent too, you said, because we've all been
dumbed down by the twitterization of the world communicating in what was it seventeen words
or less in the beginning, Yeah, like hundred forty characters or something,
and TikTok's what you've got to do it in five minutes to get to go
viral and our attention span. Look at kids next or neighbors with young kids,
and this is how they this is how they read. And so there's
no more sitting down with a book and mommy and daddy reading to you.
And I shouldn't say that, because of course parents are still doing that,
but so much of a child's attention span has been reduced, and now it's
the millennials and then Gen X, and they're just used to the scroll of
life, the scroll. They don't spend ten minutes reading a news article,
scroll and they read the headline. And so editors are telling their reporters like,
hey, people are going to scroll through this. Give me the league,
give it to me in three minutes or less. And then for the
long the long format pieces, how many of those of you seen lately?
And the other thing too is we need food and we need sleep, but
we don't need twenty four hours of news. We just don't. And it's
like prostitution. They're digging for stories and repeating them over and over again when
something big doesn't happen in the world. And I think that is that's a
problem. It's a huge problem because when you have twenty four hours of news
to fill and three stories, what are you going to do? Oh,
I don't know. You might make something up, or you might embellish.
Let's say let's use embellish because you have to. You need content, right,
you go fishing for content. The guard not the Guardian, but the
Sun interviewed me when they for the babysitter and it wasn't a salacious enough story
for the Sun, so they didn't run it. Really, yes, how
the fact that your babysitter was a serial killer. And you know what the
reporter kept saying to me, did you see anything? Did you see anything?
Did you see bodies? Did he try to kill you? Exactly?
And it went on like that and he kept repeating, oh yeah, yeah,
and it didn't run. So there you go, classy. Yeah,
oh my gosh, holding up the tradition of the British tabloid, that's for
sure. And it's not like I'm going to say, terry. And here's
here's the question for the ages. What is the best way to hold true
crime content creators to a higher ethical standard? And I, like I said,
I think like Nobel prize for answering this one, but like, what
can we be doing to try to hold people she was a standard of hey
do better? Okay, yes, Liza did not see bodies and she did
not merely get killed by a serial killer, but that doesn't mean that her
story isn't worth listening to. How can we get that across to people and
make it meaningful? I think the only way is to ignore the stories that
are full of salacious content and stretch truth or outright mistruth. That's the only
way, you guys, and for editors to not run it. But again,
as Liza said, and as you alluded to, Kristen, when you
go twenty four to seven to cover to fill, but you're going to be
like, okay, we report like radio news does report the same story in
the top of the hour. Either they're going to do that, or they're
going to cut back, or in a combination of both, they're not going
to care. So it's got to come down to the people in charge of
the button to either not run it or not listen to it. Yeah,
and I think I'm not the only one that feels that way about the twenty
four hour news cycle. Most of us are starting to feel that way.
Jen feels that way. It's our behavior that's driving it. So if we
stop doing what we do we're doing, if we stop clicking on those links
that come up in our feed about insane stuff over and over again, if
we stop doing business as usual internet providers, we can start to affect things.
Because we're not the only ones that feel this way. There's a whole
group of people out there who feel the same way we do. How's that
for a Nobel Peace Prize? I love it. I was reading an article
about Cheeter Rivera not doing Broadway anymore because the audience is on their goddamn phones.
And there she is on stage singing and somebody's on their phone talking.
She has stopped Broadway shows to say put your phone away or leave, and
the person gets belligerent. So the article is actually really well written and an
incredibly horrible, shocking insight into what it's like to go to a Broadway show
for three hundred dollars a ticket. I think it's so widespread that I'm not
sure. But this point, we're so far down that road that to really
change behavior in any real way, I don't know. I don't know how
you do it. I'm sorry it's not a Nobel answer, but I don't
think you can. I don't think you can. I think the only person
you can change behavior is you. That's it. They interviewed Sean Hayes recently.
He's doing that Broadway show something about Oscar, and he broke with somebody
was asking about the audience and he said, and by the way, people
in the first five rows with your phones. We can hear you because it's
pretty prevalent out there. I can't imagine. I can't imagine being in what
I would do? What I would do, Oh, I know what you
in a Broadway show in my three hundred four hundred dollars seat with some Yahoo
talking to the nanny behind me, I don't know what I do. I'd
probably be the one to end up being thrown out because it would, no
doubt, and so outraged for the performers who are They're oh my god,
I can't imagine anything more, and I'm going off and I feel like I'm
shouting. But if you turned and said, get off the damn phone to
by your own business, bitch, and they'd be telling you you're disruptive,
that's right, by calling them out for their bad behavior. Yeah, it's
this pervasive sense of entitlement. I think it really is running through in not
a fantastic way. And with entitlement, the truth matters less and less because
it's all about your ego and you get lost in it. And that entitlement
gets louder and louder with every new Can you imagine now with people with their
their virtual things? The VR goggles. Yeah, I imagine sitting next to
them on the airplane as they're shadow boxing somebody and oh, I hate it's
awful. People around their cell phones and the next thing is going to be
these things and they're did you guys? It's probably not going to be part
of the show. But I have to ask you because I'll forget if I
don't. Did you ever see the movie Brainstorm with Natalie Wood And yeah,
yeah, yeah, that was everyone they're walking, but it was yeah,
you're walking now. It was Christopher Walking forty something years ago, and it
was all about Ai, how he was creative, was like an orgasm machine,
and so they would have virtual experiences by wearing the goggles. That's the
movie she was making right before she died. I think it was, Yeah,
it was Christopher walking because yeah, it was because he was on the
boat. Yeah, he was on the boat right. Yeah. I keep
thinking about that with because the machine that they put on their head looked just
like a Baculus rift where Apple just for thirty five hundred dollars just released Eliza.
You were just here recently Inhampton Roads about a new and interesting project you
were working on, and it is about the contraband decision. Can you explain
to people who may not be familiar with it, what is the contraband decision?
And where was it made? And what are you doing and hanging around
here with disreputable folks like me? I'd be happy to actually most people,
even in Hampton Roads. I was there for a week and I had a
wonderful time, and shout out to the baker's wife in Phoebus. I recommend
it to everyone. But I was talking to a waiter there. Talk to
talk wherever I go, and no one knows the story. And there's a
reason no one knows the story. So the contrabands are began at Fort Monroe
in eighteen sixty one, at the beginning of the Civil War. And they
began when three enslaved men escaped from a Confederate battery that they were building where
there had just been a skirmish, a minor skirmish over at Sewell's Point.
Escaped. There's some debate about how they got to Fort Monroe, but all
accounts say that they climbed through the thicket with their white flag and asked for
asylum. And they were the first three to do it, and they were
the first three who were granted asylum. And what happened when they did is
that the spirit they caught the spiritual telegraph of the enslaved people and were traveled
really fast. And so thousands of enslaved people in the dark of night headed
for Fort Monroe and it became known as the Freedom Fortress. But what is
so significant about it is that they created the community of Hampton. All the
white people left, They abandoned their property, they abandoned their houses, They
took their wives and their children, and they left and went to higher ground.
And then they burned their city or their town. They burned that.
The Confederates burned the town of Hampton. Ten enslaved people are at Fort Monroe.
They come out of Fort Monroe because there's no place to put them,
and they start to rebuild the community, and it becomes known as the Grand
Contraband Camp or slab Town right there in Hampton. It's absolutely there's no history
on it. It's not told. And there were two hundred and fifty Contramand
camps in the United States refugee camps housing eight hundred thousand formally enslaved people during
the Civil War, eight hundred thousand and no one talks about it. Yeah,
I didn't know about it until you started telling me about it exactly.
Yeah. I think it's kind of a significant story and I think it needs
to be told and it needs to be brought up as the other half of
what we know as American history. This is the very seat of African history
in this country. It gives us so much to hear the story and hear
the story of these people. And so what we're doing is that we're talking
to the descendants of the contraband in Hampton because a lot of them are still
there and they have held onto this oral history because it didn't get written down
anywhere. And again, it's really moving to hear their stories in history that
passed down and here we go again, this is African American history that has
not been told except within the oral tradition of the African American community. So,
for example, I've never heard about this either, and I'm actually interested
in the Civil War. The way I heard about it was is that my
husband's third great grandfather was the commanding officer at Fort Monroe, and he was
also a Massachusetts lawyer, and he was the one that said, you know
what, he was there when the three men came in and he said,
Virginia had just seceded from the Union. They ratified their vote the day before,
and so he, being an attorney, said, I don't have to
return these guys because Virginia is no longer able to take advantage of the laws
of the United States. That's right, because they're no longer covered under United
States law exactly. That's how he came to call them contraband of war,
so that he could keep them and basically use them for They did all kinds
of things. They wanted to enlist. A lot of them were informants.
They had a lot of intelligence what was going on in the local area,
so that's unknown. They were strong people to help build batteries. There were
all kinds of ways in which they aided the Union Army, and still the
Union Army wouldn't let them enlist. So when you say that, it's a
piece of it. That's why we don't know it. So many African American
people didn't see themselves in the history books or even in the conversation. So
they turned they said, I'm going to learn it from my grandfather, I'm
going to learn from my neighbor I'm going to learn it from my mother,
and so those oral histories are so important to both document There's a pro there
was a program in the thirties called the Federal Writers Project that did document a
lot of these people. But when you're talking about two hundred and fifty refugee
camps in the United States, imagine, just imagine it. The story hasn't
been told. So what are your plans. You're working on a book.
I'm working on a book right now, but right right at this moment,
I'm working on a documentary with a filmmaker out of Washington, DC who DC
had one of the biggest contraband camps in the country. It grew up off
the Lee Plantation, off Roberty Lee's plantation, right in Ireland, overlooking the
government sees the land. The Mary Custis went often to the wherever she went,
and the government took the land and made what was called the Freedman's Village.
You can imagine the kind of conditions they lived in, but at least
there was a place for them to be, and DC was at the center
of it. I could go on and on. It is crazy, and
I have lived here almost my entire life. And I've never heard this,
so that's the point. No one knows the story. This is very interesting.
And Jen, how about you in terms of projects, what are you
working on? My quick answer is survival. We had a family tragedy last
year, a year ago, and yeah, so I'm just getting back to
writing. Actually, I just wrote my first piece in a year because I
have just been so sidelined by trauma. Yeah, I'm getting back to writing.
I'm actually turning the tragedy into a memoir called Sisters, a love Story.
And so we'll see. It's been a hell of a year and just
beginning to come out. As Bill, you probably understand this shared coming out
the other side of a horrific tragedy. We're so sorry to hear that chime.
Thank you. Well, hopefully some good things will come out of it
in terms of maybe you being able to turn your creative juices on again and
move forward and telling the story. But it sounds like they're very challenging.
No, it's yeah, it's in fact, as I start to write it,
it's I'm realizing just how challenging it is to relive it, to relive
it, and to relive it in the depth that you need to as a
memoirist, as Lyson knows all too well. It's just as I have said
to my clients who i've ghost written for, memoir writing is the bravest thing
you're ever going to do. And I don't want to work with you if
you're if you don't know that, if you're not aware of that and not
willing to absolutely unzip yourself for the world to see, because nobody wants to
read a memoir by Pollyanna. It's daunting, but it's also it feels so
good to finally have the bandwidth to get back to writing and to a creative
process because I've not had an ounce to spare for creativity. So getting back,
thank you for asking, and stay tuned. It's a relief when you
have your words back finally, like when you return to it from a long
time. It's, oh, this is what I missed, this is what
I love. Yeah right, I'm glad you're getting them back. That's really
good. And this is in fact, it was just the first piece of
writing that I've done in a year. A friend asked me to write the
introduction to an upcoming coffee table book. In writing the intro, I said
the happiest people. The luckiest people are those who know what they're born to
do and love doing it. It's true of myself and Jed. Not have
that for a year has been really a toob of all the challenges, really
tough, and to feel it coming back with flowers in the garden after winter
start to oh there's the sun. Oh I remember this. Yeah, Yeah,
it's an amazing feeling. That analogy is a very strong one well as
it. Jen. Thank you so much for joining us to talk a little
bit about the sticky problem of truth and true crime and some of the repercussions
for that. And we do encourage everybody to pick up The Babysitter if you
have not already done so. It is a magnificent book. And we thank
our two best selling author friends for joining us again today. We love of
having you and we loved your work. Thank you both so much. It's
been great to come back. Yeah, we've been so happy to come back.
Really, it's a pleasure to talk to you, guys, and it's
always great to get together with my Jenny. So even if it's on zoom,
all right, guys' about to get a tornado coming through Salt Lake so
I gotta go okay, all right, be safe. That is going to
do it for this episode of mind Over Murder. Thank you so much for
listening and 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
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