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Speaker 2: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 2: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 2: written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every
Speaker 2: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 2: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 2: host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 6: Good evening. When rookie FBI agent Mark Putnam received his
Speaker 6: first assignment in nineteen eighty seven, it was the culmination
Speaker 6: of a lifelong dream. If not the most desirable location. Pikeville, Kentucky,
Speaker 6: is high in Appellachian coal country, an outpost rife with
Speaker 6: lawlessness dating back to the Hatfields and McCoy's. As a
Speaker 6: rising star in the bureau, however, Putnam soon was cultivating
Speaker 6: paid informants and busting drug rings and bank robbers. But
Speaker 6: when one informant fell in love with him, passion and
Speaker 6: duty would collide with tragic results. A coal miner's daughter,
Speaker 6: Susan Smith, was a young, attractive, struggling single mother. She
Speaker 6: also was a drug user, sometimes described as a con artist.
Speaker 6: Thief and professional liar. Ultimately, Putnam gave in to Smith's
Speaker 6: relentless pursuit, but when he ended the affair, she waged
Speaker 6: a campaign of vengeance that threatened to destroy him. When
Speaker 6: at last she confronted him with a shocking announcement, a
Speaker 6: violent scuffle ensued, and Putnam, in a burst of uncontrolled rage,
Speaker 6: finally fatally strangled her. Though he had everything necessary to
Speaker 6: get away with murder, a spotless reputation, a victim with
Speaker 6: multiple enemies, and the protection of the Bureau's impenetrable shield,
Speaker 6: his conscience wouldn't allow it. Tormented by a year of
Speaker 6: guilt and deception, Putnam finally led authorities to Smith's remains.
Speaker 6: This is the story of what happened before, during, and
Speaker 6: after his startling confession. Revised and updated. This book also
Speaker 6: includes photos and a new epilogue by the author. Book
Speaker 6: we're featuring this evening is above Suspicion, an undercover FBI agent,
Speaker 6: an illicit affair, and a murder of passion, with my
Speaker 6: special guest, journalist and author Joe Sharky. Welcome back to
Speaker 6: the program, and thank you very much for this interview.
Speaker 6: Joe Sharky, Hey, Dan how are you doing. Thank you
Speaker 6: very much. I'm doing fine. Thank you. This is an
Speaker 6: incredible book. Tell us a little bit about how this
Speaker 6: was when this was first published in I Believe ninety three.
Speaker 6: Tell us how you came to be the author of
Speaker 6: this book, why you became involved, how you became involved.
Speaker 4: Well, as you know, true crime stories generally are in
Speaker 4: the in the headlines, this one was not. Mark Putnam's
Speaker 4: wife at the time, was desperate to get this story
Speaker 4: told because she was extremely frustrated with the way she
Speaker 4: thought the FBI was stonewalling her and trying to get
Speaker 4: to more of the truth about what had occurred. Neither
Speaker 4: she nor her husband, Mark Putnam, ever denied that that
Speaker 4: this that he did it, or the circumstances of it.
Speaker 4: Kathy Putnam, though, was just desperate to get the story out.
Speaker 4: And my agent at the time heard about Kathy and
Speaker 4: put me in touch with Kathy, And as I got
Speaker 4: to know her, I thought, this is really a remarkable story,
Speaker 4: a remarkable event. It was. It was below the media
Speaker 4: radar because it had occurred in this very isolated portion
Speaker 4: of Appalachia, and I thought more and more. Kathy was
Speaker 4: extremely forthcoming and her husband was available to talk in prison,
Speaker 4: and as I got you know, I spent some time
Speaker 4: in that part of eastern Kentucky and Pikeville, and then
Speaker 4: farther east along the Tug River where Susan Smith, the
Speaker 4: victim had grown up in a coal mine town, and
Speaker 4: more and more I realized there's a lot of richness
Speaker 4: in this story. So I sort of just dug into it,
Speaker 4: and above suspicion was the result.
Speaker 6: Went. Just as you write in the book, can we
Speaker 6: take us back to this time February eighty seven, Mark
Speaker 6: and Kathy Patnam, as you mentioned, and this is his
Speaker 6: first FBI finement, And so as you write in the book,
Speaker 6: in this small place Pikeville population forty five hundred East
Speaker 6: Kentucky and Susan Smith being directly related to the Hatfields,
Speaker 6: you tell us a little bit about and describe for
Speaker 6: us and set the stage for the reader about this
Speaker 6: area that has a great influence on this story. Tell
Speaker 6: us a little bit about this Pikeville, East Kentucky.
Speaker 4: Well, Pikeville is the metropolis as what was a forty
Speaker 4: five hundred population of the coal mine region in this
Speaker 4: part of eastern Kentucky, which also abuts just across the
Speaker 4: river West Virginia. You know the coal mine area of
Speaker 4: West Virginia. It's traditionally been an isolated area. It's still
Speaker 4: fairly isolated. The interstate at the time hadn't come anywhere
Speaker 4: near Pikeville. I think it was a place where outsiders
Speaker 4: traditionally had come in to extract things, starting with the
Speaker 4: lumber industry and then and then of course the coal
Speaker 4: mine barrens. And there was a place of up and
Speaker 4: down economy with with the coal mines. By the time
Speaker 4: I got there, and by the time this book was
Speaker 4: set a few years before that, everything had fallen on
Speaker 4: hard times. The coal mine economy was was in its
Speaker 4: just flopping around and not doing very well. It was
Speaker 4: It's a place where, I mean, I got very fond
Speaker 4: of eastern Kentucky, and particularly not just a Pikeville, but
Speaker 4: of the town where Susan Smith grew up, Cold Freeburn,
Speaker 4: which is right on the river, very much a coal
Speaker 4: mine town. Used to be a company town. Uh this
Speaker 4: let's you know, Susan grew up in this environment of isolation, suspicion,
Speaker 4: but extreme family orientation, if you know what I mean.
Speaker 4: There were there were always people around her who basically
Speaker 4: put up with her. She was a remarkably complex girl
Speaker 4: who had who had dreams of of getting out of
Speaker 4: that that that life, and I never sort of had
Speaker 4: the skills to uh to achieve those dreams. She was sassy,
Speaker 4: she was pretty. Uh. The picture of her that I
Speaker 4: have in the book is the only picture if I
Speaker 4: could get, and it doesn't really, you know, do justice
Speaker 4: to her. She was pretty, she was that, she was smart,
Speaker 4: although uneducated, uh, and she was desperate to uh to
Speaker 4: be something and had absolutely no no skills in order
Speaker 4: to get there. The the area is one of the
Speaker 4: themes in this book is the not just the isolation,
Speaker 4: but the important, the critical importance of what I think
Speaker 4: of as hillbilly hearsay. It's an area where at the
Speaker 4: time I don't know how it is exactly now. Word
Speaker 4: of mouth was how information sort of got passed from
Speaker 4: one place to another, and word of mouth had a
Speaker 4: tremendous influence on the way this story played out, or
Speaker 4: particularly on the fact when Susan Smith disappeared from her
Speaker 4: home and her family and her kids in Freeburn, Kentucky.
Speaker 4: The word of mouth helped to cement the idea that
Speaker 4: she had as she had gone, as she had done
Speaker 4: in the in the past, that she might have been
Speaker 4: off on some caper, that she she was involved in
Speaker 4: petty drug deals with some you know, shady characters, as
Speaker 4: was her husband, and she had been known to disappear before.
Speaker 4: She always took care to make sure that her children
Speaker 4: she had two kids, were looked after. And she wasn't
Speaker 4: that she was a horrific mother, that she had no
Speaker 4: major mothering skills, but she did look after her kids.
Speaker 4: So she disappears, and the hearsay is that, well she was,
Speaker 4: she's off to you know, Chicago or some place in
Speaker 4: Ohio on a drug deal, and that accounted for the
Speaker 4: fact that it took months, maybe six months, for it
Speaker 4: to become clear to particularly her sister who lived also
Speaker 4: in Freeburn on the on the River, that something was
Speaker 4: desperately wrong. Susan had not been in touch at all,
Speaker 4: and then the the mystery began as to who was
Speaker 4: who were the suspects, Who were the major suspects in
Speaker 4: Susan's disappearance, And of course, as is always the case,
Speaker 4: the husband in which this guy was a near do
Speaker 4: well but also a charming guy named named Kenneth Smith.
Speaker 4: He was the prime suspect. The local you know, the
Speaker 4: local cops had no crime to investigate. The county cops,
Speaker 4: so they you know, they did talk to him. They
Speaker 4: figured there were other suspects. There was a notorious bank
Speaker 4: robber again, a charming guy named Cat Eyes, who was
Speaker 4: you know, could have been a suspect. The Cat Eyes
Speaker 4: was in prison at the time. But the investigation, such
Speaker 4: as it was, was a missing person investigation and it
Speaker 4: really went nowhere for months and months and months and months. Well,
Speaker 4: Susan Smith's sister, Shelby, kept pressing the local cops to uh,
Speaker 4: you know, to get on with it. And Shelby knew
Speaker 4: one thing, and only one thing. She knew that that
Speaker 4: she had never met Mark Puttnam, the FBI agent. But
Speaker 4: she knew that Susan was always on about Mark Puttnam.
Speaker 4: Susan was Mark Putnam's informant. She was on the payroll
Speaker 4: of the FBI. She was helping Mark crackcases. And Susan
Speaker 4: told stories and it was hard to sort out what
Speaker 4: was really was, you know, what was a pipe dream
Speaker 4: for Susan. And Susan told stories about her affair with
Speaker 4: Mark Putnam. Now these stories were being told in far away,
Speaker 4: you know, forty miles away from pike pike Field, and
Speaker 4: people sorry shrugged and said, well, you know that's that's Susan.
Speaker 4: Maybe she is, you know, romantically linked with this guy,
Speaker 4: but there's no you know, there was no evidence of
Speaker 4: that at the time. So eventually Mark Putnam became focused,
Speaker 4: it became more out of focus as a potential suspect
Speaker 4: and what at the time was just a disappearance a
Speaker 4: missing person. It took Shelby a long long time to
Speaker 4: knock heads together and get the cops, to get the
Speaker 4: FBI to sort of get on this case because the
Speaker 4: FBI was horrified even the idea of one of its
Speaker 4: star young agents would be involved in something they the
Speaker 4: disappearance of a girl, and that all finally, about almost
Speaker 4: a year later, started to come into uh started to
Speaker 4: become a more serious investigation. In the meantime, Mark Putnam
Speaker 4: and his wife, who was a very assertive woman who
Speaker 4: got involved in the FBI's business very much in an
Speaker 4: office in Pikeville that was basically unsupervised from the higher FBI.
Speaker 4: They had gotten out of Pikeville on you on good terms,
Speaker 4: and Mark was as part of his reward for being
Speaker 4: such a crime fighter in Pikeville, was transferred with his
Speaker 4: wife and two kids at this time to the Miami Bureau,
Speaker 4: which was quite a prize. And in the Miami Bureau,
Speaker 4: as all this stuff was going on back in eastern Kentucky,
Speaker 4: Mark's Mark was a real boy scout and his conscience
Speaker 4: really preyed on him. Throughout the entire year. He kept thinking, well,
Speaker 4: they're going to find out, They're going to find out,
Speaker 4: but he didn't doing it. He didn't say anything until
Speaker 4: about a year later. He started making moves like we've
Speaker 4: got to get this thing clear, and it all came
Speaker 4: It all just came to ahead a year later when Mark,
Speaker 4: through a series of machinations with lawyers and with the
Speaker 4: prosecutor in Pikeville, decided that he was going to fess up,
Speaker 4: tell them that he had killed Susan Smith in a
Speaker 4: fit of passion, and tell them where the body was.
Speaker 4: And suddenly we had not just a missing we had
Speaker 4: not a missing person's case. We had we had a homicide.
Speaker 4: And the process of getting marked through that confession period
Speaker 4: struck me as very very interesting because the district attorney
Speaker 4: in Pike County, in Pikeville was kind of in a.
Speaker 4: He was a really interesting guy. John Paul Runyon was
Speaker 4: his name. Because he didn't have a body. He had
Speaker 4: somebody confessing to a crime that he had no evidence
Speaker 4: of except the fact that the person had been missing,
Speaker 4: and he had to very carefully, step by step concoct
Speaker 4: along with the attorney for Mark Putnam, on the other hand,
Speaker 4: a crime basically that Mark Puttnam could comfortably, comfortably I
Speaker 4: don't mean comfortably, but that Mark Putnam would in fact
Speaker 4: plead to eventually. The crime was second degree murder, and
Speaker 4: the deal was Mark had to tell them from Miami
Speaker 4: where the body was. Once that was agreed to and
Speaker 4: negotiated and put in place, the cops and the FBI
Speaker 4: were led to this scene where Mark had dumped the
Speaker 4: body on a sort of a mountain ravine not far
Speaker 4: from Pikeville itself, and they found the and Mark confessed.
Speaker 4: And in Kentucky, first degree murder is extremely hard to
Speaker 4: prove and the best the prosecutor could get. And I
Speaker 4: talked to him at great length when I was researching
Speaker 4: this book. Was second degree murdered, a prison sentence of
Speaker 4: twelve years, and Mark fled guilty, went to prison, to
Speaker 4: a federal prison because FBI agents I thought to be
Speaker 4: at some risk if they were in a state prison.
Speaker 4: And that in turn ignited another controversy in Pikeville, which
Speaker 4: was yankee, fair haired Yankee boy gets an easy easy,
Speaker 4: an easy sentence, and so that controversy is still going
Speaker 4: on in Pikeville. To me, the overall thrust of this book,
Speaker 4: that as I spent more and more time there and
Speaker 4: got to know Mark Putnam and his wife and the
Speaker 4: people who knew the citizen Smith, is that it was
Speaker 4: almost a classic track in that you had a hero
Speaker 4: who was brought low by his own hubris. Mark Putnam
Speaker 4: was was driven, he was up. You know, he literally
Speaker 4: was a boy scout. He was a high school and
Speaker 4: college soccer star. He believed firmly in the FBI. That
Speaker 4: was his dream. His wife was behind him, pushing all
Speaker 4: the way, and this this was really his dream, was
Speaker 4: to become an FBI agent. He was a really really
Speaker 4: good one. For most of his time in Pikeville. He
Speaker 4: was cracking cases. Susan Smith became an informant and she
Speaker 4: really helped him cracked some bankruptbery cases and things like that.
Speaker 4: He was looking really really good until of course it
Speaker 4: all it all just collapsed on everybody, not just Mark,
Speaker 4: but on Mark's family and of course on Susan's family
Speaker 4: and her two children. So that was the niche of
Speaker 4: my interest in it.
Speaker 6: Mm hmm. Let's go back, as you do in the book, though,
Speaker 6: to create this entire scenario where this boy scout FBI
Speaker 6: agent really looked like he was at all accounts he
Speaker 6: had a future, a really bright future. He was madly
Speaker 6: in love with his wife, they had children, and he
Speaker 6: was at this outpost. What you have in the book, though,
Speaker 6: is the complex relationship between his wife and this is
Speaker 6: a person with a little bit of a checkered past
Speaker 6: as well and redemption in her life, and then she
Speaker 6: met her dream Mark and Susan Smith, and the relationship
Speaker 6: with his wife Kathy, because she became an ally of
Speaker 6: Susan relating to her. So tell our audience about this
Speaker 6: relationship that developed that contributed to Susan falling in love.
Speaker 6: Tell us, as you do in the book, about this
Speaker 6: evolving relationship that contributed to this, as you say, tragic death.
Speaker 4: That's a very good point, and that to me is
Speaker 4: one of the most one of the most compelling aspects
Speaker 4: of this story is the two women is Kathy Putnam
Speaker 4: on the one hand, Mark's wife, Kathy Putnam, and on
Speaker 4: the other hand Susan Smith, the informant working for Mark Putnam.
Speaker 4: This I mean that the setting is important in that
Speaker 4: this office was an outposts just exactly as you say.
Speaker 4: It was not supervised. That there was one other agent
Speaker 4: and he was a goof off. So Mark Putnam was
Speaker 4: basically operating without in essence adult supervision, if you know
Speaker 4: what I mean, Kathy, it was a very I mean
Speaker 4: Kathy was a really aggressive, assertive woman who helped Mark
Speaker 4: in every way to becoming at the Eye agent in
Speaker 4: Connecticut where they both grew up. She because she involved
Speaker 4: herself in the the i's business because basically there was
Speaker 4: no there's no secretary in the office. She got to
Speaker 4: the point where she was handling a lot of the
Speaker 4: business at the FBI office. I don't mean the investigations,
Speaker 4: but taking the phone calls. And she got to know
Speaker 4: because Susan Smith had become so deeply involved as an
Speaker 4: informant with Mark, she got to know Susan and the
Speaker 4: one thing that I mean, I got to know Kathy
Speaker 4: very very well and also Mark. But Kathy was a
Speaker 4: helper She was one of these people who involved yourself,
Speaker 4: involved yourself in sort of not hopeless cases, but desperate cases.
Speaker 4: And Kathy fell in as a helper to Susan, and
Speaker 4: Kathy made it her business to try to put Susan
Speaker 4: on a better path. She kept telling her, you can,
Speaker 4: you can straighten things out, you can get there's a
Speaker 4: way to get out out of this situation. And Susan,
Speaker 4: for her this would mostly telephone conversations. Susan, for her part,
Speaker 4: began to model herself after Kathy. Kathy had a bit
Speaker 4: of a checkered background, as you say, but Kathy had
Speaker 4: had as a young adult, had really cleared all those
Speaker 4: things up. Kathy was pretty, she was poised, and to
Speaker 4: Susan Dies Kathy was the frosty queen, I mean, Kathy
Speaker 4: was nothing of the sort. But Susan began to model
Speaker 4: herself after Kathy in terms of the way she spoke.
Speaker 4: Susan was cognizant of the fact that she and I
Speaker 4: don't use this term hillbilly in any pejorative sense, but
Speaker 4: that she was considered a hillbilly. Susan tried to improve
Speaker 4: her grammar. Susan was always a reader, which always which
Speaker 4: fascinated me, and more to a great extent, Susan began
Speaker 4: to act like Kathy, and I don't know how that
Speaker 4: affected Mark, because Mark was thrown into intimate relation with
Speaker 4: professional relations with Susan. Kathy had no idea. Susan told
Speaker 4: her that she was in love with Mark, but Kathy
Speaker 4: had no idea that Mark would ever get involved into
Speaker 4: a romantic relationship with Susan. But it was interesting how
Speaker 4: those two I think of these two women as Kathy
Speaker 4: and Susan as orbiting around Mark, and I think to
Speaker 4: the extent that I that I could, you know, it
Speaker 4: being a non fiction book where you have to be accurate,
Speaker 4: I think I got that idea that these two women
Speaker 4: were involved in this tragic orbit around around Mark. And actually,
Speaker 4: actually when the movie was made many many years, not
Speaker 4: long ago, the star, the woman who the actress who
Speaker 4: played Susan the Dead, the dead Girl, the dead coal
Speaker 4: miner's daughter was Amelia Clark from a Game of Thrones,
Speaker 4: and that on location it became a Wilia made it
Speaker 4: clear that she really was driven to that aspect of
Speaker 4: the book in her portrayal of Susan Smith, and I
Speaker 4: said to her, Amelia, after I watched her work on location.
Speaker 4: I was a consultant on the shoot. I said, you've
Speaker 4: really brought this young woman to life, which is something
Speaker 4: I tried to do in the book. But I was
Speaker 4: astonished at how well Amelia understood all that and got
Speaker 4: the very interesting facets of Susan Smith, and she worked.
Speaker 4: Amelia worked day and night for three months on this
Speaker 4: movie shoot. But I think obviously I was not able
Speaker 4: to interview Susan Smith. I talked to both the people
Speaker 4: who knew her, and I got these various parts of
Speaker 4: her personality. But somehow Amelia seemed to just synthesize all
Speaker 4: that and she just nailed it. So I'm interested in
Speaker 4: seeing the finished movie when it comes out, and finally
Speaker 4: seeing Susan Smith almost in the flesh, if you know
Speaker 4: what I mean. But those two women fascinated me. I
Speaker 4: was Kathy was was determined to get the story told.
Speaker 4: Kathy was furious at what she thought of as the
Speaker 4: FBI having abandoned her husband in the sense that he
Speaker 4: wasn't supervised, that they kept pushing him to get more
Speaker 4: and more involved in these these crimes, and that her
Speaker 4: husband was not a victim. She never never saw that,
Speaker 4: but that her husband was pushed into areas that that
Speaker 4: should have been supervised a little bit better. There was
Speaker 4: an agent, another agent in the bureau who was in
Speaker 4: love with Susan Smith. He was a no good guy.
Speaker 4: He was an IAGO and he didn't he didn't know it,
Speaker 4: and he kept needling trying to get Susan Smith interested
Speaker 4: in him rather than interested in Mark. And Kathy just
Speaker 4: was determined to get to get this story out. And
Speaker 4: you know, I talked to the FBI, and particularly to
Speaker 4: the FBI agent in charge of this after the after
Speaker 4: the crime became known, and they were they were very
Speaker 4: very astonished at Kathy. Uh. They they they did. I
Speaker 4: think they did the right thing after Mark. You know,
Speaker 4: at the point that Mark confessed and they understood Kathy's frustration.
Speaker 4: She uh, she never let go and there was basically
Speaker 4: nothing they can could do about it at that point.
Speaker 4: But Kathy was right that and the FBI finally, the
Speaker 4: FBI UH supervisors finally admitted to me and and and
Speaker 4: also to the record that this was a real mistake.
Speaker 4: This was a black eye for the FBI, not just
Speaker 4: the fact that one of their star agents killed a
Speaker 4: female informant, but that he had been allowed and encouraged
Speaker 4: in fact, to keep that relationship going. And that was
Speaker 4: just that was just trouble. And I think the the
Speaker 4: FBI finally, you know, came to that conclusion. We made
Speaker 4: a terrible mistake here in letting in encouraging this guy
Speaker 4: to keep pushing and pushing and pushing, and in not
Speaker 4: giving a better advice about, Hey, this informant is UH
Speaker 4: is going to be trouble for you. You better, you
Speaker 4: better back off of it. So that that was the
Speaker 4: precipitating event was when Uh, Susan desperate. At this point,
Speaker 4: Susan was was almost delusional about her relationship with Mark.
Speaker 4: It was a short lived relationship. I'm hill billy. Hearsay
Speaker 4: is that these two had this torret affair. They didn't
Speaker 4: as far as I can determine, and I worked hard
Speaker 4: on this aspect of it. Uh, they might have had.
Speaker 4: They had a sexual relationship a couple of times in
Speaker 4: a motel in Pikeville and maybe once on a mountain road. Uh.
Speaker 4: From Mark's point of view, uh, and I you know,
Speaker 4: I blame him for this. He saw Susan essentially in
Speaker 4: a transactional way. She was helping him. She was deeply
Speaker 4: in love with him. He wasn't in love with her.
Speaker 4: She saw him as the white knight as they the
Speaker 4: nied on the white horse, who was gonna, you know,
Speaker 4: collect her and leader out of town to a better life.
Speaker 4: That was the case that that she was tragically mistaken
Speaker 4: in in how she saw Mark. She at some point
Speaker 4: in uh towards the end of this relationship, she thought
Speaker 4: she was pregnant. She had a pregnancy test at a
Speaker 4: local clinic that seems to indicate that she she was.
Speaker 4: There's some there's some dispute on that. It doesn't really matter.
Speaker 4: She confronted Mark. Mark had come back to town for
Speaker 4: a trial on a case that he had cracked earlier,
Speaker 4: and he had to come back for the pre trial motions.
Speaker 4: She confronted him with the fact that she was pregnant,
Speaker 4: that this was his child and that made certainly made sense.
Speaker 4: And unless he this, unless he agreed to marry her
Speaker 4: and you know, carry her off, she was going to
Speaker 4: expose the relationship to not not just to Kathy, but
Speaker 4: to the FBI and to the public, and that would
Speaker 4: ruin Mark's career. He suggested. At this point, they had
Speaker 4: a meeting place up up at a mountain up at
Speaker 4: a mountain plate the mountain part of town, away from
Speaker 4: prying eyes, because the prying eyes were everywhere in this
Speaker 4: part of the world. They went to this mountain place
Speaker 4: that they had gone to, this pull off that they
Speaker 4: had gone to many many times before it to discuss
Speaker 4: bureau business. And she I'm confident that this is this
Speaker 4: is accurate. Obviously I couldn't talk to her. She precipitated
Speaker 4: a fight. She was a fighter. I mean she was
Speaker 4: a physical fighter. If you crossed her in any any
Speaker 4: physical way, she'd fight. Uh. And she precipitated a fight,
Speaker 4: which Mark tried to tried to tone down the fight
Speaker 4: over you better you know, you'd better marry me and
Speaker 4: or I'll expose you. And here it became very intense
Speaker 4: at this dark mountain road away from any eyes whatsoever.
Speaker 4: That as she was beating on Mark, he grabbed her
Speaker 4: around the neck and told her to shut up, and
Speaker 4: then lost it. He strangled her. She this is this
Speaker 4: is from Mark's point of view. Now I talked to
Speaker 4: him in prison. She she sort of collapsed and he realized,
Speaker 4: oh my god, I might have killed her. And he
Speaker 4: realized that he did, and then he did something that
Speaker 4: I've never quite fully understood, although I understand it partially.
Speaker 4: The next morning, Mark was supposed to drive from Pikeville,
Speaker 4: where he had come back for this pre tile business,
Speaker 4: to Lexington, which is at least a two hour drive
Speaker 4: away to the FBI had to an FBI bureau office
Speaker 4: in Lexington to discuss the case that he had, the
Speaker 4: trial he had been working on with some FBI supervisors
Speaker 4: in that area. So Mark, being you know, the the
Speaker 4: the the obedient and Gunghill FBI agent that he was,
Speaker 4: now had a body and in a panic.
Speaker 6: He.
Speaker 4: Stripped Susan's body, put it in the trunk of his car,
Speaker 4: went back to his motel in Pikeville, spent a sleepless
Speaker 4: night frantic, and then the next morning drove to his
Speaker 4: meeting in Lexington with a body in his trunk of
Speaker 4: his car, thinking never be obviously, never being able to
Speaker 4: get that out of his mind, goes through the entire
Speaker 4: day thinking they're gonna They're going to see how how
Speaker 4: frantic I am. Nobody noticed that, they may have thought
Speaker 4: he was hung over. And after the after the day's
Speaker 4: business in Lexington, minds you with a car with his
Speaker 4: car parked and a body in the trunk. He drives
Speaker 4: back to Pikeville and drives up to an air another
Speaker 4: area that he knew uh in the mountains that was
Speaker 4: actually a strip mine area. Uh finds a pull off.
Speaker 4: He knows this area very well, and in a panic,
Speaker 4: dumps the body into a ravine and and drives off
Speaker 4: back to his motel, thinking, well, they're going to find
Speaker 4: this body and it's all going to be over, but
Speaker 4: then you'll have to fess up. Nobody ever found the
Speaker 4: body until he until a year later, So that that
Speaker 4: always struck me as first of all, horrifying that he
Speaker 4: drove with a day with a body in the trunk
Speaker 4: of his car. I talked to him in prison. He
Speaker 4: was very cooperative. He didn't try to make excuses, and
Speaker 4: he talked about that. And the reason I know how
Speaker 4: he felt is that he told me and I was.
Speaker 4: I came away from, you know, two days in talking
Speaker 4: to him in prison, with the impression that what he
Speaker 4: said was true, but there was no evidence that he
Speaker 4: that there was another part of this story. I was
Speaker 4: horrified by what he had done, of course, as was he,
Speaker 4: but I thought, okay, this guy's being straight. Every the
Speaker 4: stories matched up Kathy's story matched up the you know,
Speaker 4: a year goes by and he's frank, he's frantic with guilt,
Speaker 4: and finally, as the he's in Miami and he realizes
Speaker 4: the FBI. The local cops have got the ear of
Speaker 4: the FBI, and the FBI is beginning to look into
Speaker 4: this case with the absolute certainty that one of the
Speaker 4: agents could not possibly be involved. The FBI team that
Speaker 4: went to Pikeville basically came there with the idea, we
Speaker 4: got to clear clear this guy's reputation up and Mark,
Speaker 4: sensing that he was being figured as a suspect, went
Speaker 4: to his superior in Miami, gave some indication that he
Speaker 4: was ready to take a lie detector test. Reluctantly, they said,
Speaker 4: you know, you don't have to do that. What are
Speaker 4: you crazy? He did. They failed the lie detector test,
Speaker 4: and then the FBI started to be Okay, we got
Speaker 4: a problem here. This guy might be it might be
Speaker 4: the guy. And Mark, knowing that things were coming to
Speaker 4: a rapid conclusion, that that night told his wife that
Speaker 4: they were She had picked him up at an airport.
Speaker 4: He had gone for the lie detector test. Told his
Speaker 4: wife in an airport are a motel bar near the airport,
Speaker 4: he said, She said, you know she was obviously he
Speaker 4: was distraught. She said, all right. He indicated that it
Speaker 4: was a problem with Susan smith disappearance, Kathy said, And
Speaker 4: I have this from both Mark and Kathy. Kathy said
Speaker 4: they both had a couple of drinks. Kathy said, well,
Speaker 4: did you sleep with her? And Mark said yes. And
Speaker 4: Kathy had no idea that that would that would be
Speaker 4: the answer. Kathy was kind of naive on this point.
Speaker 4: And then Kathy sort of almost like just being sarcastic,
Speaker 4: what would you kill her? And Mark said yes, And
Speaker 4: Kathy's world crashed at that point. She wrote that her
Speaker 4: her world, her family's world. I mean, everybody had thought
Speaker 4: this guy was was just Dudley do right. Everything collapsed,
Speaker 4: and Kathy did her best to try to make sure
Speaker 4: that that Mark negotiated at least as good a deal
Speaker 4: as he could. As I said, none of neither of
Speaker 4: them ever indicated to me that they felt like they
Speaker 4: were victim victims. Kathy felt that she was. Kathy was
Speaker 4: furious at the FBI, but they both absolutely agreed that
Speaker 4: this is what happened, and that Mark never ever in
Speaker 4: my time talking to him and said that tried to
Speaker 4: deflect guilty was he almost felt like he had to
Speaker 4: punish himself.
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Speaker 6: skipping over basically some of the incredible dynamics of this
Speaker 6: complex relationship that Susan finds herself in before in this
Speaker 6: fantasy that she has that she will rest Mark from
Speaker 6: his wife Kathy, even though she's friends with Kathy, and
Speaker 6: he'll leave his children, and like you say, she's delusional
Speaker 6: at this point, but we haven't talked about the situation
Speaker 6: with her husband, Kenneth that puts her in this incredibly
Speaker 6: vulnerable position. And then you talk about the tryst that
Speaker 6: they had a few times it had sex. Of course,
Speaker 6: Mark makes the incredible stupid move of not using a condom,
Speaker 6: and so he believes rightfully or at least he believes
Speaker 6: that he could possibly or could likely be the father
Speaker 6: of this child. And when you talk about the car
Speaker 6: and the meeting. She is is provoking him, and he
Speaker 6: is provoking her with talks of possible abortion, and then
Speaker 6: he and Kathy taking over the child from Susan. Well,
Speaker 6: you talk about really go ahead.
Speaker 4: That was a really good way to trigger Susan, was
Speaker 4: to indicate that he was going to continue life with Kathy.
Speaker 4: I hate to use the word delusion. If Susan had
Speaker 4: pipe dreams, if you know what I mean she I
Speaker 4: think it's important you mentioned the husband and also the mill.
Speaker 4: You that Susan grew her entire it spent her entire
Speaker 4: life in a hopeless place. Really and Mark this was important.
Speaker 4: Mark was the only man that ever treated her with respect.
Speaker 4: Mark knew how to treat women. He'd grown up you know,
Speaker 4: in a in a I don't mean politically conservative, but
Speaker 4: he grown up in an environment as a kid. And
Speaker 4: also you know, as a college student and getting into
Speaker 4: the FBI, where you behaved, well, you had some you
Speaker 4: had some sense of courtesy and comportment. And he always
Speaker 4: treated Susan with respect. He treated her as a as
Speaker 4: a person of some some you know, worthy of respect.
Speaker 4: She was blown away by that. No one had ever
Speaker 4: treated her that way. And I think it kind of
Speaker 4: led to her absolute misapprehension about any future that she
Speaker 4: might have with Mark. And she certainly thought, well, this
Speaker 4: guy and I are going to get out and my
Speaker 4: kids are going to get out of this awful environment
Speaker 4: and go to something much happier life. So that was
Speaker 4: really important with Susan's this apprehension. And I talked to,
Speaker 4: of course, everybody who knew Susan when she was growing
Speaker 4: up and had absolutely fit with their assessment of her.
Speaker 4: She had pipe dreams. She she she thought she might
Speaker 4: be an entertainer at some point, because she was apparently
Speaker 4: not a bad singer. She she she always thought that
Speaker 4: things were going to be better than they were, and
Speaker 4: she never really did anything to achieve that. Kathy kept
Speaker 4: importuning her, as it were, you can you can get
Speaker 4: out of this environment, but you got to take step A,
Speaker 4: step B, step C. You have to get yourself away
Speaker 4: from her husband kind of was abusive, kind of friends
Speaker 4: were shady characters. She's got all these other characters that
Speaker 4: that sort of braided through her life, including Cat Eyes,
Speaker 4: the notorious but actually kind of inept bank robber. There
Speaker 4: were a lot of banks in this area at the time.
Speaker 4: No big banks had come into this part of halp
Speaker 4: of A that there were small banks in every town
Speaker 4: and cat Eyes made a living robbing these banks. He'd
Speaker 4: spend time in prison and me get out and he'd rob
Speaker 4: some more banks. Cat Eyes was always if cat Eyes
Speaker 4: had money, everybody, all his friends had money. He was
Speaker 4: generous and he wasn't violent. He was just a kind
Speaker 4: of an antique character who robbed banks. And he was
Speaker 4: part of that environment with Kevin, with Kenneth, Raather and
Speaker 4: Susan had the good sense and of this is not
Speaker 4: this is not going to end well. So she kept
Speaker 4: flailing about trying to think how am I going to
Speaker 4: get out of this mess? And Mark Putnam was the
Speaker 4: way out.
Speaker 6: There was also the incredible lure of money. You talk
Speaker 6: about how poor this area was, so for the first
Speaker 6: time Sherry could boast things but also back it up
Speaker 6: with buying the things that she was deprived of when
Speaker 6: she was young. And also you talk about that also
Speaker 6: that this Sherry justice and cat Eyes in her whole
Speaker 6: entire family, and Kenneth Smith as this trial that Mark
Speaker 6: was fortunate enough to have Susan involved with helped him
Speaker 6: build his career in the Bureau. This was more and
Speaker 6: more endangering her with her own family, and people that
Speaker 6: had threatened her and had actually made their threats turned
Speaker 6: them to beatings. So she was increasingly in a precarious,
Speaker 6: doubtful situation. Then she believed she was pregnant, told people
Speaker 6: she was pregnant, told people she was vulnerable, invulnerable and
Speaker 6: had FBI protection. And those are the kinds of things
Speaker 6: that she said to him, to Mark in that meeting,
Speaker 6: that she was provoking him and provoked him to kill her,
Speaker 6: didn't he.
Speaker 4: Susan helped Mark with a lot of cases, but the
Speaker 4: major one. Mark was involved in other other investigations, but
Speaker 4: the major one involving Susan was cat the the trial
Speaker 4: for Cat Eyes robbing a bank. And from the Bureau's
Speaker 4: point of view, and of course they looked at at
Speaker 4: at cases being solved, and you know they from a distance,
Speaker 4: they looked at these things. It was remarkable that Mark
Speaker 4: persuaded his informant, Susan Smith, to testify in this trial
Speaker 4: against Cat Eyes. Now, this is an area where everybody
Speaker 4: knows everybody, everybody knows everybody's family, and I mean this
Speaker 4: goes back and back. You know, grudges are being are
Speaker 4: held here. This, as you noted, is where they had
Speaker 4: Field McCoy few who played out exactly right there. And
Speaker 4: it's that kind of an environment where there's there's suspicion,
Speaker 4: there's there's an idea that you don't you certainly don't
Speaker 4: wrap anybody out. And Susan went public at the trial,
Speaker 4: well uh, and that really expected that. That was the
Speaker 4: most I think, the most brave things she did, but
Speaker 4: also the most stupid things she did because she put
Speaker 4: herself out front, and that of course caused lots of
Speaker 4: you know, Cat Eyes's girlfriend Sherry, a couple of you
Speaker 4: know a bit later after the trial beat Susan up
Speaker 4: I think in Pikeville. But it also created an atmosphere
Speaker 4: where you had, you had potential suspects when Susan went missing,
Speaker 4: you had certainly, you know, you had you had criminals.
Speaker 4: You had friends and family of criminals. And when I
Speaker 4: say criminals, it's again it's kind of an antique kind
Speaker 4: of I don't mean to, uh in any way justify
Speaker 4: the crime, but we're not talking people shooting each other
Speaker 4: in the head, with bank robberies and drug deals and
Speaker 4: things like that. That kind of crime at that at
Speaker 4: that level. But you had a bunch of were involved
Speaker 4: in this in this area, and so there were suspects
Speaker 4: to look at when Susan disappeared, and Susan had created
Speaker 4: a bit of a local scandal by going public with
Speaker 4: informing on a bank rubber.
Speaker 6: Yeah, she also had that pressure right from her husband
Speaker 6: that knew that they lived together. It is very odd
Speaker 6: they lived together despite the fact that he knew she
Speaker 6: was an informant for the FBI. And then he spread
Speaker 6: rumors around the Pikeville that she was sleeping with Mark
Speaker 6: and that they had He had some account of them
Speaker 6: publicly sleeping or having sex in front of a restaurant
Speaker 6: in broad daylight. So that kind of pressure, and then
Speaker 6: you introduced this again you call it a slimy character.
Speaker 6: This FBI guy named Ron Poole that has the hots
Speaker 6: for Susan is calling Kathy, Mark's wife. And then Kathy,
Speaker 6: like you said, she's a very interesting character, but she
Speaker 6: is holding back some information from Mark. She wants to
Speaker 6: get the hell out of Pikeville.
Speaker 4: Kathy's desperate at this point. Kathy arrived in Pikeville really
Speaker 4: ready to ready to accommodate herself, and she found that
Speaker 4: she was, she had no friends there with the exception
Speaker 4: of Susan. And at the point we're now talking about,
Speaker 4: Kathy was desperate, desperate, desperate to get her, Mark and
Speaker 4: their children out of Pikeville because she said the environment
Speaker 4: was just stultifying to her, and it also had become
Speaker 4: terrifying as more and more criminals became involved in basically
Speaker 4: the family life, because there was no separation between her
Speaker 4: and Mark and Mark's wife Mark's work. So Kathy is
Speaker 4: very much a a force here here. Uh, well, Kathy's
Speaker 4: working very hard to get Mark out of town. Ron Poole,
Speaker 4: the FBI agent you just mentioned, uh, is a real
Speaker 4: uh screw up. He's the reason he's a veteran agent.
Speaker 4: The reason Ron is in Pikeville is because nobody wanted
Speaker 4: to deal with him in more important offices. Ron as
Speaker 4: just as you said, had the hots for Susan. So
Speaker 4: you've got you've almost got an Iago character here that
Speaker 4: he's he's just working conniving to get Ron wants Mark
Speaker 4: Putnam out of the way. And Ron is pressing on Susan,
Speaker 4: pressing her, and she is aware of that, and she's
Speaker 4: terrified of Ron. Uh. And she's aware that if Mark
Speaker 4: Putnam is not on the scene. Ron is the guy
Speaker 4: she has to deal with. He had been wheedling Kathy,
Speaker 4: telling Kathy that Susan of course, was telling everybody that
Speaker 4: she had this relationship with Mark, telling Kathy that that
Speaker 4: Susan was was going around ragging about her intimate relationship
Speaker 4: with Mark and making Kathy even more uh frantic and uh.
Speaker 4: Ron never knew anything really about about this relationship except
Speaker 4: with what Susan had had told that what he'd heard
Speaker 4: Susan saying. He's sort of he's almost a peripheral character,
Speaker 4: but he's just in there. He's just causing trouble that
Speaker 4: that actually adds to the to the the circumstances that
Speaker 4: make this whole thing blow up. Eventually. Ron was in
Speaker 4: there just a needling Mark. Ron was the guy that
Speaker 4: told Mark that he'd seen the showed Mark the medical
Speaker 4: the clinic UH report that said Susan was pregnant. So
Speaker 4: Ron was a fascinating character. Me and and Ron's idea
Speaker 4: was I mean, Ron's goal was this, He wanted Susan.
Speaker 4: That was his goal. He was basically he worked drug deals,
Speaker 4: but he was all over the place. He was he
Speaker 4: was just off the reservation, frequently running drug deals. Rond's
Speaker 4: most interested The thing that interested Ron Ron is dead now.
Speaker 4: The thing that interested him most was women. He was
Speaker 4: he was just that was that was his goal was
Speaker 4: an FBI agent, was was to just have women. And
Speaker 4: eventually the FBI sanctioned him after all this ended. And
Speaker 4: you know, as I talked to Jim Huggins, the FBI
Speaker 4: supervisor on this case, who became involved very late in
Speaker 4: the process, but just went down the Gangbusters and into Pikeville. Uh,
Speaker 4: Jim Hoggins just basically shrugged his shoulders in dismay at
Speaker 4: the role of Ron Pool in all of this and
Speaker 4: just said that the agency should never have sent round
Speaker 4: Bull to this place. And they were just horrified at Rumbull.
Speaker 4: He died five or six years ago, but he was
Speaker 4: a factor, and he was the one that was working
Speaker 4: on Kathy to try to get her even more frantic
Speaker 4: about getting out of town. So Kathy being who she is,
Speaker 4: and Kathy explained all this to me in great detail
Speaker 4: over a long period of time. As he was researching
Speaker 4: the book, Kathy began to on her own make overtures
Speaker 4: to known criminals because Kathy knew that if an FBI
Speaker 4: agent's family was considered to be in danger, the agent
Speaker 4: would be transferred bome right out of town to Kathy.
Speaker 4: In a very strange and almost perverse way, worked on
Speaker 4: one particular criminal trying to get at least enough information
Speaker 4: that they were in danger that would cause the FBI
Speaker 4: to transfer her and the transfer Mark and the family
Speaker 4: out of town. That was all part of the weird
Speaker 4: circumstances that were playing around this fairly basic case of murder.
Speaker 4: But you had all these people that had different goals,
Speaker 4: that had no idea. It was like these two like
Speaker 4: a bunch of trains that were coming at each other
Speaker 4: and couldn't see each other that finally just collided.
Speaker 6: When you talk about this year of remorse and guilt,
Speaker 6: and then every time the phone rang that Mark thought, okay,
Speaker 6: the gig is up. And then he was getting like
Speaker 6: he had volunteered, almost putting the noose around his neck
Speaker 6: to submit to a polygraph. That's very stupid, But they said, yeah,
Speaker 6: that's crazy because this would interfere with your promotion. So
Speaker 6: this is the odd ironic stuff that was going on
Speaker 6: in that year of him thinking that they're going to
Speaker 6: find the body that I'm going to have to confess
Speaker 6: I'm not really good at this at all. He had
Speaker 6: covered up his wound on his hand with some lame excuse.
Speaker 6: But it's very interesting, very very interesting, how savvy and
Speaker 6: how strong and how supportive Kathy was when she found
Speaker 6: out the truth and then Mark again was trying to
Speaker 6: commit legal suicide by submitting to a polygraph. This is
Speaker 6: one of the most exciting and interesting and edge of
Speaker 6: your seat parts of this book. Tell us about this
Speaker 6: meeting that was supposed to be and what Kathy does,
Speaker 6: which is instrumental in him not spending the rest of
Speaker 6: his life in prison. I think.
Speaker 4: Kathy, true to form charges we're now in Miami or
Speaker 4: now at the end of this horrible story, horrible event,
Speaker 4: Kathy charges when she realizes that Mark is planning to
Speaker 4: have is planning to have this polygraph test. Kathy charges
Speaker 4: in to the FBI, and she now confronts the FBI
Speaker 4: guy in charge in Miami, finds out that the options
Speaker 4: are fairly limited. She then on her own again. Because
Speaker 4: Kathy was always always pushing, basically beats it into her
Speaker 4: husband's head that they don't number one, they don't have
Speaker 4: a case. He's obviously a suspect. But they don't have
Speaker 4: a crime, they don't have a body. What they have
Speaker 4: is a missing person's investigation. So I mean the FBI
Speaker 4: jurisdiction except it's one of their agents, is kind of
Speaker 4: limited in a missing person case that's kind of a
Speaker 4: local or state case. Kathy beats it into his head
Speaker 4: that he needs to he needs to get some good
Speaker 4: legal advice and that obviously he has to face the
Speaker 4: music here, but there are ways that he can he
Speaker 4: can limit his exposure, and through Kathy's pressure, he does decide.
Speaker 4: They do decide to get a lawyer who then negotiates,
Speaker 4: very very skillfully negotiates with the the good old boy
Speaker 4: John Bull Runyon, who has seen everything in Pikeville, negotiates
Speaker 4: a step by step if this guy tells you, I
Speaker 4: finally you know it comes down to this guy will
Speaker 4: tell you. This guy will admit that there's a there's
Speaker 4: been a homicide, tell you where the body is, and
Speaker 4: then this whole thing can be can come to a conclusion.
Speaker 4: But we need a deal, and they did work out
Speaker 4: a deal that Mark would be would receive twelve years
Speaker 4: in prison, which is a fairly light sentence, and John
Speaker 4: Paul run in. The prosecutor in Pikeville is of course
Speaker 4: aware of the local reaction to any any when when
Speaker 4: this whole thing finally comes explodes. He's I mean, he's
Speaker 4: an elected prosecutor, he's been around forever. He's aware that
Speaker 4: he's going to be on the spot for giving what
Speaker 4: may look like a break to this this FBI guy,
Speaker 4: this this yankee from Connecticut who sailed in and murdered
Speaker 4: a local girl and kind of gets a break. So
Speaker 4: he was in a terrific fix. And I think, you know,
Speaker 4: he took me over this step by step, and he
Speaker 4: was always troubled me to the end of his life
Speaker 4: by the reaction to it, because, as he told me,
Speaker 4: he had no he had no other choice. He had
Speaker 4: to get the best deal he could get in terms
Speaker 4: of being a prosecutor, and that was to have more
Speaker 4: confess to clear this thing up. And Okay, so he
Speaker 4: gets twelve years in a federal prison, and that's the
Speaker 4: best deal they could get. There was a lot of
Speaker 4: furious reaction in Pikevielle to that, and I think to
Speaker 4: this day, these things never go away in that part
Speaker 4: of Kentucky. To this day, there's a fury about that
Speaker 4: and I went down back to Pipeville and Freeburn Well
Speaker 4: right after the movie had been shot a couple of
Speaker 4: years ago, and kind of re researched a lot of
Speaker 4: these talked to a lot of people who had been
Speaker 4: who were in the original edition of the book. And
Speaker 4: it's still very raw. It's amazing because it's now, what
Speaker 4: thirty years later, how raw the emotions are over the
Speaker 4: fact that this outsider, this yankee got a deal. Now
Speaker 4: Mark is out of prison, Now he got out and
Speaker 4: ten I think it was. I guess I'm not spoiling
Speaker 4: the story because in the apologue of the current edition
Speaker 4: of the book, Kathy tragically dies of a heart attack
Speaker 4: at age thirty eight. Now, I was in touch with
Speaker 4: Kathy throughout this process because she just became essentially after
Speaker 4: the book was published. She became in a way of friend,
Speaker 4: and I was always I always had an ear to
Speaker 4: listen to her. And what I didn't realize, and I
Speaker 4: truly didn't in long conversations with her on the phone,
Speaker 4: was that Kathy was drinking very heavily at the time.
Speaker 4: She was basically ruined, her life was ruined, and she
Speaker 4: stayed faithful. I mean she still you know, stayed faithful
Speaker 4: to Mark, but eventually her health just went downhill and
Speaker 4: she had a heart attack and she died at age
Speaker 4: thirty eight to one of that's in the epilogue of
Speaker 4: the book of just one of the additional tragedies in
Speaker 4: this story.
Speaker 6: You right too, that she was so supportive. He was
Speaker 6: in a federal prison in Minnesota. What did Kathy do
Speaker 6: as a result.
Speaker 4: Kathy became a prison a prisoner's wife. She went to
Speaker 4: see him, even though you know that Kathy was now
Speaker 4: had moved back to Connecticut to be near her parents,
Speaker 4: who were always supportive of her but kind of frustrated
Speaker 4: by her. She did what She stayed with the kids
Speaker 4: for as long as she could in a financial sense,
Speaker 4: close close to the prison, but then moved back to Connecticut.
Speaker 4: She stayed in close to She was on the phone,
Speaker 4: she had the kids were on the phone with Mark
Speaker 4: whenever they could be. From Mark's point of view, Kathy
Speaker 4: was now here is where I You know, I have
Speaker 4: to reassess a little bit about Mark, because he became
Speaker 4: a little hostile talking to me about Kathy. That Kathy
Speaker 4: was she wouldn't give up on this FBI obsession. But
Speaker 4: I think he did realize that that Kathy was drinking
Speaker 4: something I didn't realize, drinking a lot, something I didn't
Speaker 4: really twig on, and he became in prison, deeply frustrated
Speaker 4: and worried about the children. Now that's the part of
Speaker 4: the story that I know much less about at this point,
Speaker 4: except you know, when it all when it collapsed and Kathy,
Speaker 4: Kathy died and the grandparents took the children, and Mark
Speaker 4: is now out of prison, the kids are living and
Speaker 4: there of course adults, they're living in Florida, Marcus in Florida,
Speaker 4: And that's sort of just where things stand after thirty
Speaker 4: years after this horrible thing occurred.
Speaker 6: Tell us about the movie and the whole attempt or
Speaker 6: the effort to put this on film.
Speaker 4: That's a that's a really good question, because the book
Speaker 4: is you know, what's the book? Three hundred and fifty
Speaker 4: pages or one. And when the movie finally happened, to
Speaker 4: my astonishment, I thought this is never gonna happen. Once
Speaker 4: they once they signed Amelia Clark, the thing went and
Speaker 4: I thought, well, how are they going to tell this story?
Speaker 4: Because there are really two parts of the story. There's
Speaker 4: the there's the crime, and then there's the other stuff
Speaker 4: that's very complex, including Mark's year of being having his
Speaker 4: guilty conscience weighing on him. I thought, how are they
Speaker 4: going to tell this, and that they did it. You know,
Speaker 4: a movie is two hours long, and you know, I
Speaker 4: looked at that. I saw the script and I thought, okay, well,
Speaker 4: they kind of boiled this stuff. One of the hitches
Speaker 4: was when the movie started filming and they had to
Speaker 4: shoot in Harlan, Kentucky, because Pikeville had sort of become
Speaker 4: a little spruced up, and Harlan, Kentucky, a coal mine
Speaker 4: town somewhat to the west of Pikeville, looked like pike
Speaker 4: what Pikeville looked like in nineteen eighty nine. So they
Speaker 4: shot there and throughout it. There was a three month shoot.
Speaker 4: The director was Philip Noyce, who's been accomplished director, and
Speaker 4: of course the star was Amelia Clark. Amelia was deeply
Speaker 4: concerned that she'd get Susan's death right because she was
Speaker 4: playing basically, you know, a dead girl. And Amelia told
Speaker 4: me she'd read read my book a couple of times.
Speaker 4: She had a dog eared, but she really was she
Speaker 4: was a really hard worker. She really tried to get
Speaker 4: Susan right, and I think I think she really nailed that.
Speaker 4: I myself, I've never been in loved in a movie.
Speaker 4: I actually thought it was a wonderful experience spending time
Speaker 4: on a location where you have like two hundred Hollywood people,
Speaker 4: crew and stars show up with this little isolated town
Speaker 4: and accommodate themselves to it. And I thought, this is interesting.
Speaker 4: You've got all these skilled people who are you know,
Speaker 4: just they just show up like it's it's just like
Speaker 4: an event to them, and they make themselves comfortable. It
Speaker 4: was a dry town, dry county actually, and so they
Speaker 4: arranged those runs two hours across the mountains to Tennessee
Speaker 4: and brought back. You know, there were supplies of booths
Speaker 4: and by and rage. There was like one motel in town.
Speaker 4: They were all crammed into that. Some of the stars
Speaker 4: had houses that were rented, you know, nearby. Amelia and
Speaker 4: her assistant were in a house nearby. But it was
Speaker 4: like interesting to me how these people basically just got
Speaker 4: into it day in and day out. They start shooting
Speaker 4: at seven in the morning or even before sometimes and
Speaker 4: wrap up at eleven o'clock at night. Nobody was complaining,
Speaker 4: And I thought this is an interesting business. I looked
Speaker 4: at the you know, when you write a book, you
Speaker 4: do it on your own. But I saw the movie
Speaker 4: and I thought, look at the collegiality here. Everybody is
Speaker 4: working toward the same goal, and that's a bunch of
Speaker 4: people involved. So I really enjoyed the movie experience, and
Speaker 4: I can't wait until the movie comes out.
Speaker 6: When is the estimated time that it will date that
Speaker 6: it should be released?
Speaker 4: When will it be released? Yeah, that's that's become tricky,
Speaker 4: the producers and the financial people. I think now I'm
Speaker 4: talking out of class here because I'm basically there's radio
Speaker 4: silence about this as regards me because I'm a pain
Speaker 4: that became a reporter. There was there was there was
Speaker 4: there was a trouble uh involved involving the release. The
Speaker 4: movie has been released weirdly enough in the Middle East
Speaker 4: and in Turkey. Uh So it was months ago it
Speaker 4: was available at the you know, the cinemas in Dubai
Speaker 4: in with Arab with with Arab Arabic subtitles, and in
Speaker 4: Turkey where where it was dubbed uh. And so the
Speaker 4: movie has been released in in in the Middle East
Speaker 4: and Turkey, also in Spain on pay per view, which
Speaker 4: is weird. Right now, there's no release date. I'm told
Speaker 4: it's going to be early in two thousand and twenty,
Speaker 4: but we shall see. It's very it's very frustrating, not
Speaker 4: just to me, of course, but to the you know,
Speaker 4: the people who worked hard on this movie felt noise.
Speaker 4: And Amelia and Jack Hughes who played Mark Putnam, and
Speaker 4: one of the interesting characters was Johnny knox still is
Speaker 4: in the movie on the location. Johnny was like the
Speaker 4: star in town. She was he was the one that says,
Speaker 4: this tiny little town, but he was the one who
Speaker 4: was the celebrity. And Amelia, who of course is brown
Speaker 4: hair and she's you know, unassuming and and sort of quiet.
Speaker 4: They felt that she would be the celebrity, but she
Speaker 4: really wasn't. People didn't really recognize her from from uh uh,
Speaker 4: from the TV series Game of Throw.
Speaker 6: What is called Game of Thrones, Yes, Game of Thrones.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, Johnny Knoxville was the guy everybody followed. Yeah, wow,
Speaker 4: So I had fun. I mean, I really enjoyed the movie,
Speaker 4: and I saw It's clear to me that they made
Speaker 4: a very good movie that they had they had to
Speaker 4: they had to boil the story down to something that
Speaker 4: was manageable in movie form. Uh. The screenwriter was Chris Duralmo,
Speaker 4: who wrote Mississippi Burning. And Chris and I have since
Speaker 4: become pretty good friends. And I thought that Chris, under
Speaker 4: you know, difficult circumstances, got got it basically right. He
Speaker 4: and I went round and round initially, but then you know,
Speaker 4: I realized Chris, Chris wrote.
Speaker 6: I wrote a book, and Chris wrote a movie, and
Speaker 6: he did a great job capturing what I think I
Speaker 6: think he did.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, And Philip Noyce, Uh, you know, this big
Speaker 4: gruff direcord worked day and night, and I was just
Speaker 4: amazed at help on his toes Philip was when things
Speaker 4: didn't go exactly right, he just he just innovated and
Speaker 4: it was It was a good experience.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it is fascinating, fascinating to watch an actual movie
Speaker 6: being shot. But also you had the the privilege of
Speaker 6: being able to see the screenplay and then see how
Speaker 6: that screenplay plays out and how they deal with that.
Speaker 6: So that's that was fascinating.
Speaker 4: And the uh, you've heard this about Hollywood that when
Speaker 4: they adapt the book, the writer is generally the writer
Speaker 4: of the book is generally not somebody they want to
Speaker 4: deal with once they get rolling, And it was unusual
Speaker 4: in that they welcomed me on the set. They were
Speaker 4: they were just as cordial and gracious as could be,
Speaker 4: and they made me sort of feel like part of
Speaker 4: the crew. And I really admired Philip Noyce for that.
Speaker 4: Philip was just gracious and the whole the whole crew
Speaker 4: were as well as the stars. Just I felt that
Speaker 4: I was part of the process, and I tried to
Speaker 4: stay out of the way as much as possible. Once
Speaker 4: I walked into a shot, not knowing that they were
Speaker 4: that they were filming, and I heard Philip from down
Speaker 4: the street cut and then through his megaphone, Oh you're
Speaker 4: in the shot, And I.
Speaker 6: Thought, yeah, now you cast them a bit of money. Yeah,
Speaker 6: very interesting. Yeah, well, I you know, I think though
Speaker 6: too that I had predicted a few years ago, so that,
Speaker 6: you know, Hollywood has run out of ideas. So I
Speaker 6: think the thing that hasn't in mind whatsoever has been
Speaker 6: true crime and true crime books and from true crime authors.
Speaker 6: And so if you're going to look for a consultant,
Speaker 6: somebody that's going to advise on set, he might as
Speaker 6: well go to that author and It really is a
Speaker 6: great package deal that that person has given these filmmakers
Speaker 6: and done all that investigative work, so they certainly don't
Speaker 6: have to go back and do it. And then as
Speaker 6: the author and the expert on this subject and this story,
Speaker 6: they go to you and understandably they get what they need.
Speaker 6: So very interesting.
Speaker 4: Well, I think they need to ascertain first that the
Speaker 4: author is going to behave you know what I mean.
Speaker 4: They knew that I was not going to cause any
Speaker 4: trouble like, oh, this is not my vision. I'm smart
Speaker 4: enough to stay out of the way. They know what
Speaker 4: they're doing I don't in terms of a movie. So
Speaker 4: that was a good relationship.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Absolutely. This this is an open road media re
Speaker 6: release and this was originally in nineteen ninety three, and
Speaker 6: this is a twenty and seventeen. Tell us just a
Speaker 6: little bit about the revise and updated version, and tell
Speaker 6: us how they might take a look at your work.
Speaker 6: You have a Facebook page, website. Tell us about that.
Speaker 4: Well. The book was originally published in hardcover by Simon
Speaker 4: and Schuster in what was in nineteen ninety three. It
Speaker 4: was optioned almost immediately by the movies, and it's one
Speaker 4: of these tales where it took what twenty five years
Speaker 4: to make the movie. Once that became clear, open Road
Speaker 4: Media a kind of a company that does a lot
Speaker 4: of republication of books that suddenly have have more have
Speaker 4: come back into public awareness. They were I've dealt now,
Speaker 4: you know, with many publishers. Open Road was a delight
Speaker 4: to deal with, and they encouraged me and I of
Speaker 4: course jumped right into it to add what I could
Speaker 4: to the existing book, and I did that, particularly in
Speaker 4: a new, lengthy epilogue. They were absolutely delight delightful to
Speaker 4: work with, and they still promote the book very effectively.
Speaker 4: On Amazon. They have every once in a while they
Speaker 4: have a sale that you can you can buy the
Speaker 4: e book edition, not not not the print edition for
Speaker 4: whatever one or I'm like, okay, uh, the printed the
Speaker 4: print edition is Uh. It was a good experience. It's
Speaker 4: a good editorial experience. And the book is available of
Speaker 4: course on Amazon or wherever else you might you might
Speaker 4: buy a book. I assume it's in bookstores and they
Speaker 4: get the new edition because that's got a lot of news.
Speaker 4: The epilogue. I'm very proud of the epilogu because, as
Speaker 4: I said, I went back there right after the movie
Speaker 4: was finished, and spent time talking to everybody in Pikeville
Speaker 4: that I had taught in Freeburn. And some of these
Speaker 4: people don't come out well in the book, and I thought, well,
Speaker 4: maybe something I want to shoot me here. But it's
Speaker 4: just this hospitable area and people were welcoming and ready
Speaker 4: to tell me what they knew that they didn't know
Speaker 4: thirty years ago. So overall was good experience and I'm
Speaker 4: pleased with the current edition of the book.
Speaker 6: Well, it's fantastic. Thank you very much Joe Sharky for
Speaker 6: talking about Above Suspicion an undercover FBI agent, and I
Speaker 6: listened fair and a Murder of passion. It's an absolute pleasure.
Speaker 6: Joe Sharky, thank you so much.
Speaker 4: It's my pleasure.
Speaker 6: Thank you. Good night,