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Speaker 1: Welcome to the f vdW group. NOPERD is necessary if
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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 Night Stalker vck
Speaker 2: every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking
Speaker 2: and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with
Speaker 2: your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 4: Good Evening. In the late nineteen eighties, Caitlin Rother wrote
Speaker 4: for the Berkshire Eagle and the Springfield Union News in Massachusetts.
Speaker 4: She returned to California and went to work as a
Speaker 4: reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News. After working a
Speaker 4: year as a freelancer for the Los Angeles Times, beginning
Speaker 4: in nineteen ninety three, she worked as a metro news
Speaker 4: and investigative reporter for the San Diego Union Tribune. Caitlyn
Speaker 4: left the paper to write nonfiction books in two thousand
Speaker 4: and six. Caitlyn Rother went on to become a Bulletzer
Speaker 4: nominated investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author. Caitlyn
Speaker 4: Rother has written or co authored thirteen true crime books
Speaker 4: and several kindle e books. Her book Death on Motion Boulevardist,
Speaker 4: slated for release in two thousand and twenty one. Caitlyn's
Speaker 4: true crime body of work includes the books Poison, Love,
Speaker 4: Body Parts, Lost Girls, Wherehope Begins, Slash, Deadly Devotion, Dead Reckoning, Secrets,
Speaker 4: Lies and Shoelaces. I'll take care of you then no
Speaker 4: one can have her, Naked Addiction, Hunting, Charles Manson, Love
Speaker 4: Gone Wrong, Twisted Triangle, A Complicated Woman, Dead on Delivery,
Speaker 4: and Kill Him some More. Caitlyn Rother will discuss how
Speaker 4: she got started in true crime writing, the cases that
Speaker 4: have most affected her career, and the background behind some
Speaker 4: of the most shocking stories in true crime history. My
Speaker 4: guest tonight, Caitlin Rother True Crime Retrospective with my special guest,
Speaker 4: journalist and author, Kitlyn Rother. Welcome back to the program.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much for this interview. Caitlin Rother. Hi,
Speaker 4: good to be back, good evening. Glad to have you
Speaker 4: on this very special true crime retrospective.
Speaker 5: I hope I can remember everything.
Speaker 4: I'm sure you can't. Absolutely, you had been working, as
Speaker 4: we did in the introduction. We mentioned in Indian introduction
Speaker 4: that you've been working for newspapers since the late eighties,
Speaker 4: but you decided in two thousand and six to write
Speaker 4: books full time. Tell us about that decision to write
Speaker 4: books full time and what was your first book project
Speaker 4: and how did it help you, if at all, in
Speaker 4: your decision to write true crime.
Speaker 5: All right, first, I just want to clarify that I
Speaker 5: have thirteen books that are out. They're not all true crime.
Speaker 5: There are ten of them I think are true crime,
Speaker 5: but a couple you mentioned. Naked Addiction, for example, is
Speaker 5: actually a mystery novel. And so that was the first
Speaker 5: book that I ever wrote, and I spent seventeen years
Speaker 5: trying to get it published. So the thing is, people think, oh,
Speaker 5: she's got all these books, it must be really easy
Speaker 5: to get published. No, it took me fifteen years to
Speaker 5: get my very first book published, and it happened to
Speaker 5: be a true crime book, Poisoned Love. So I spent
Speaker 5: many years working as an investigative reporter for various newspapers.
Speaker 5: I had to fight just like everybody else. It's a
Speaker 5: lot different today with journalism. It's you know, I think
Speaker 5: people can go to work when they're very young and inexperienced.
Speaker 5: And that's some of the issues that we veteran journalists
Speaker 5: have with with newspapers these days, is they're the experience level.
Speaker 5: You know, a lot of people who are my age
Speaker 5: or even younger, you know, who have years and years
Speaker 5: of experience, have been laid off or pushed out, you know,
Speaker 5: because of the financial shrinkage of the whole industry. So
Speaker 5: I was working on my research skills, my investigative reporting
Speaker 5: skills at newspapers where I worked for nineteen years. And
Speaker 5: while I was working at the newspaper, I mean, I've
Speaker 5: always wanted to write a book. I always wanted to
Speaker 5: get published, so I was working on fiction. Actually, so
Speaker 5: my first book, Naked Addiction, that I wrote, I started
Speaker 5: in a writing workshop in little town in western Massachusetts,
Speaker 5: in Northampton, where I lived, and I was working for
Speaker 5: the newspaper there, and I was reading Patricia Cornwell and
Speaker 5: I was reading Michael Connolly, who are crime fiction writers,
Speaker 5: because that's what I wanted to do. So I mean,
Speaker 5: you know, I learned how to write fiction by reading
Speaker 5: and by taking these writing workshops. And meanwhile I'm working
Speaker 5: on my writing fast skills on deadline at the newspaper,
Speaker 5: writing as fast as I could type, essentially, and learning
Speaker 5: how to be a researcher. And so you know, it
Speaker 5: took many years to actually get my very first book published,
Speaker 5: and it wasn't the first book that I wrote. So
Speaker 5: my first book that I wrote was Naked Addiction, which
Speaker 5: I wrote much of when I was in Massachusetts. But
Speaker 5: it takes place where I grew up here in San Diego,
Speaker 5: which is where I am now, and actually in La Joya,
Speaker 5: where I went to junior high in high school. It's
Speaker 5: a you know, wealthy community on the beach, and so
Speaker 5: it's basically about you know, sex, drugs and murder at
Speaker 5: the beach. I just couldn't get it published because I
Speaker 5: had not been published before other than in the newspaper.
Speaker 5: And so I just worked on it, and I kept
Speaker 5: rewriting it and rewriting it and rewriting it, and I'd
Speaker 5: send it out and I'd go to conferences and so basically,
Speaker 5: you know, you have to learn your craft first then,
Speaker 5: and what I do involves two crafts. One is research
Speaker 5: and one is writing. And then over time I learned
Speaker 5: how to write what we call narrative nonfiction, and so
Speaker 5: I started doing that in the newspaper long stories. But
Speaker 5: that's basically you have characters and you have scenes. And
Speaker 5: so I basically got that published in the newspaper, and
Speaker 5: then I started, you know, my first book that I
Speaker 5: finally was able to get published, with Poison Love, and
Speaker 5: that was about the Kristin Rossam case with the county
Speaker 5: toxicologist who stole drugs from the lab at the Medical
Speaker 5: Examiner's office and poisoned her husband with them and then
Speaker 5: staged a suicide scene and put red rose pedals all
Speaker 5: over his body. That was actually my first book that
Speaker 5: I got published, and I'm so grateful that it sold
Speaker 5: really well. It is my best selling book to date.
Speaker 5: In fact, it's still selling and it's not in print anymore,
Speaker 5: but you can still get it in audio and you
Speaker 5: can still get it as an ebook. And I actually
Speaker 5: have copies of all my books that are out of
Speaker 5: print in my special collector's inventory that I sell to
Speaker 5: people who want to buy private copies. But that was
Speaker 5: my first book that I got published. Then it took
Speaker 5: me another I had Twisted Triangle, and then my novel
Speaker 5: I finally was able to get published as book number three.
Speaker 5: So even though it was the first book that I wrote,
Speaker 5: it was book number three when it got published, and
Speaker 5: it was you know, it has a detective in it
Speaker 5: who is kind of a little bit based on me,
Speaker 5: But he's a man, and I learned the hard way that,
Speaker 5: you know. Even though I thought I could think like
Speaker 5: a man, I'm actually not a man. I'm actually a woman.
Speaker 5: And so I had to have men read it and
Speaker 5: tell me men wouldn't think like that or men wouldn't
Speaker 5: say that. So that's always a challenge. If you try
Speaker 5: to pick a protagonist who is not the same gender.
Speaker 5: You may think you know what you're doing. But that
Speaker 5: took me a long time to get that right. And
Speaker 5: then I actually got it. The original publisher went out
Speaker 5: of business and so I was able to take it
Speaker 5: and revise it because I was a much better writer
Speaker 5: by this point, and I had it revised and updated
Speaker 5: through Wild Blue Press, So it's actually still it's available
Speaker 5: now and it has a different cover than it did originally,
Speaker 5: and it's better. So that's still out. But that you know,
Speaker 5: like I said, it took me fifteen years to get
Speaker 5: my first book published. After trying, trying, trying to get
Speaker 5: Naked Addiction published, I just couldn't get it published. But
Speaker 5: I wanted a book more than anything, I mean, and
Speaker 5: then once I got a book published, I still wanted
Speaker 5: that novel published because I've worked on it for so long,
Speaker 5: so you know, little by little, you know, I just
Speaker 5: kept I stuck with the true crime because it's just,
Speaker 5: you know, something that I kind of have always enjoyed.
Speaker 5: You know, I've always enjoyed watching crime movies. I always
Speaker 5: enjoyed reading true crime, you know, magazine stories and books.
Speaker 5: But the thing about it that I like so much,
Speaker 5: and the reason I've stuck with it, even though it
Speaker 5: doesn't really pay that much and it's you know, doesn't
Speaker 5: sell that well these days because there's so much TV
Speaker 5: and podcasts like yours, people think, oh, I already know
Speaker 5: the story, and so they don't tend to buy as
Speaker 5: many books anymore. So there aren't as many true crime
Speaker 5: authors these days as there used to be. But I,
Speaker 5: you know, it's what I know how to do, and
Speaker 5: I'm good at it, and people, well, it seemed to
Speaker 5: like my books, and so I just keep at it.
Speaker 5: But I do try to write other books in between sometimes.
Speaker 5: So I'm working on another book right now about the
Speaker 5: San Diego Frozen Zoo, which is about saving the planet
Speaker 5: and trying to save some of these species that are
Speaker 5: you know, going extinct and taking their little living cells
Speaker 5: and freezing them so that they can try to recreate
Speaker 5: these animals, save them in a kind of a large,
Speaker 5: you know collection. So that's a whole other topic. But
Speaker 5: it's not it's not true crime. But that's that's what
Speaker 5: I'm going to do next. So that was a long
Speaker 5: answer to your question. I forget what it was now.
Speaker 4: That's okay, fine, that's fine. You talked about the first
Speaker 4: book and then the frustration and not getting it published
Speaker 4: at in the beginning. So how was it that you
Speaker 4: came to Poison Love? How did you make come to
Speaker 4: that decision to say, Okay, I'm gonna I'm going to
Speaker 4: concentrate on this. You had always been interested in true crime,
Speaker 4: but tell us some of the conditions that were present
Speaker 4: when you were in a position to write Poison Love.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so, I mean, I like, so I learned how
Speaker 5: to write a book in fiction, you know, by writing
Speaker 5: naked addiction, and then I brought that to the newspaper
Speaker 5: to write narrative for the newspaper. And then I this
Speaker 5: case came along. While I was still working at the newspaper.
Speaker 5: I had covered county government and local government, and you know,
Speaker 5: and every Saturday shift, which we had to do like
Speaker 5: once a month, I would ask for the cop beat,
Speaker 5: so you didn't necessarily get assigned that, but I just
Speaker 5: like to do that because on a Saturday, you know,
Speaker 5: there's only one or there's only a couple three reporters
Speaker 5: maybe who are working, and so I said, hey, let
Speaker 5: me do the cop beat. So if there was a murder,
Speaker 5: I would go out and do the first day reporting
Speaker 5: on a murder. And the way that it would work
Speaker 5: in newspapers is the cop beat. They do the first
Speaker 5: initial few days, then it ends up getting passed over
Speaker 5: to the court reporter because it switches over into the
Speaker 5: court system. So there's not really good continuity there in coverage,
Speaker 5: just as far as I'm concerned. So I would sometimes,
Speaker 5: you know, stick with the story and try to keep
Speaker 5: reporting on it. Well. In this case, Kristin Rossam was
Speaker 5: a county toxicologist and she got fired. She and her lover,
Speaker 5: who was her boss, they were both married, but they
Speaker 5: were having an affair and they were both fired from
Speaker 5: the County Medical Examiner's office. She was using methamphetamine and
Speaker 5: her lover basically protected her and covered for her. And
Speaker 5: then six months six months later, she was arrested for murder.
Speaker 5: So I had these sources from covering the county government
Speaker 5: and they called me and they said, hey, a former
Speaker 5: county employee was just arrested for murder and I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 5: and there was you know, methamphetami. She was using drugs
Speaker 5: on the job. The turns out that her husband, you know,
Speaker 5: they stayed a suicide scene and he died of fentanyl poisoning.
Speaker 5: And at this time, you know, people hadn't heard of fentanyl.
Speaker 5: So today it's in you know a lot of street
Speaker 5: drugs and people are dying from it because people are
Speaker 5: cutting heroin and cocaine and even pot, and you know,
Speaker 5: it's showing up everywhere. And it's a very very powerful drug.
Speaker 5: It's a one hundred times more strong than morphinge. But
Speaker 5: at this time, nobody knew what fentanyl was and it
Speaker 5: was very difficult to get the only way you could
Speaker 5: get it it's a you know, very controlled substance. So
Speaker 5: you know, part of the defense they were trying to say, oh,
Speaker 5: her husband could have gotten it on the street. Well,
Speaker 5: you couldn't get it on the street at that time.
Speaker 5: So basically she was in charge of the fentanyl that
Speaker 5: was in the office so they collected patches, you know,
Speaker 5: for cancer patients, and when they'd go to have they'd
Speaker 5: have a dead body. They would take all the drugs
Speaker 5: out of the house, prescription drugs and illegal drugs, and
Speaker 5: they'd put them into this kind of inventory system which
Speaker 5: wasn't properly maintained at the time, and she had access
Speaker 5: to all this. So she basically had stolen these drugs
Speaker 5: from the lab and then she took them home and
Speaker 5: you know, she used some for herself, She used the
Speaker 5: math for herself, and she you know, sedated her husband
Speaker 5: and then poisoned him with the fentanyl and they weren't
Speaker 5: testing for fentanyl at the lab at that point, so
Speaker 5: it didn't show up and they didn't realize that what
Speaker 5: he had been poisoned with. So anyways, very clever. It
Speaker 5: was a great case. I covered it from arrest to sentencing,
Speaker 5: and I had to get special permission because it wasn't
Speaker 5: my beat. So I covered it initially as the police story,
Speaker 5: and then I stuck with it. And then it became
Speaker 5: a governmental negligence, and you know, the Medical Examiner's office
Speaker 5: did not properly, you know, control how these drugs were
Speaker 5: kept and monitored and stored and what have you. So
Speaker 5: the husband's family filed a civil suit against the county,
Speaker 5: a wrongful death suit, so there's that was going on
Speaker 5: as well, so I basically stuck with it. I got
Speaker 5: you know, the court reporter was a friend of mine,
Speaker 5: and I said, Hey, I'd really like to continue to
Speaker 5: cover this and actually cover the trial, would you mind?
Speaker 5: And he's like, no, go ahead, And so I have
Speaker 5: to thank him because without him, I don't know that
Speaker 5: I would have the same career because I ended up
Speaker 5: writing a book, and like I said, it's how I
Speaker 5: got started, and it was. I took six months off
Speaker 5: unpaid from the Union Tribune, where I worked, and I
Speaker 5: had no idea whether I was ever going to get
Speaker 5: that money back, because when you start out, your advances
Speaker 5: are extremely small. So I took a big risk, and
Speaker 5: thank god, I made back my advance and you know,
Speaker 5: many times over. So that turned out to be a
Speaker 5: good choice. And then I loved it so much. I
Speaker 5: came back to work and they were so worried I
Speaker 5: was going to write another book. They kept trying to
Speaker 5: keep me away from the murder stories, which is kind
Speaker 5: of bizarre backwards thinking, but that's why I lost newspapers
Speaker 5: because clearly that's what I wanted to do. So I
Speaker 5: had a couple book proposals that were out. One was
Speaker 5: for Twisted Triangle and one was for Body Parts, both
Speaker 5: of which did get published. But I ended up getting
Speaker 5: two offers within a week of each other. So I
Speaker 5: had already signed a contract for Twisted Triangle and I
Speaker 5: had already given my notice, and so basically what happened
Speaker 5: is we accepted that offer and I spent the next
Speaker 5: you know, nine months working on that, and then back
Speaker 5: to back we sent out the proposal again for Body
Speaker 5: Parts that I ended up getting more money than I
Speaker 5: did the first time, because I was by then, you know,
Speaker 5: I had three books under my belt. This would be
Speaker 5: number four, so I got more money for it, and
Speaker 5: I had back to back books. And so that was
Speaker 5: really hard though, because I ended up getting injured from
Speaker 5: sitting at the computer so much that I ended up
Speaker 5: having a really bad about of chronic pain. So that
Speaker 5: was the whole other part of my career where I
Speaker 5: had to basically switch over from writing on a computer
Speaker 5: to dictating. So I have actually written entire books using
Speaker 5: voice activated software. I'm okay now, but it took quite
Speaker 5: a bit to get through that. It was very, very painful.
Speaker 5: So people don't know that when they think, oh, she
Speaker 5: just keeps churning these books out. Yeah, well it can
Speaker 5: take a toll, and especially when you're writing about murder
Speaker 5: and serial killers, and you know, it can get very
Speaker 5: dark and it can get very difficult, you know, to maintain.
Speaker 5: You know, it was just very that book body parts.
Speaker 5: It was just that that was probably one of the
Speaker 5: hardest books that I've had to write in terms of
Speaker 5: the emotional impact that it had on me, because it
Speaker 5: was just such a gruesome and gory case. And I
Speaker 5: said to myself, I can't ever write a book like
Speaker 5: this again, so I try to stick. You know. Overall,
Speaker 5: the cases that I'm most drawn to are like Kristin Rossam.
Speaker 5: That was you know, drugs, lying, adultery. You know, you've
Speaker 5: got the international intrigue of this family. Her husband, Greg
Speaker 5: de Villers, had this family whose father, his father was
Speaker 5: a doctor and he lived in Monaco and his you
Speaker 5: know mother and father were French, and his brothers, you know,
Speaker 5: they were all very good looking and all educated, and
Speaker 5: so it was a story about you know, this person.
Speaker 5: Kristin Rossam was also really pretty, and she had been
Speaker 5: a ballerina and a child's model, so it was just
Speaker 5: about the pretty girl. Everybody loves a pretty murderer in
Speaker 5: this country. You would be amazed how many men emailed
Speaker 5: me trying to get her information in prison so they
Speaker 5: could write her. It was pretty sick, but you know,
Speaker 5: the body parts was difficult because it was about this.
Speaker 5: He was a long haul trucker and he would pick
Speaker 5: up these troubled women, prostitutes, drug addicts, and you know,
Speaker 5: lure them into his truck and they'd have sex and
Speaker 5: then he would torture them, and it was horrible. I mean,
Speaker 5: it's I prefer the financial crimes and the greed, the
Speaker 5: medical crimes, the ones that involve you know, more of
Speaker 5: the con men and conwomen. Those are I'm more drawn
Speaker 5: to those than the ones that are about addiction or
Speaker 5: mental illness. I'm kind of more into those, and I
Speaker 5: don't like to do the gruesome, gory, bloody, you know,
Speaker 5: hatchet people. This guy, this guy drew me to the
Speaker 5: story because went out and ford he turned himself in,
Speaker 5: and so I've never heard of a serial killer who
Speaker 5: turned himself in before he wanted to. He couldn't stop
Speaker 5: himself from killing anymore. So he called his brother for
Speaker 5: help because he knew he wouldn't be able to do
Speaker 5: it on his own. And he even tried to get
Speaker 5: out of it, even asking after asking his brother to
Speaker 5: help turn him in, changed his mind, tried to get
Speaker 5: out of it. But he had a woman's breast and
Speaker 5: a baggie in his pocket that he'd cut off her
Speaker 5: body and stuck her in the aqueduct, and he had it,
Speaker 5: and he had pieces of her body, you know, buried
Speaker 5: and in the freezer, and he you know, I hate
Speaker 5: to even say this stuff out loud because it just
Speaker 5: grosses me out, but I'll just say this one thing.
Speaker 5: He took this So this wasn't her breast. This was
Speaker 5: his first victim, but the one who he turned himself
Speaker 5: in with was probably I think was his more recent victim,
Speaker 5: but this first one, and he chopped her into pieces
Speaker 5: and you know, put her he basically baked her breasts
Speaker 5: I think it was her breasts and kept the fat
Speaker 5: in a can. I mean, it's just it was like
Speaker 5: it was very disturbing to have to be in that
Speaker 5: world he was, and he had a lot of paraphilias,
Speaker 5: which I learned all about you know, these people who
Speaker 5: have these fetishes where he liked to poke women's breasts
Speaker 5: with pins and needles, and I mean that's really gross,
Speaker 5: gross stuff. And he also had a head injury, so
Speaker 5: you know a lot of people who are violent in
Speaker 5: prison have had had head injuries. I think at the
Speaker 5: time I wrote that, there was a statistic that I
Speaker 5: think eighty five percent of the people who were had
Speaker 5: done violent murders had head injuries. And that seems really
Speaker 5: high to me, but it's definitely, you know, that's definitely
Speaker 5: an indicator.
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Speaker 4: Details what I read in your book, which was unique
Speaker 4: because of the access that you had. But also just
Speaker 4: this one point before we move on to something less gory,
Speaker 4: obviously than anything would be, is that he used CPR
Speaker 4: to bring his victims back right right.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So this is the thing about this guy and
Speaker 5: the reasons that I was drawn to this story. Not
Speaker 5: only did he turn himself in, but it seemed like
Speaker 5: he was a decent guy at one point. I mean,
Speaker 5: and that's what his family said that after he had
Speaker 5: been he was in the Marines, and you know, he'd
Speaker 5: had some issues. You know, he wasn't perfect by any stretch,
Speaker 5: but and he was somewhat abusive. But he was I
Speaker 5: think nineteen years old and he's in the Marines, and
Speaker 5: he you know, took these classes in US, you know,
Speaker 5: first Aid. And so he was with his girlfriend who
Speaker 5: later became his wife. They were driving on the freeway
Speaker 5: and they saw that there had been an accident and
Speaker 5: so he says, pull over, I want to see if
Speaker 5: I can help. So he goes over and he sees
Speaker 5: the you know, somebody who had been in the car
Speaker 5: was badly injured, and so he stuck his hand on
Speaker 5: the person's neck to stop the bleeding, and in the
Speaker 5: process of that, a drunk driver hit him and knocked him,
Speaker 5: you know, like eighty feet down the embankment, and he
Speaker 5: ended up being in the ICU for nine days. His
Speaker 5: jaw was like knocked off his face practically, so, you know,
Speaker 5: he had this horrible head injury. He almost didn't make it.
Speaker 5: And after that his family said he was never the
Speaker 5: same and so whatever proclivities he had before that were
Speaker 5: just you know, horribly exacerbated. The other thing about Wayne
Speaker 5: Adam Ford. That I thought was pretty interesting was his
Speaker 5: mother had tried to commit suicide and had told him
Speaker 5: that his father had raped her and that so he
Speaker 5: was the product of his mother being raped. So I mean,
Speaker 5: there were just so many issues with this case in
Speaker 5: terms of mental illness, in terms of you know, suicidal ideations,
Speaker 5: and I mean, he just seemed like he was just
Speaker 5: such a troubled, complicated, you know, tragic victim, and yet
Speaker 5: he is killing people. So I mean, you know, he
Speaker 5: was for me, it was it was he was very
Speaker 5: intriguing as a character to research. I learned a lot
Speaker 5: his brother, who I interviewed with, I also interviewed his dad,
Speaker 5: who had not talked to anybody else. They they, you know,
Speaker 5: told me everything. I sat in a hotel for two
Speaker 5: days with the two of them, and his brother was,
Speaker 5: you know, a really religious guy and really good guy.
Speaker 5: Construction of foreman, and you know, he he had no idea,
Speaker 5: you know, that his brother had been doing this kind
Speaker 5: of stuff, and he didn't even really want to know,
Speaker 5: you know, but he and Wayne Ford wouldn't really tell
Speaker 5: him what he did. He just said, I've hurt some people.
Speaker 5: So he helped turn him in and then found out
Speaker 5: later you know what happened, But it was just it
Speaker 5: was just a really intriguing, an intriguing case on a
Speaker 5: lot of human levels, you know, which is those are
Speaker 5: the cases that I get drawn.
Speaker 4: To tell us a little bit about Lost Girls.
Speaker 5: Okay, So Lost Girls is about John Gardner, who is
Speaker 5: a sex offender. He had gone to prison for five
Speaker 5: years for assaulting and molesting his thirteen year old neighbor.
Speaker 5: And yet he told his family that it had never happened,
Speaker 5: that he had never touched her sexually, and that she
Speaker 5: had made it up. And they believed him because they
Speaker 5: knew that this girl had a crush on him, and
Speaker 5: they you know, watched her having a crush on him,
Speaker 5: and you know, being kind of clingy, and you know,
Speaker 5: coming over when he had a girlfriend and knocking on
Speaker 5: his bedroom door when he was in there with his girlfriend,
Speaker 5: and so there was clearly some weirdness. So they believed him.
Speaker 5: But in fact, you know, he picked her up at
Speaker 5: school one morning and brought her back, and you know,
Speaker 5: she's thirteen, and you can't give consent when you're thirteen,
Speaker 5: and he pressured her and finally punched her and did
Speaker 5: all this stuff and you know, she ran across the street.
Speaker 5: She was terrified and the neighbors called nine one one,
Speaker 5: and you know she was just traumatized by this. But anyway,
Speaker 5: he went to prison for five years for that. But
Speaker 5: yet his family had no idea that he was the
Speaker 5: bull of doing anything like that. So, you know, this
Speaker 5: is again you have somebody who's got mental illness. He's
Speaker 5: a bipolar and he also had tried to commit suicide
Speaker 5: when he was nine years old, ten years old, threatened
Speaker 5: to jump off a building, and even before these crimes
Speaker 5: that he finally was put on death row for I'm
Speaker 5: sorry he didn't go to death row. He's in life
Speaker 5: in prison. He raped and killed these two teenage girls
Speaker 5: one year apart from each other. The first one was
Speaker 5: Amber du Bois. Her her mother was trying to find
Speaker 5: her and get people in the neighborhood in Escondido in
Speaker 5: northern San Diego County to search for her. They looked everywhere,
Speaker 5: but they didn't really get that much help from law
Speaker 5: enforcement because her mother was kind of a difficult person
Speaker 5: I'll just use that word, and got you know, the
Speaker 5: law enforce. She was constantly criticizing law enforcement. She just
Speaker 5: wasn't she wasn't easy to get along with, and she
Speaker 5: made it difficult to help her.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: That's what I was basically told by law enforcement in
Speaker 5: so many words. And then a year later, another girl
Speaker 5: goes missing. Who was She was fourteen and this next
Speaker 5: girl was sixteen, and she had gone jogging around this
Speaker 5: lake right in the in the neighboring community of Rancho Bernardo.
Speaker 5: And you know, Poway is where the second girl was from.
Speaker 5: So she drove from you know, high school to this
Speaker 5: lake to go jogging, and then she was supposed to
Speaker 5: be home and she didn't come home. So her parents,
Speaker 5: you know, she was very she was a bright girl.
Speaker 5: She was you know, very ambitious. She had, you know,
Speaker 5: she had the whole world in front of her, and
Speaker 5: she was definitely going to go go places you could
Speaker 5: just tell. And so her parents need something was wrong,
Speaker 5: and they used the they called it her cell phone provider,
Speaker 5: and they managed to track down her cell phone which
Speaker 5: was in her car. So they went to the car,
Speaker 5: saw her car there at the lake where she had
Speaker 5: been running, and so they at least had a place
Speaker 5: to start, you know, with the with the first girl,
Speaker 5: she was her way to school and she'd never made
Speaker 5: it to school, but they didn't know until later in
Speaker 5: the day, and so they thought she was a runaway,
Speaker 5: even though her mother said, no, no, she's not a runaway.
Speaker 5: So anyway, they knew what the second girl, at least
Speaker 5: where her car was and where she had been, and
Speaker 5: pretty quickly realized that this was a missing person, whereas
Speaker 5: in the first case it took them longer to define
Speaker 5: it that way. So they had the whole Sheriff's department
Speaker 5: search and rescue. It's a really big area with a
Speaker 5: lot of trails around this giant lake and a lot
Speaker 5: of places where, you know, you can these trails, you
Speaker 5: can run, and there's not a lot of people. It's
Speaker 5: pretty pretty isolating in certain parts of it. Creeped me out.
Speaker 5: I went walking there by myself, and I was like,
Speaker 5: oh my god, I just like someone's going to jump
Speaker 5: out at me at any minute. So basically what happened
Speaker 5: is he he had been he had been disintegrating essentially
Speaker 5: during gain and doing you know, drugs, and he was
Speaker 5: bipolar and so he you know, his mom, who was
Speaker 5: a psychiatric nurse, could see that he was not, you know,
Speaker 5: not himself, and took him to a see a psychiatrist,
Speaker 5: and the psychiatrist said, do you feel like hurting anybody
Speaker 5: right right now? And he said no. So he said,
Speaker 5: but I think I could be a fifty one fifty,
Speaker 5: which is essentially, you know, do you feel like you're
Speaker 5: going to hurt yourself for others? And he said, well, no,
Speaker 5: not right now. So the doctor gave him a couple
Speaker 5: of miles of pills and sent him on his way,
Speaker 5: and they just made him more manic. They gave he
Speaker 5: gave him the wrong pills essentially, And so he had
Speaker 5: asked for help. He had tried to get help. He
Speaker 5: and his mother were calling that, you know, substance abuse places,
Speaker 5: mental health places, trying to get him a bed. But
Speaker 5: the problem is that he had this record as being
Speaker 5: a sex offender. So there is absolutely not a single
Speaker 5: place you can go if you're a sex offender and
Speaker 5: you ask for help because you feel like you're about
Speaker 5: to go hurt somebody, there was no place. There was
Speaker 5: no place for him to go. So that was something
Speaker 5: that I managed to uncover in my research that had
Speaker 5: never been you know, nobody thought of that, and so
Speaker 5: you know the point of it is, you know, I'm
Speaker 5: not trying to make excuses for the guy, but by
Speaker 5: the same token, that's a flaw in our system because
Speaker 5: that means our teenage girls are in danger if we
Speaker 5: can't even stop the sex offenders who know that they
Speaker 5: need help and try to get help and they go
Speaker 5: kill somebody. So it was a pretty controversial book though,
Speaker 5: because even though I had approached both families of both
Speaker 5: girls to you know, to be to let me interview
Speaker 5: them and tell their side of their stories, neither one
Speaker 5: of them wanted to do that, which is absolutely they're right,
Speaker 5: I have no issue with that. But nobody ever said,
Speaker 5: you know, please don't write this book. What happened was
Speaker 5: the first girl's mom was writing her own book and
Speaker 5: she said, I can't talk to you because I'm writing
Speaker 5: my own book. I'm like, well, okay, And so basically
Speaker 5: my book comes out and she stages protests at my
Speaker 5: book signings, and so I had, you know, seven TV
Speaker 5: cameras and this woman marching into the middle of my
Speaker 5: book signing with all these women wearing orange T shirts
Speaker 5: and just trying to disrupt everything. So that's kind of
Speaker 5: you know, that was a whole adventure, and I was
Speaker 5: basically just trying to you know, shine a light on
Speaker 5: what happened to educate people. So this is what a
Speaker 5: sex offender? This is what makes a sex offender? Because
Speaker 5: that was a question I had, and I it's not
Speaker 5: the kind of thing we really talk about. We don't
Speaker 5: really know where these people, how do they get like this?
Speaker 5: What makes them like this?
Speaker 4: What?
Speaker 5: You know, what in his upbringing made him like this?
Speaker 5: And so I went into all that, spent a lot
Speaker 5: of time interviewing his mother, and no one had She
Speaker 5: had not talked to anybody else. She had gotten fired
Speaker 5: from her job, beca, got death threats because they everybody
Speaker 5: thought that she knew that her son was doing this
Speaker 5: and that she was protecting him. But she had been
Speaker 5: molested and when she was nine years old by a
Speaker 5: family member. She had been raped when she was in
Speaker 5: her twenties, and she just couldn't see who her son was.
Speaker 5: You know, it was like emotionally impossible for her to
Speaker 5: accept or even recognize the signs because she was so
Speaker 5: already so traumatized herself and her the whole family was
Speaker 5: totally dysfunctional with mental illness, small station, you know, drug addiction, alcoholism.
Speaker 5: I mean, it was just another case for me to
Speaker 5: do a lot of research and a lot of education
Speaker 5: for people so that you know, you can recognize maybe
Speaker 5: your daughter's dating somebody like this because his next girlfriends
Speaker 5: had said, I never saw that side of him. He
Speaker 5: was sweet, he was protective, he was nurturing. And so,
Speaker 5: you know, my goal in writing these books is, you know,
Speaker 5: these are human beings. They're not animals. Everybody goes, oh,
Speaker 5: they're just evil. Well, sometimes they're not evil. They're mentally ill.
Speaker 5: And I don't consider mental illness to be evil. They're
Speaker 5: sick people. They're messed up, and that's not a real
Speaker 5: popular opinion, but that's how I write these books. I mean,
Speaker 5: everybody is a three dimensional person. Nobody is all good
Speaker 5: and nobody is all bad. Everybody. You know, I live
Speaker 5: in the gray. There's no black and white in what
Speaker 5: I do, and that you know, it's pretty black and
Speaker 5: white in the courtroom, but that's not real life. Those
Speaker 5: are attorneys trying to win a case, and they only
Speaker 5: present information that they think is going to help them
Speaker 5: win their case. It doesn't even mean it's absolute truth,
Speaker 5: because both sides have their own truth and both sides
Speaker 5: have their own interpretation of the very same evidence. So
Speaker 5: my goal is always to sort of present the evidence
Speaker 5: and whatever else doesn't get into court. You know, the
Speaker 5: human stories of a who are these people? Who are
Speaker 5: their families? How does this affect them? Did they know
Speaker 5: about this? What can they tell me about these people
Speaker 5: that didn't come out in court? That helps us understand
Speaker 5: how people get like this, so we can all, you know,
Speaker 5: protect ourselves and our families and just understand better, you know,
Speaker 5: the human condition, certainly because I think we could be
Speaker 5: doing right now with the with the way people are
Speaker 5: acting during this pandemic. I spend a lot of time
Speaker 5: right now shaking my head, going, I do not understand
Speaker 5: why people are acting like this, And I spend a
Speaker 5: lot of time trying to analyze that because I think
Speaker 5: people are acting crazy right now for so many different reasons.
Speaker 4: Right, let's get to something that's pretty clear cut. When
Speaker 4: you talk about mental illness and you talk about the
Speaker 4: issues surrounding and you talk about a three dimensional all
Speaker 4: these characters. But in twenty eleven, and we had the
Speaker 4: great pleasure of having you on talking about dead reckoning
Speaker 4: in the updated and heavily revised version in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 4: So just last year we talked about it, but dead
Speaker 4: Reckoning is back, I believe, in twenty eleven. And this
Speaker 4: is a clear cut case of psychopathy. This is a psychopath,
Speaker 4: very very evident in this incredible case with Skyler di Leon.
Speaker 4: And then the update, So tell us a little bit,
Speaker 4: not about the story itself, but just about your experience
Speaker 4: and the circumstances surrounding being involved with Dead Reckoning and
Speaker 4: the story and the book, and then the developments that
Speaker 4: happened that necessitated an updated version in two thousand and nineteen.
Speaker 5: Okay, I actually did three additions to this one, and
Speaker 5: even though it says it's the second edition, it's actually
Speaker 5: the third edition. I did a more brief update in
Speaker 5: twenty sixteen, and so the twenty nineteen version has stuff
Speaker 5: in it that I couldn't get into that one because
Speaker 5: at the last minute my editor said, oh, it only
Speaker 5: can be half as long. So I actually went to
Speaker 5: go visit Skyler at San Quentin in twenty fifteen. So
Speaker 5: the stuff that's in the book in twenty nineteen includes that,
Speaker 5: but also includes stuff that happened subsequent to that as well.
Speaker 5: So I just want to clarify. I interviewed Skyler four
Speaker 5: times in twentousand and nine when Skyler was still presenting
Speaker 5: as a man. But this is basically you know, and
Speaker 5: I've been criticized for describing it. No matter what I
Speaker 5: do in this case, somebody's upset with me. So basically,
Speaker 5: we have a transgender killer who at the time of
Speaker 5: the murders of Tom and Jackie Hawks and John Jarvey
Speaker 5: Skyler was presenting as a man and was married to
Speaker 5: a woman, Jennifer de Leone, and she was pregnant with
Speaker 5: their second child, and they had a daughter who was
Speaker 5: ten months old. So basically I interviewed Skyler four times
Speaker 5: right before his sentencing hearing before he was sent to
Speaker 5: San Quentin, and then I went back in twenty fifteen
Speaker 5: because the California had recently a federal judge had basically
Speaker 5: ordered the state to provide transgender you know, sexual I'm sorry, gender,
Speaker 5: They keep changing the names. Gender confirmation surgery is what
Speaker 5: it's called now. Basically had ordered this inmate, not Skyler,
Speaker 5: but another inmate to be given the surgery. And because
Speaker 5: this inmate was eligible for parole and had never been
Speaker 5: granted parole, suddenly was granted Pearl, which gave the state
Speaker 5: kind of an out so that they didn't have to
Speaker 5: be setting a precedent by granting taxpayer subsidized, you know,
Speaker 5: surgery to this inmate. Well, then the judge granted it
Speaker 5: again to another inmate. So what California, the California Corrections Department,
Speaker 5: decided to do, was to adopt its own criteria for
Speaker 5: transgender inmates to apply for this surgery. And that way,
Speaker 5: the state felt like a control it better and decide
Speaker 5: who would get it, rather than be ordered to do
Speaker 5: it by the federal courts. So they did that. And
Speaker 5: so I had a magazine editor who asked me to
Speaker 5: do a story Orange Coast Magazine. So I went to
Speaker 5: go interview Skyler because the motive for killing Tom and
Speaker 5: Jackie Hawks, you know, Skyler and Jennifer had a lot
Speaker 5: of debts. But the other motive was that Skyler wanted
Speaker 5: one of these gender reassignment surgeries. So and they'd already
Speaker 5: put a deposit down. So basically I go up there
Speaker 5: to talk with Skyler about how she's doing because she's
Speaker 5: now on hormones and she now actually looks like a woman.
Speaker 5: She's allowed to wear women's clothes, she's wearing makeup, she's
Speaker 5: got really long hair, she's got small breasts and So
Speaker 5: I get there and my interview her for two and
Speaker 5: a half hours, and it was really surreal. I was
Speaker 5: not expecting this, but they basically said, okay, you go
Speaker 5: sit over there in that cage and wait. So there
Speaker 5: are like these rows of cages like the size of
Speaker 5: a room. So they're like like like you're in a
Speaker 5: bird cage, but it's like for people. Right. So I'm
Speaker 5: sitting in there and these are you know, Skyler's on
Speaker 5: death row in and out of the psychiatric unit, and
Speaker 5: they rock Skyler in in cuffs behind I think behind her,
Speaker 5: front of her, behind her, I can't remember. Comes in.
Speaker 5: Then they closed the door and she puts her wrists
Speaker 5: through this hole in the door. They unlocked her cuffs
Speaker 5: and then she's were locked inside together. They an't worried
Speaker 5: me about this, So I mean, here I am with
Speaker 5: someone who's killed three people, you know, split one guy's throat,
Speaker 5: left him by the side of the road to die,
Speaker 5: and tied two other people to an anchor and drowned
Speaker 5: them through the anchor over and you know, drowned them
Speaker 5: over the side of the boat off Newport Beach. And
Speaker 5: I'm locked in a cage with her for two and
Speaker 5: a half hours, so I, you know, I talked with
Speaker 5: her about you know, medication. She was on how his
Speaker 5: life in the psychiatric unit, how you know, what's going on,
Speaker 5: and she pretty much answered most of my questions. She
Speaker 5: seemed very lucid. She seemed happier than I had ever
Speaker 5: seen her, more rational because she was medicated by this point.
Speaker 5: So she'd tried to cut off her penis in jail.
Speaker 5: She had she'd had scotters all over her wrists, which
Speaker 5: I could see. She'd cut herself with this a piece
Speaker 5: of plastic cup, I think, so, I mean, and they
Speaker 5: were big scars, and they were vertical, not horizontal, and
Speaker 5: vertical means you're really trying to kill yourself horizontals like
Speaker 5: I'm just playing. I've just kind of scared people. So,
Speaker 5: I mean, I thought for myself, and you know, So
Speaker 5: I got back to my house, though, and I had
Speaker 5: a letter waiting from her attorney saying I couldn't use
Speaker 5: anything from the interview because she Skuyler was not able
Speaker 5: to give informed consent. She was mentally not competent to
Speaker 5: provide consent for an interview. Therefore, I couldn't use anything
Speaker 5: from the interview. I'm like are you kidding me? So, basically,
Speaker 5: some of the criteria forgetting this surgery is that you
Speaker 5: have to be mentally competent and you have to be
Speaker 5: able to make a medical decision for yourself, because you know,
Speaker 5: there's no going back. Once you've cut off your penis,
Speaker 5: your penis is gone. And if you decide you don't
Speaker 5: want that afterwards, you know that's you know, that's not
Speaker 5: that's not the idea. So it's possible that she may
Speaker 5: not qualify. Also that you know, there's also another criterion,
Speaker 5: which is that you the details of your crime are
Speaker 5: also considered when they're judging whether an applicant will get
Speaker 5: the surgery. But I know Skyler wants the surgery. I
Speaker 5: know Skyler was really excited when she heard that the
Speaker 5: surgery application process was available. I have not talked to
Speaker 5: a single person who supports that her getting it, except
Speaker 5: for one person who was visiting her in prison, and
Speaker 5: that was the only person that I've talked to. The
Speaker 5: families are absolutely just furious and outraged because this was
Speaker 5: the motive for killing their family members, you know. But
Speaker 5: they don't want her to get this surgery because that
Speaker 5: just feels so wrong to them and nobody that I
Speaker 5: have talked to wants they're taxpayer money going for this,
Speaker 5: which many people see as an elective surgery. But according
Speaker 5: to the US Constitution, and this is what I always
Speaker 5: come back to, it's a matter of the Eighth Amendment.
Speaker 5: You know, it's part of the whole Cruel and Unusual
Speaker 5: Punishment thing where you have to provide adequate quote unquote
Speaker 5: medical care to inmates. Whether you like paying for that
Speaker 5: or not, you know. So, yeah, people think it's unfair
Speaker 5: because they can't even get health insurance, and yet we
Speaker 5: have inmates who are qualifying for gender confirmation surgery at
Speaker 5: the taxpayer's expense. But it's a matter of the Constitution
Speaker 5: and that they have to provide them and it is
Speaker 5: considered a medical need and not a cosmetic or inelective surgery.
Speaker 4: It's a political hot potato.
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Speaker 4: I lost the terms conditions.
Speaker 5: Eighteen plus right, yeah, and I I mean I was
Speaker 5: on twenty twenty, which is a prime time I don't
Speaker 5: know if you guys have that in Canada, but it's
Speaker 5: a big news show, you know, murders and stuff. And
Speaker 5: I was the only person on the entire program who
Speaker 5: was interviewed who actually called Skyler ashi because people just
Speaker 5: don't even want to give a murderer the courtesy or
Speaker 5: whatever you want to call it of, you know, allowing
Speaker 5: her to call herself she. But I always say, look,
Speaker 5: it's a journalistic standard when someone is transgender and they
Speaker 5: asked to be called a she. And in fact, Skuyler
Speaker 5: has gotten to court and gotten a judge to grant
Speaker 5: her the legal permission. She basically has changed her gender
Speaker 5: in court to female. So she is a woman. She
Speaker 5: is bigally a woman, even though she's still as far
Speaker 5: as I know, still has a penis.
Speaker 4: The thing is some people, I mean most people, and
Speaker 4: then accordingly they're going to badger their their representatives to
Speaker 4: not let this kind of person exercise their rights. So,
Speaker 4: I mean, of all the people that are denied their rights,
Speaker 4: no one is going to step up. So the Libertarians
Speaker 4: are going to have a hard time choosing as this
Speaker 4: as their project to represent some of the things that
Speaker 4: they do.
Speaker 5: So, oh, there's something that anybody can really do about this.
Speaker 5: I mean, this is a prison. This has become a
Speaker 5: matter of just what you know, medical care and mental
Speaker 5: health care in the prison. California prison system was actually
Speaker 5: in a lot of trouble because it was found to
Speaker 5: you know, it's been sued a number of times, and
Speaker 5: so a federal monitoring agency was created to provide medical
Speaker 5: care and mental health care in California prison So it's
Speaker 5: not in the taxpayer's hands to change this. It's not
Speaker 5: even in the state prison system's ability to really change this.
Speaker 5: I mean, it is actually they are being told by
Speaker 5: the courts you have to do this.
Speaker 4: So incredible.
Speaker 5: I don't know, a lot of people don't agree with it,
Speaker 5: but that's you know, and I'm not trying to defend
Speaker 5: it either way. I'm just trying to explain, you know,
Speaker 5: this is how it works. Yeah, but people think that
Speaker 5: if I don't call Skuylar a he or an it,
Speaker 5: then I'm a bad person. And I've been called the
Speaker 5: C word. I've been called all kinds of stuff, incredible, incredible,
Speaker 5: it's not the same. You know, just because I explained
Speaker 5: something doesn't mean I believe something. And whether I did
Speaker 5: or not, it's irrelevant. You know, I'm a journalist. I'm
Speaker 5: not an advocate. I'm a journalist.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, People forget let's talk about I'll take care of you.
Speaker 4: And so it's twenty fourteen, tell us about this case
Speaker 4: and your involvement.
Speaker 5: I'll take care of you. Was you know, funny the
Speaker 5: same police department, Newport Beach to police department, same detectives
Speaker 5: worked on dead reckoning, that scholarly Owne case, the Hawks case,
Speaker 5: and this case, which is how I got it.
Speaker 2: So I was.
Speaker 5: Interviewing, you know, the the police detective when one day
Speaker 5: and he's like, all right, I'm preparing these warrants. We're
Speaker 5: gonna go arrest this woman. This is really you know,
Speaker 5: interesting case. Blah blah blah. So that that turned out
Speaker 5: to be, you know, a book down the line when
Speaker 5: it finally got to court. This was another murder, but
Speaker 5: this one involved this was you know, so Skuyler was
Speaker 5: a con man. This involved a con woman. So and
Speaker 5: and similar charges to financial murder for financial gain, same charges.
Speaker 5: So so Nanette, Nanette had so many last names, and
Speaker 5: I can't even remember what her name is anymore. She's
Speaker 5: been married, she was married three times, so we'll just
Speaker 5: call her Nannette Packard because that's pretty much what they
Speaker 5: called her. I think during the trial, so I went
Speaker 5: to so there were three trials and for for dead reckoning,
Speaker 5: this case had two trials, and and I I live
Speaker 5: in San Diego County and these trials were in Orange County,
Speaker 5: so I had to drive ninety minutes or two hours
Speaker 5: each way to go to these trials. So that was
Speaker 5: kind of tricky. But basically, this woman, she just didn't
Speaker 5: want to be who she was. She created all kinds
Speaker 5: of stories about herself. And you know, Skylar was the
Speaker 5: same way. So there's some interesting parallels in some of
Speaker 5: these killers that, you know, they decided to become somebody else.
Speaker 5: I don't know if that makes them feel I don't
Speaker 5: know why. It's kind of a weird thing that I've noticed.
Speaker 5: But she wanted money. She I think she just felt
Speaker 5: like having money would make her feel better. And you know,
Speaker 5: Skylar was the same and Jennifer. That's why they got
Speaker 5: charged with that, because they had one hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 5: in debt that they needed to pay off. They stopped
Speaker 5: by stealing the Hawks's boat. They could, you know, and
Speaker 5: going into their bank accounts that they were going to
Speaker 5: be rich because they owned this yacht, they must be rich.
Speaker 5: We'll turn out they weren't. Well. So Jannette had a
Speaker 5: different way of going about it. She decided she wanted
Speaker 5: a wealthy guy. So she put a classified ad that
Speaker 5: said for wealthy men only. I'll take care of you
Speaker 5: if you take care of me. So what that meant was,
Speaker 5: you know, I'll have sex with you as long as
Speaker 5: you pay me right take care of me the way
Speaker 5: that I want to be taken care of. So this guy,
Speaker 5: Bill McLoughlin, was recently divorced, had three grown kids. His
Speaker 5: youngest was I think nineteen at the time, and he
Speaker 5: had been in a skateboarding accident and had a bad
Speaker 5: head injury. So he was living at home with Bill,
Speaker 5: but his other two kids were I think they were
Speaker 5: both married and living on their own, you know, elsewhere.
Speaker 5: So he answers this ad and he doesn't tell his
Speaker 5: kids that he answered the ad, but you know, and
Speaker 5: that starts showing up but the house, and then you know,
Speaker 5: then she moves in, and then her kids are there.
Speaker 5: She shares custody with her first ex husband and Bill,
Speaker 5: you know, he's already raised you know, his own kids.
Speaker 5: But he's like, okay, you know, they could stay here too.
Speaker 5: So she basically starts helping him with his you know,
Speaker 5: his finances and other things. And he liked to take
Speaker 5: her to business dinners because she was attractive and he
Speaker 5: was older. And he had made a lot of money
Speaker 5: by inventing a machine that separates the plasma from the blood,
Speaker 5: and so he made a lot of money, but he
Speaker 5: had quite a lot of legal and financial struggles with
Speaker 5: the former business partner that he worked on some of
Speaker 5: these projects with, and so he was constantly you know,
Speaker 5: in court with this. Meanwhile, he was flying back and
Speaker 5: forth in his private plane to Las Vegas because he
Speaker 5: was establishing residency there so that he didn't have to
Speaker 5: pay taxes. So while he was out of town, Nanette
Speaker 5: would go to the gym and pick up some guy
Speaker 5: at the gym and take him out and spend all
Speaker 5: this money on and when in fact she was spending
Speaker 5: Bill's money, and so these men thought that she was
Speaker 5: rich and she was pretending to be someone she wasn't.
Speaker 5: She met this guy, Eric Napowski at the gym. They
Speaker 5: start out being friends. He was a He was a
Speaker 5: really good athlete, and he wanted to be an NFL
Speaker 5: football player, and he kept making it onto these teams,
Speaker 5: but then he kept getting injured, so he ultimately was
Speaker 5: only able to play five games on the field during
Speaker 5: his whole career. But he just kept getting injured and
Speaker 5: just had to keep stopping, you know, in between. And
Speaker 5: then he went off for a year to Barcelona and
Speaker 5: he made a big name for himself in their football
Speaker 5: league there. But he came back and they started dating,
Speaker 5: and she told Eric Nepowski that Bill was her boss
Speaker 5: and so that she was living in the house, you know,
Speaker 5: but he was her boss. She didn't mention that Bill
Speaker 5: was her fiance.
Speaker 4: Yea.
Speaker 5: So she told Eric one day that Bill had raped
Speaker 5: her using an actual gun, not pointing it at her,
Speaker 5: but actually raped her with the gun and got Eric
Speaker 5: really upset, and Eric was thinking about, you know, asking
Speaker 5: her to marry him. Meanwhile, she's already engaged to Bill McLoughlin,
Speaker 5: and she just takes the ring off every time she
Speaker 5: sees him where it goes to the gym. And next
Speaker 5: thing you know, Bill McLoughlin is dead, shot dead in
Speaker 5: his kitchen and his son, the one who was disabled,
Speaker 5: was upstairs. I think he had earbuds in or something.
Speaker 5: So by the time he was able to get down
Speaker 5: the stairs, he couldn't move very well either because he
Speaker 5: had this head injury and had problems speaking and had
Speaker 5: problems moving. He called nine one one, but he stuttered
Speaker 5: and they couldn't really understand him, so it took a while.
Speaker 5: But anyway, the police came and you know, Bill was
Speaker 5: dead on the floor and processed the scene. And anyway,
Speaker 5: it turned out that Nannette had been writing checks, signing,
Speaker 5: you know, forging checks essentially, and she had stolen like
Speaker 5: two hundred and fifty thousand dollars by writing these checks
Speaker 5: on his accounts, and she had gotten Eric Neposki to
Speaker 5: do this. But the problem was they couldn't prove it. So,
Speaker 5: you know, they could prove the check stuff. So they
Speaker 5: ended up separating the case into two pieces. So there
Speaker 5: was a financial side of it and then there was
Speaker 5: the murder side of it. There was an argument at
Speaker 5: the DA's office between the and I actually go into
Speaker 5: all this in the book, and it had never come
Speaker 5: out before, but I found the original prosecutor and she
Speaker 5: was a woman, and all the people working on the
Speaker 5: case at the police department were men, and so she
Speaker 5: was explaining to me that it was just a whole
Speaker 5: gender thing, and nobody wanted to listen to her or
Speaker 5: get along with her or do what she said. And
Speaker 5: it was a big mess. So anyway, they ended up
Speaker 5: separating the case into these two pieces rather than keeping
Speaker 5: it together as a murder with financial aspects. They're like, oh,
Speaker 5: she'll just confess to it. Well, no, she didn't. So
Speaker 5: they ended up getting her on the financial fraudulent stuff
Speaker 5: and she went to jail for six months. But meanwhile,
Speaker 5: Eric Neapowski's like, you know, she just quit talking to
Speaker 5: him because she had no more use for him, and
Speaker 5: so they went their separate ways. She got remarried. She
Speaker 5: married another guy who ended up, after my book came out,
Speaker 5: was indicted for financial crimes against people that he was
Speaker 5: like some kind of Ponzi scheme with development. It was
Speaker 5: just another crook, right. So anyway, she managed to move on,
Speaker 5: and then she had yet a third husband who was
Speaker 5: actually a really nice guy, had no idea who she
Speaker 5: was or what she was like, and he wasn't a crook.
Speaker 5: They had Bible study in their house. She was, you know,
Speaker 5: looked like she was becoming one of the you know, wealthy,
Speaker 5: you know, rich housewives of Orange County kind of thing. Meanwhile,
Speaker 5: you know, the police did a cold case. They had
Speaker 5: the same cold case investing gator that worked on dead reckoning,
Speaker 5: even though it wasn't a cold casey, he helped them
Speaker 5: because the there was another murder in the Hawks case
Speaker 5: that had happened to you earlier, and he helped him
Speaker 5: with that. So anyway, they brought him in on this
Speaker 5: case and he had to basically go through all the
Speaker 5: evidence again and he found some stuff that they had overlooked,
Speaker 5: and he managed to put this case together. And so
Speaker 5: there were two trials. They were both found guilty. They
Speaker 5: both got life without pearol so no death penalty, but
Speaker 5: life without pearl and they both ended up in prison,
Speaker 5: and that was it was a pretty fascinating case, and
Speaker 5: I always thought it was a really she was just
Speaker 5: another interesting person to me. She'd had breast enhancement surgery
Speaker 5: but lied about it. She you know, she was just
Speaker 5: wanted to be somebody else and so and she was
Speaker 5: just a calm woman. She just lied all the time,
Speaker 5: and she just I don't know, it's like these people
Speaker 5: they just don't have souls or something.
Speaker 4: Yeah, bizarre, but it was you talked about you talk
Speaker 4: your book. Then no one can have her twenty and fifteen.
Speaker 5: You know we did do it that one?
Speaker 4: I checked, Yes, right, we did. Yeah, what was different?
Speaker 5: Beta, we hadn't done that one?
Speaker 4: Go ahead, Yeah, so anyway with this case and then
Speaker 4: no one can have her in twenty fifteen? What was
Speaker 4: different from this case in terms of her her ex
Speaker 4: was the suspect. What was there anything surprising in that
Speaker 4: after covering cases were similar in terms of motive for murder?
Speaker 4: Is there anything surprising about then you can have no
Speaker 4: one can have her?
Speaker 5: Excuse me, myroach getting dry. This one was different because
Speaker 5: it's a it was a domestic violence, which I don't
Speaker 5: normally do. But this one was fascinating for a whole
Speaker 5: bunch of other reasons. Now, the reason I got this
Speaker 5: case is because it took place in Prescot, in preuscat Arizona,
Speaker 5: and that's where Tom and Jackie Hawks were from his
Speaker 5: little town in the mountains. And some woman who had
Speaker 5: read dead Reckoning sent me started sending me clips from
Speaker 5: the newspaper from the trial of this guy who was
Speaker 5: accused of killing his ex wife of thirty five days.
Speaker 5: So they had just had their divorce, had just been
Speaker 5: finalized thirty five days earlier. She was found beaten to
Speaker 5: death with a golf club in her house. Now, this
Speaker 5: is what's interesting. There was no forensic evidence tying him
Speaker 5: to this murder in the house. There was none of
Speaker 5: his DNA, there was no there were no fingerprints. But
Speaker 5: there was so much behavior. There was a life insurance policy,
Speaker 5: there was a whole bunch of alimony you know that
Speaker 5: he was going to have to pay. And you know,
Speaker 5: the more I got into it, the investigation was just
Speaker 5: a mess. So there were actually two trials in this case.
Speaker 5: The first one ended up in mistrial. There were ethical
Speaker 5: allegations flying back and forth between all the attorneys and
Speaker 5: the judge, and it was, you know, it was really
Speaker 5: messed up. In terms of how many mistakes were made.
Speaker 5: So I'll give you an example here. I want to
Speaker 5: pull this out so I can remember what the people's
Speaker 5: names are. Okay, So the medical examiner, for example, was
Speaker 5: this kooky guy who like, who transported the victim's body
Speaker 5: your name was Carol Kennedy in the back of his
Speaker 5: truck in Arizona, where it's like one hundred degrees. You
Speaker 5: have this poor woman's body in the truck and it's
Speaker 5: bouncing around. It's back the truck. It's not like a
Speaker 5: proper medical examiner's van took her to get her head
Speaker 5: examined literally by a separate lab, and during the autopsy
Speaker 5: him clean as nail clippers. So for a year and
Speaker 5: a half, the Sheriff's investigators, the Sheriff's detectives were looking
Speaker 5: for this mysterious guy, Mister six three is what they
Speaker 5: called him, because they found this DNA male DNA under
Speaker 5: Carol Kennedy's fingernails. So they thought, oh, she fought the guy,
Speaker 5: and so we need to find this guy. So they're
Speaker 5: going all over the country, you know, getting DNA swabs
Speaker 5: from people who had been in the house or who
Speaker 5: she had dated. She was doing online dating. This is
Speaker 5: a whole. This book is an interesting book on some
Speaker 5: of the sub threads. She met her current boyfriend that
Speaker 5: she was dating, she met him, I think she I
Speaker 5: don't know if she met him online or she was
Speaker 5: on she was dating people online. I don't remember if
Speaker 5: she actually met him online or if she But she
Speaker 5: had other people that she was she had dated that
Speaker 5: she met online. And Steve was also meeting women online
Speaker 5: and telling them that, you know, he wasn't seeing anyone else.
Speaker 5: He'd have like four relationships going on at once. Carol
Speaker 5: during their marriage, basically counted up all the affairs that
Speaker 5: he had had on her, and there were that she
Speaker 5: knew of. There were fourteen, including their midwife when she
Speaker 5: was pregnant with their second child. The guy was just
Speaker 5: really a piece of work. He was. When they met,
Speaker 5: she was like, Oh, he's my soul maid, and they
Speaker 5: both said, oh, we're both each other's soulmate. And he
Speaker 5: ended up getting a PhD in sociology and becoming a
Speaker 5: professor at this little college in Prescot, Arizona, And so
Speaker 5: she taught there as well, and she was a therapist
Speaker 5: and coincidentally, ironically, she worked with domestic violence victims. And
Speaker 5: so what was really interesting about this case is this
Speaker 5: was a woman who worked with domestic violence victims as
Speaker 5: a therapist who couldn't even you know, save herself from
Speaker 5: the same fate. And so I interviewed her friends, two
Speaker 5: of her really close friends who were also therapists. So
Speaker 5: I was able to really portray a very intimate and
Speaker 5: sympathetic picture of the victim in this case. And it
Speaker 5: was just so sad that Steve Democratist had control of
Speaker 5: this woman who was a smart woman and a very
Speaker 5: accomplished artist and carpenter and therapist, and she just didn't
Speaker 5: have any money. He controlled all of her money. He
Speaker 5: became an investment broker and was making you know, at
Speaker 5: least five hundred thousand dollars a year, and he was
Speaker 5: overspending that because he was a compulsive spender. He loved
Speaker 5: going to the resorts and going to dinner, and you know,
Speaker 5: meanwhile he's going to all these different places and he's
Speaker 5: having sex with all these different women who don't know
Speaker 5: about each other, and then she finally says, Okay, that's
Speaker 5: it no more. And so that's basically the theories that he
Speaker 5: felt like he lost control over her. And she was
Speaker 5: seeing someone else, and he was trying to reconcile even
Speaker 5: after the divorce, and so anyway, she ends up dead.
Speaker 5: There's a guy who's living in the guest house, and
Speaker 5: so the defense was trying to say, oh, it was
Speaker 5: more likely that that guy is the one who killed Carol,
Speaker 5: But in fact, he ended up dead six months later
Speaker 5: and it was suicide, even though they were trying to
Speaker 5: you know, he created this is a crazy thing. This
Speaker 5: guy committed suicide, but he staged his own may try
Speaker 5: to make it look more like a homicide. And then
Speaker 5: may have been because he wanted his kids to not know,
Speaker 5: or he wanted his you know, ex wife to get
Speaker 5: you know, life insurance money. It's not really clear. But
Speaker 5: there's a lot of a lot of these cases I've
Speaker 5: covered have had stage homicides and stage suicides, So I mean,
Speaker 5: I do have quite a bit of experience with that,
Speaker 5: which is has been very helpful in writing the book
Speaker 5: that's about to come out next year. The Rebecca's a
Speaker 5: House case, so what else the oh, and then the
Speaker 5: judge in the Democra case also ended up collapsing in
Speaker 5: the courtroom and had a brain ended up dying. It
Speaker 5: was just like, there were so many interesting bizarre things
Speaker 5: in this case, but some of the most bizarre things
Speaker 5: happened after Steve Demoker was actually in jail. So they
Speaker 5: have these tape recordings of these phone calls that he's
Speaker 5: making from jail, and he's basically getting his sixteen year
Speaker 5: old daughter to send fake emails to the prosecution and
Speaker 5: to the police and to his own attorneys, basically framing
Speaker 5: the guy who was living in the guest house or
Speaker 5: trying to Oh, he was involved in some kind of
Speaker 5: prescription drug ring and he told Carol about it and
Speaker 5: they came and killed her, you know. And then he says, oh,
Speaker 5: I was there was a voice in the event in
Speaker 5: my jail cell I over, you know, somebody was trying
Speaker 5: to tell me that, you know, the same story that
Speaker 5: showed up into emails. He said he heard another inmate
Speaker 5: tell him through the because that's how they talk to
Speaker 5: each other. I guess in jail, you're not in the
Speaker 5: same cell. They talked to others through the air. Vince right.
Speaker 5: So basically he got his daughter and his mother to
Speaker 5: transfer all this money because the health the life insurance
Speaker 5: money went to his there was like a whole series
Speaker 5: of transactions that he basically inserted himself into. So even
Speaker 5: though it it was just a mess, he basically got
Speaker 5: all of his family members to do things that were illegal,
Speaker 5: essentially from jail because he was such a manipulative guy.
Speaker 5: And then all these people had to get immunity just
Speaker 5: in order to testify because he'd gotten them all complicit
Speaker 5: in doing these things just because he was trying to
Speaker 5: help frame somebody else for his own purposes.
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Speaker 5: So he ended up getting convicted and to the day
Speaker 5: that you know, still to this day he's still saying
Speaker 5: I didn't do it, I was wrongly convicted. His whole family,
Speaker 5: you know, believes he was wrongly convicted. And it's a
Speaker 5: pretty wild book.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, not only did you. We talked about books that
Speaker 4: you have authored and you we won't have time to
Speaker 4: talk about the notorious USA singles to kindle edition books
Speaker 4: that we talk about, and those have been coming out.
Speaker 4: You co wrote a book with Greg Olsen as well
Speaker 4: that we did cover hero.
Speaker 5: No, we didn't actually co write something. He just that's his.
Speaker 4: Series, right, Okay, pardon me, Yeah, I.
Speaker 5: Wrote all that. Love Gone Wrong is actually a compilation
Speaker 5: of ten stories and you can they're by state, So
Speaker 5: it's Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia. And so if you
Speaker 5: want to buy them by state, they're separately available as
Speaker 5: kindle shorts, or you can get all of them together
Speaker 5: in a compilation called Love Gone Wrong. So it's ten
Speaker 5: kind of magazine length true crime stories which are all
Speaker 5: interesting to one of them are all they're all pretty interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 5: we were going to get secret Lies and Shoelace.
Speaker 4: Yes, tell us why even though this is not per
Speaker 4: se a true crime book at all, But what did
Speaker 4: this do for you or help you at all inform
Speaker 4: you in your true crime writing?
Speaker 5: You know in a way it almost is a true
Speaker 5: crime book. It isn't, but it is, you know it.
Speaker 5: It has definitely has aspects, and it definitely my experience
Speaker 5: in my marriage with this with my late husband has
Speaker 5: given me incredible insight to all these people that I've
Speaker 5: written about, because his name is Rich and he was
Speaker 5: the chief investment officer for the County Pension Fund in
Speaker 5: San Diego County, and he was this brilliant investment guy
Speaker 5: who got written up in a Wall Street journal and
Speaker 5: was known for being a maverick with derivatives. I don't
Speaker 5: know if you know if you remember that term, but
Speaker 5: it was really big at that time, and he was
Speaker 5: investing in all this stuff that was pretty cutting edge.
Speaker 5: And he completely reallocated all of the investments in the
Speaker 5: pension fund and diversified it and ended up taking it
Speaker 5: from a billion dollar fund to a four billion dollar fund.
Speaker 5: But he was paid very little money as a county employee,
Speaker 5: was like fifty nine thousand dollars a year, which is ridiculous,
Speaker 5: so he was working over time to make more money.
Speaker 5: And anyway, I was covering the county government at that point,
Speaker 5: and so that's how we met. I was actually writing
Speaker 5: about the retirement board, and so you know, he helped
Speaker 5: me with some stories and I learned a lot about
Speaker 5: investments and you know, the investment pool, and it was
Speaker 5: pretty hard stuff for reporters to understand, and I worked
Speaker 5: really hard at it. But I had to quit covering
Speaker 5: that because we went out on a date. I immediately told
Speaker 5: my editor and so they carved that portion of my
Speaker 5: beat out because that was, you know, an ethical conflict
Speaker 5: by that point. So but he I didn't realize, you know,
Speaker 5: when I met him that he was a very troubled person.
Speaker 5: And he had told me some things, but he you know,
Speaker 5: didn't really tell me the truth. And in fact, he
Speaker 5: lied about quite a few things. And you know, I
Speaker 5: just thought he had a really big heart, which he did.
Speaker 5: He was really sweet to me. He loved me, you know,
Speaker 5: more than anyone ever had. And you know, my job
Speaker 5: was to know when somebody was lying. And I could
Speaker 5: tell he had secrets, but I couldn't didn't really know
Speaker 5: what they were. And I asked, I asked my questions,
Speaker 5: but he didn't tell me the truth. And as it
Speaker 5: turned out, he had hidden drinking problem. So, you know,
Speaker 5: the first I remember, like one of the first dates
Speaker 5: we had. I think it was our first date. Actually,
Speaker 5: I remember he left some wine in his glass and
Speaker 5: I was thinking to myself, that's a good sign. He didn't, like,
Speaker 5: you know, even finish his wine and we left. So
Speaker 5: turns out though, that he was drinking at home and
Speaker 5: when I couldn't see him, because you know, wouldn't live together.
Speaker 5: So it turns out that the girlfriend of the reporter
Speaker 5: who actually took over the beef from me, lived in
Speaker 5: his apartment building, and they thought I knew how much
Speaker 5: he was drinking, and they never told me, so I
Speaker 5: didn't know. So he had this weird schedule where he
Speaker 5: would get up really early because he had to be
Speaker 5: up when the markets opened, and so we had a
Speaker 5: very I had worked the night shift and he worked
Speaker 5: the morning shift, and so we could go for a
Speaker 5: few days without even seeing each other. And but he,
Speaker 5: you know, we we ultimately did move in together because
Speaker 5: I hurt you know, remember I said earlier that I
Speaker 5: had hurt myself really bad with the chronic pain and
Speaker 5: the typing and everything. That was actually about of the
Speaker 5: same thing that I had had ten years earlier when
Speaker 5: I was with him. So it happened again in between books.
Speaker 5: But I also it happened ten years earlier. So I mean,
Speaker 5: I've been typing, you know, my whole career, if that's
Speaker 5: what you do as a reporter, that you do as
Speaker 5: an author, and I would just get terrible inflammation and pain.
Speaker 5: So I got to the point where I had to,
Speaker 5: you know, go out on disability workmen's comp from my
Speaker 5: job at this newspaper. And I couldn't even open a
Speaker 5: door for myself. I could not hold a dinner plate,
Speaker 5: even when nothing was on it. My arms were so
Speaker 5: inflamed and so sore. I started freaking out. I was
Speaker 5: so scared. I didn't know, you know, how am I
Speaker 5: going to take care of myself? And I you know,
Speaker 5: I'd forgotten, I had forgotten until I wrote this book.
Speaker 5: I'd actually blocked out of my own mind the reasons
Speaker 5: why I got married. But I kind of told myself
Speaker 5: that this was a you know, this was going to
Speaker 5: be a good idea, and I kind of tried to
Speaker 5: ignore the drinking part of it because it didn't happen
Speaker 5: all the time, and you know, you know, I didn't
Speaker 5: really I didn't know how bad it was. Obviously, So
Speaker 5: when we moved in together and we got married. We
Speaker 5: had this trip to New York where he was running
Speaker 5: an investment conference out of a hotel, and I had
Speaker 5: like this juckle and hide situation with him. I'm like,
Speaker 5: who is this person? Because suddenly, you know, I'm around
Speaker 5: him and I see what I didn't see before. But
Speaker 5: I thought something was like, he must have a brain
Speaker 5: tumor or something. Why was he acting like that? He
Speaker 5: was in like an a fugue state and he was
Speaker 5: just acting really crazy. Anyway, long story short, it just
Speaker 5: was this roller coaster marriage, and you know, he ended
Speaker 5: up threatening to shoot himself essentially while I was at
Speaker 5: work in the newsroom, and I was back and forth
Speaker 5: with the nine one one operator between two lines on
Speaker 5: the phone while he was driving around and the police
Speaker 5: were trying to find him. And it's just like my
Speaker 5: life with this guy who has ended up being diagnosed,
Speaker 5: who went into counseling, and the counselor told me he
Speaker 5: had borderline personality disorder. But I don't tell him, I said,
Speaker 5: what do you need? Don't tell him. She said, it'll
Speaker 5: just make him feel even more broken than he already does.
Speaker 5: And I don't think it'll help him to have a
Speaker 5: label like this because I just don't think he can
Speaker 5: handle it. I'm like, okay, this is ethical. So anyway,
Speaker 5: he was just a mess, you know, and he was
Speaker 5: in and out of rehab and finally, like the last
Speaker 5: year that we were still married, we weren't even together.
Speaker 5: He was in this sober living series of homes because
Speaker 5: I had to call nine one one a couple times
Speaker 5: and had to have him taken away because he picked
Speaker 5: up a bat and threatened me with it. So that
Speaker 5: actually is a true crime story. As it turns out,
Speaker 5: he was arrested for shoplifting in Phoenix. That's how he
Speaker 5: ended up losing his job ultimately, because he shouldn't have gone,
Speaker 5: but he was in a blackout and he took a
Speaker 5: bunch of items from the gift shop at the Phoenician Resort,
Speaker 5: which is a flanky place in Phoenix, and he lost
Speaker 5: his job because he didn't want to admit that he
Speaker 5: was an alcoholic, which was crazy because when you're in
Speaker 5: charge of billions of you know, pension fund money, people
Speaker 5: think if you're a thief, that's a bad thing. But
Speaker 5: he actually would rather have been looked at as a
Speaker 5: thief than as an alcoholic. And that's how much. He
Speaker 5: was ashamed of his problems. So anyway, it took me
Speaker 5: nineteen years. I rewrote this so many times because I
Speaker 5: was pretty angry at him for a long time, and
Speaker 5: I couldn't really get I couldn't get the tone of
Speaker 5: this right. I'm like, what is the message that I
Speaker 5: want for people to get from this? But basically, he
Speaker 5: ultimately committed suicide and he hung himself in a motel
Speaker 5: room in Mexico. And so I was watching the Rebecca's
Speaker 5: the How trial here in San Diego in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 5: and this is the book that's going to come out
Speaker 5: next year. Death on Ocean Boulevard. So I can't talk
Speaker 5: much about it, it's not out yet, But basically the
Speaker 5: storyline is this woman was found hanging naked from an
Speaker 5: exterior balcony at the Spreckles mansion, which was owned by
Speaker 5: her wealthy boyfriend. And the wealthy boyfriend had a son, Max,
Speaker 5: who was six years old. Two days earlier before Rebecca
Speaker 5: was found hanging, there was a horrible accident inside the
Speaker 5: house where Max ended up falling. We're still not really
Speaker 5: sure because no one saw it, but he was found
Speaker 5: lying on the floor in this foyer of this mansion,
Speaker 5: and there was a glass chandelier lying next to him
Speaker 5: in a soccer ball, and a razor scooter and a
Speaker 5: barking dog. And so they don't know exactly what happened.
Speaker 5: They've you know, theorized, but you know, two days later
Speaker 5: and she was the only one home, She was the
Speaker 5: only adult in the house. She said she was in
Speaker 5: the bathroom at the time and came out, heard this
Speaker 5: crash and came out and found him and tried to,
Speaker 5: you know, do some CPR. Her little sister was there,
Speaker 5: who was thirteen, visiting. They called nine one one and
Speaker 5: the paramedics came. And then two days later she was
Speaker 5: found hanging, and her boyfriend, who was the boy's father,
Speaker 5: was you know, supposedly at the hospital with the boy's mother.
Speaker 5: And the only other person in the house or on
Speaker 5: the property rather was the boyfriend's brother, Adam Shackney. So
Speaker 5: Jonah Shackny was the owner of the house. And so
Speaker 5: you know, she was found hanging, and so I'm watching
Speaker 5: this whole trial. The authorities say she committed suicide. The
Speaker 5: victim's family believed that Adam shack and I murdered her.
Speaker 5: So it was a civil case. There was no criminal
Speaker 5: case and no arrest, so it's very tricky to write
Speaker 5: about from legal standpoint, but it was basically I got
Speaker 5: a book deal because of what happened with my husband
Speaker 5: and my own personal insight into, you know, what someone
Speaker 5: acts like when they commit suicide. It turns out that
Speaker 5: Rebecca Howe was also arrested for shoplifting in Phoenix, and
Speaker 5: they went through the same diversion program, which is the
Speaker 5: most bizarre coincidence. So there's a lot there, and there's
Speaker 5: a lot from my personal background. So you know, borderline
Speaker 5: personality disorder is actually something that Wayne adam Ford was
Speaker 5: diagnosed with, and it's something that murderers can often have.
Speaker 5: So this memoir is a short read. It's only fifty
Speaker 5: eight pages. You can finish it in one sitting. It's
Speaker 5: super intense, but it basically has given me insight into
Speaker 5: a lot of these people I have written about in
Speaker 5: all these other books. And it's not because my husband
Speaker 5: was a criminal. It's just because he had all these problems,
Speaker 5: you know, and I was angry at him, but he
Speaker 5: wasn't an evil person. He was a sick person. So
Speaker 5: it's also a jumping off place for me, you know,
Speaker 5: I ended up putting my experience, in my insight and
Speaker 5: my you know, my unique viewpoint on all of this
Speaker 5: into this book that's going to be coming out next year.
Speaker 5: So if you want to read this book now, it'll
Speaker 5: give you an idea of you know, where I'm coming from. Absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 5: And it was it was very hard to write. It
Speaker 5: took me nineteen years to finally finish it. But after
Speaker 5: I finished watching this trial, I was able to finally
Speaker 5: finish it. But I spoke at a domestic violence fundraising
Speaker 5: event and I gave a speech about it, and for
Speaker 5: the first time, I basically admitted that I was a
Speaker 5: do mystic violence survivor, and that was a very hard
Speaker 5: thing to admit. And then I would watched the trial
Speaker 5: and then I was able to finally finish this book.
Speaker 4: It seems all of your personal and professional experiences have
Speaker 4: informed your incredible true crime storytelling.
Speaker 5: Yes, absolutely absolutely. And I was a psychology major at Berkeley,
Speaker 5: so I was actually help to be a therapist. But
Speaker 5: I just decided, you know what, I don't want to
Speaker 5: I don't want to live with this in my life
Speaker 5: every day, with these crazy people. And then look what happened.
Speaker 5: I'm doing it. I'm just doing it as a writer
Speaker 5: instead of as a therapist. But you know, I have
Speaker 5: to interview all these people, all these traumatized family members,
Speaker 5: and it's, you know, it's not an easy job what
Speaker 5: I have to do. You know, it's it's pretty hard,
Speaker 5: and there's a lot of people who get upset. You know.
Speaker 5: It's like I always try to be really sensitive to everybody,
Speaker 5: but people, you know, they feel wrongly acute, used, or
Speaker 5: they have lost someone and they feel like you're trying
Speaker 5: to profit off their tragedy and it's their story, not
Speaker 5: your story. And you know, there's a lot of you know,
Speaker 5: and I'm not I'm trying to help educate people. And
Speaker 5: I honestly don't make very much money. That's why I'm
Speaker 5: also a writing coach, and I also do TV commentator work,
Speaker 5: and you know, I do not make enough money off
Speaker 5: these books for much of anything. So people can think
Speaker 5: that I'm making a lot of money off it, but
Speaker 5: I'm not.
Speaker 4: So no. I think many authors have seen that, especially
Speaker 4: with cases where well almost every case is going to
Speaker 4: inflict incredible pain on family members. So you're going to
Speaker 4: see family members are never going to be objective obviously,
Speaker 4: and those are the people going to lash out. There
Speaker 4: might be people surrounding those people just don't understand. I
Speaker 4: remember that ten years ago people had different attitudes towards
Speaker 4: true crime in general. If you were interested in true crime,
Speaker 4: you might be weird. So you know, there's a there's
Speaker 4: a shift. And I think what you present and some
Speaker 4: other authors are are not prepared to be able to
Speaker 4: do that, is be be empathetic towards that subject. Yea.
Speaker 4: And they're not not goal for the sensationalistic perspective.
Speaker 5: Right and and I actually the weird thing about that
Speaker 5: is I still get a tag for that sometimes. I
Speaker 5: mean a lot of people like that about my writing,
Speaker 5: which is, you know, I you know, I try to
Speaker 5: be I try to humanize people and I don't just
Speaker 5: say all that person's evil. And you know, I just
Speaker 5: was reading something today where they're like, they're evil, it's evil.
Speaker 5: How did it feel being like, you know, locked in
Speaker 5: a cage with Skylar? Could you feel the it's it's
Speaker 5: she called yea an it nobody's an. It's still a person.
Speaker 5: Whether you like what they've done or not, there's still
Speaker 5: a person. You can still understand them. And I think
Speaker 5: that's where we are with this pandemic. It's like, you know,
Speaker 5: we all want we all were so divisive and and
Speaker 5: you know it's I mean, I'm angry too at the
Speaker 5: people who aren't wearing masks. I'm angry about it. It
Speaker 5: makes me mad to walk around outside because I feel
Speaker 5: like they're not doing what they should to protect me
Speaker 5: and to protect other people. And the longer that they
Speaker 5: don't wear a mask, the longer I have to stay
Speaker 5: in my house, which I'm not happy about. But you
Speaker 5: have to try to understand why people act the way
Speaker 5: they do. So that's pretty much what I spend my
Speaker 5: career doing, is trying to understand why people act the
Speaker 5: way they do, what made them like that, maybe I
Speaker 5: can sympathize or empathize more. And sometimes it's hard. Sometimes
Speaker 5: it's really hard. But and you know, and people lash
Speaker 5: out at me and they don't even know what I'm writing,
Speaker 5: but they make these wrong assumptions about what kind of
Speaker 5: book I'm going to write, and you know, they haven't
Speaker 5: read it. It's not out, but they've decided that they're
Speaker 5: going to lash out at me and harass me. And
Speaker 5: it's not fun. You know, I have that going on
Speaker 5: right now as a matter of fact, and I've had
Speaker 5: to report it to the police, and it's it's really
Speaker 5: not fun. It's not pleasant. I'm just trying to do
Speaker 5: my job and it's unfortunate that people, you know, my
Speaker 5: partner always says, well, this is your choice. You know,
Speaker 5: you chose to write true crime. And I'm like, well,
Speaker 5: it kind of chose me. I don't know that, Rebecca,
Speaker 5: how case chose me. Honestly, I did not go out
Speaker 5: and you know, work real hard to go get it.
Speaker 5: I had people come to me and bring me stuff.
Speaker 5: That's basically what happened. And I couldn't not do it
Speaker 5: because of what happened with my husband. I just felt
Speaker 5: like compelled to try to figure out this mystery of
Speaker 5: what really happened.
Speaker 4: So well, I mean, it just comes with your success
Speaker 4: that you're going to get some criticism from some people.
Speaker 4: You are touching people in the right way, I mean,
Speaker 4: you're also rubbing people the wrong way.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 4: Regardless of what you do, you have to have your
Speaker 4: sense of what your journalistic integrity is and your standards,
Speaker 4: and and that is really what's under attack all the
Speaker 4: time anyway. Is journalism good journalism, you know, solid journalism, true,
Speaker 4: the truth, rather than looking for what people might want
Speaker 4: you to say. So there's a fair amount of that.
Speaker 4: We didn't get to discussing some of the books that
Speaker 4: you've co authored, like Hunting Charles Manson, Deadly Devotion, we
Speaker 4: touched on Twisted Triangle. But for those that want to
Speaker 4: check out all of the books that you have, you
Speaker 4: have an excellent website. Can you tell us about the website?
Speaker 4: And also they could go to Amazon and check out
Speaker 4: the books you have, But tell us about your website.
Speaker 5: Okay, it's Caitlin Rother dot com and there's plenty. It's
Speaker 5: like a destination website. I worked on it for three
Speaker 5: months last year and rebuilt the whole thing and it's
Speaker 5: got a lot of different pictures and podcasts and interviews,
Speaker 5: and you know, all my books are listed on there,
Speaker 5: and I have an inventory at my house. I'm basically
Speaker 5: kind of a I sell books here out of my house,
Speaker 5: which is nice. During the pandemic, you know, it's hard
Speaker 5: to get books these days from like Amazon is out
Speaker 5: of a lot of stuff, and you know a lot
Speaker 5: of these other bookstores are still closed and some are
Speaker 5: doing online stuff. But if anybody wants any of these books,
Speaker 5: they should contact me. It's not going to work in
Speaker 5: Canada because the postage makes it prohibit cost prohibitive. But
Speaker 5: if you live in the United States and you want
Speaker 5: to sign copy, and I've got plenty at home, even
Speaker 5: if they're out of print. But one did we talk
Speaker 5: about Naked Addiction only a little bit. I just wanted
Speaker 5: to just say Naked Addiction was my baby, and I
Speaker 5: want people who read true crime to give it a shot,
Speaker 5: because I've actually had some people who read true crime
Speaker 5: and they're like, I don't read crime fiction, and then
Speaker 5: every once in a while I'll get one to read
Speaker 5: one and they're like, you know, I normally wouldn't read this,
Speaker 5: but I really like this book. So I would encourage people,
Speaker 5: if you like my true crime books, to try reading
Speaker 5: my crime novel, because even though it isn't based on
Speaker 5: any specific murder, it is based on parts of my
Speaker 5: own experience, in my own life and these characters. You know,
Speaker 5: there's addiction and mental illness in it, and there's suicide
Speaker 5: in it, and all the stuff that actually happened in
Speaker 5: my life or in cases I've written about, they showed
Speaker 5: up in this book before I published any of them.
Speaker 5: So I just think it's kind of an interesting when
Speaker 5: we're doing a retrospective because it was the first book
Speaker 5: that I ever wrote. I think if anybody's interested in
Speaker 5: kind of going back, they want to read my memoir
Speaker 5: and they want to read Naked Addiction. Those are kind
Speaker 5: of the bookends of my career and who I am
Speaker 5: as a writer and as a person.
Speaker 4: Yes, absolutely, I want to thank you very much, Kaitlyn
Speaker 4: Rother for this Caitlin Rother True Crime Retrospective. It's been
Speaker 4: an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much, Caitlin, And I
Speaker 4: know I'll be speaking to you again real soon.
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, thank you, Dan. This was a really this
Speaker 5: was I was looking forward to this. It's been Actually
Speaker 5: it's fun going back down, you know, through all of this,
Speaker 5: because it's it's interesting to kind of look back and go, yeah,
Speaker 5: all of these different cases have brought me to this
Speaker 5: place now, and I'm trying to figure out, you know,
Speaker 5: do I want to write a novel next? Do I
Speaker 5: want to write? I mean, because this whole pandemic thing
Speaker 5: has thrown everything off. You can't write, It's so hard,
Speaker 5: how do you make anything up? At this point, it's
Speaker 5: just so unbelievable. Where we are so and do you
Speaker 5: want to write hard stuff? You know, do you want
Speaker 5: do people want something real or do they not want
Speaker 5: something real right now? So anyway, yes, thank you so much.
Speaker 5: I really I enjoy it and hopefully we'll talk about
Speaker 5: the next one sometime soon.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, thank you very much, Caitlin rothis You're welcome.
Speaker 5: Great right by bye,