True crime author Ann Rule gets to know the kind of people most of us hope we’ll never meet. The long-time chronicler of murders most foul is fascinated with the personalities of those who kill as a matter of choice.

Early in her career, the author got a close-up glimpse of one such frightening character. When Rule was just getting started as a crime writer in the early ’70s, she worked at a Seattle crisis clinic with the soon-to-be-revealed serial killer Ted Bundy. In the decades since that coincidental meeting, Rule has become America’s top true crime writer, with 16 best-selling books to her credit.

In her latest study, Every Breath You Take, she descends into the twisted mind of Allen Blackthorne, the handsome, brilliant and self-made (right down to renaming himself) multimillionaire who instigated the 1997 killing of his former wife, Sheila Bellush. After years of threats and terror, Sheila was shot and slashed to death in front of her two-year-old quadruplets. Blackthorne was convicted of her murder in July 2000 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

"I’m always looking for the protagonist who appears to have everything in the world," Rule said recently from her home in Washington state. "The rest of us think, boy, if I were handsome or pretty and smart and charming and wealthy and popular and had love, why wouldn’t I be happy? But these people never get enough. And, in the end, many of them will kill to get what they want. If I find the right person who looks good, but under that façade is basically evil, the book’s very easy to write. I just kind of follow along with the action."

But Rule doesn’t rely on action alone to propel her stories. She also delves into the family histories of her principal characters, trying to discover why they act as they do. "When I was a little kid and my grandpa was a sheriff in Michigan," Rule says, "I was allowed to go up in the cells and visit with the women prisoners. They just looked so nice. I was always asking my grandfather, ‘Why would they want to grow up and be a criminal?’ The why of murder always fascinates me so much more than the how. I wanted to understand the psychopathology, why some people would grow up to be criminals. I found that if you can follow the family pathology back, often there are clues."

With a degree of foreboding that is chilling to contemplate, the victim in Every Breath You Take chose Rule to be her voice from the grave long before she was murdered. "Kerry Bladhorn, who is Sheila Bellush’s sister, sent me an e-mail [in February 2000] and said, ‘I’m going to try one more time to find you.’ She told me that her sister, when she got divorced 10 years earlier from Allen, had said, ‘If anything ever happens to me, please have it investigated.’ And then she said, ‘Promise you’ll find Ann Rule and ask her to write my story.’"

Rule concedes that her book would have been derailed had Blackthorne been found not guilty. "It’s always a gamble for me," she explains, "because if someone is acquitted at trial — and I try to be at every session of the trial — I really could not write about it. They could say that I was invading their privacy."

Beyond the common trait of guilt, Rule says the criminals she writes about share other similarities: "I think the lack of empathy is the first thing. . . . All of them, I would say, have deeply entrenched personality disorders. In their minds, the world revolves around them, and the rest of us are one-dimensional paper-doll figures who are put on earth to make them happy. I don’t think they attribute the feelings to us that they have themselves. It doesn’t really matter who they hurt. Yet they’re all chameleons. They fool us. They give us back whatever we might want from them, if it suits their purposes."

Rule says her authoring chores have evolved into a fairly predictable pattern: "I’m always working on three

in a sense. I’m publicizing the book that’s done. I’m writing the book that’s in the hopper, and I’m doing a little advance research on the book to come. I don’t write on two books at a time. I may stop to do an article or two in the midst of a book, but I get so immersed with the characters involved that it’s awfully hard to pull me away."

Her next book will be about Anthony Pignataro, the plastic surgeon from Buffalo, New York, who poisoned his "faithful wife of 20 years," albeit not fatally. "It took her a very long time to even believe that this man she’d always stood beside would do that to her," Rule says. "I’m going to tell the story from her viewpoint."

Beyond telling good and true stories, Rule has a more basic agenda. "The thing I hope to do, although I know it’s impossible, is put myself out of business," she says. "I want to warn potential victims. Many of them are women, and many of them are battered women. It’s a cause for me. When I look back, though, so many of the books I’ve written are about wives who just couldn’t get away. But I’ve heard from probably a dozen or more women who’ve said, ‘I’d be dead if it wasn’t for something I read in one of your books.’ That makes me feel so good."

Thanks to the public nature of trials and the media interest in them, even the most heinous killers get to tell their story. Rule believes their victims should be heard, too. "I always want to give the victim a voice," she concludes. "One of my main tasks is to let the reader know the extent of the loss and what might have been if this person had been allowed to live."

Edward Morris writes on books and music from Nashville.

Except for newcomers, almost everyone in Nashville instantly recognizes the name “Marcia Trimble.” The nine-year-old disappeared from her Green Hills neighborhood one winter evening in 1975 when she was out delivering Girl Scout cookies. Two months later, on Easter Sunday, her body was found a few hundred yards away in a neighbor’s garage.

It was a crime that horrified and forever changed a city where children had freely roamed their suburban neighborhoods without fear. The effort to catch Marcia’s killer would span more than 30 years and take the Nashville Police Department down many wrong paths, with several young men falsely suspected and one even arrested for the crime (though never indicted).

Nashville authors Douglas Jones and Phyllis Gobbell take readers through every step of the crime and the decades-long search for justice in their new book, A Season of Darkness. The co-authors recently answered questions from BookPage about the facts of the case and their collaborative effort to tell this riveting story.

For people outside the Nashville area who aren’t familiar with the Marcia Trimble case, how would you describe the impact this crime had on the local community?
PHYLLIS GOBBELL: We’ve heard it said many times: With the murder of Marcia Trimble, Nashville lost its innocence. And it is so true. The Green Hills neighborhood where Marcia lived was a microcosm of the city. Children played freely in the yards and streets, went in and out of neighbors’ houses, and returned home when the streetlights came on. During the day, doors stayed unlocked. Neighbors watched out for each other. It was a gentle time, and Nashville seemed insulated from many of the harsh, violent events of the world. This shocking crime ushered in a new era, where the entire city realized what could happen, just across the street.

One of the most unusual aspects of the Marcia Trimble murder is that the case was solved more than 30 years after her death. What do you see as the definitive factor in finding her killer?
DOUGLAS JONES: Cold Case Detective Bill Pridemore’s excellent investigative work was the reason this case was broken. Pridemore maintained an open mind and rejected 30 years of faulty police work that had created a mindset focused on one individual. Pridemore re-examined every lead and uncovered new ones. By being open-minded and a professional, he refused to accept the bogus assumptions of the Nashville Police Department homicide detectives. Pridemore was then able to crack the case.

Additionally, Deputy District Attorney General Tom Thurman had the insight, experience, and courage to try the 30-year-old case against Jerome Barrett. Thurman went in to the trial knowing that it would be very difficult to locate witnesses. He tried an excellent case, which led to Barrett’s conviction. Tom Thurman is one of the best district attorneys not only in Tennessee but also in the country.

You packed many fascinating details into every scene, giving readers a real “you were there” feeling as they read A Season of Darkness. How did you uncover this kind of detail about events that transpired more than 30 years ago?
JONES: Truman Capote in his landmark In Cold Blood painted the picture of Holcomb, Kansas, and the savage murder of the Clutter family. To paint the picture of Green Hills and Nashville in 1975, we had to capture the details of the time. This process was based upon reviewing articles and interviews done in 1975, as well as interviewing as many people as possible who were involved in the case. We also reviewed court files and records in detail. Additionally, I have practiced law in Nashville for 35 years, and I have a number of contacts and friends in law enforcement. This was invaluable in understanding and explaining the mystery.

You write about a lot about “what if’s”—missed opportunities in the investigation to find Marcia’s killer. Do you think the culture in the police department contributed to these wrong turns in the case?
JONES: Absolutely. In our research of the culture in the police department, we found that in 1975, the Nashville homicide detectives were known for wearing flashy suits and jewelry. They were determined to crack the Trimble case and get the limelight. In the book, they are referred to as “cowboys.” Because she was a woman, Detective Diane Vaughn’s productive work was ignored by the cowboy detectives. It was simple and easy to lock in on one suspect. They would continue to focus on the same suspect for the next 30 years.

In the years after Marcia’s death, several young men were wrongly targeted in the investigation and one was even arrested, though never indicted. Ultimately, do you think this case represents justice served, or justice gone wrong?
GOBBELL: If I were the parent of one of those young men, there’s no doubt that I’d focus on the mistakes made in the investigation. As Deputy D.A. Thurman pointed out after the trial, “there were a lot of victims” in this case. Justice was a long time coming, but I believe in the end justice was served when DNA analysis matched evidence on Marcia’s clothing with her killer’s DNA.

As you did your research and wrote the book, did you find any lesser-known characters in the story who really stood out?
JONES: Yes. Detective Diane Vaughn. Diane Vaughn was from Alpine, a remote village in Overton County, Tennessee. In 1967, she applied to be a police officer with the Nashville Police Department. Two years later, she was hired. She worked hard and after several years was promoted to detective. As a female detective, she was assigned the “dirty cases”’—rapes and murders of prostitutes— that the “cowboys” in the homicide division refused to work. But Diane Vaughn solved many of these cases and gradually built up a reputation and credibility in the department. Vaughn’s tenacious and professional investigation led to Jerome Barrett’s conviction in the case of the rape of Belmont coed Judy Porter. Vaughan was the first Nashville detective to link Barrett to the string of rapes and murders in Nashville in February 1975. Diane Vaughn died in 1994, never knowing her work would ultimately lead to Barrett’s conviction in the Marcia Trimble murder case.

Tell us one thing you were surprised to learn about Jerome Barrett, the man convicted of Marcia’s murder.
JONES:Jerome Barrett was an extremely dangerous man. The Vietnam vet had lived off the streets of Memphis making a living fighting barefisted for cash. In Memphis, he was a prime suspect in a number of assaults, rapes and homicides. After Barrett was captured he confessed to police that he was constantly on the prowl looking for an open door or unlocked window. Barrett spent years in prison for convictions of aggravated rape. A number of tough, hardened inmates that were assigned to be Barrett’s cellmate begged various wardens for transfers because they were deathly afraid of the man.

If a murder like Marcia’s happened today, how would the case be handled differently?
GOBBELL: I was surprised to learn that in 1975, individual detectives kept the case files. There was no central database. With today’s technology, the investigation would be entirely different. Via computer, information would be available to all involved in the search or the homicide. Had that happened, the link between Marcia’s murder and the other crimes for which her killer was charged would surely come to light quickly.  

You’ve said that the Marcia Trimble case is a sad story, any way you slice it. As you think about the overall series of events, what strikes you as the single saddest moment of this 30-year ordeal?
GOBBELL: This is a hard one because there are so many sad moments—some that aren’t actually dramatic, but they still break your heart, like Virginia Trimble [Marcia’s mother] standing under the streetlight, calling for Marcia. The Trimble family coming home from church on Easter Sunday and being met by their friend, Detective Sherman Nickens, who delivered the news that Marcia’s body had been found—that was an unbearably sad moment. When the word spread across Nashville, it was as if the city suddenly fell under a dark cloud.

What is the one element of Marcia Trimble’s murder that still puzzles you or keeps you lying awake at night?
JONES: Marcia Trimble left her parents’ house around 5:30 p.m. on the evening of February 25, 1975. By 7:00 p.m., the police department was actively working the missing person’s case.

On February 26, 1975, around noon, the Nashville Police Department received a phone call from a Tennessee State Trooper in West Tennessee advising them that they had pulled over a white Chevrolet driven by a Phillip A. Wilson, who was a Black Muslim in Nashville. The state trooper wanted someone from Youth Guidance to advise him because the previous night, during the extensive search, the Nashville Police Department sent out a BOLO (to be on the lookout) for this vehicle “wanted for kidnapping.” The police couldn’t determine who sent the BOLO, so Mr. Wilson was allowed to drive away.

To this day, this mystery has never been cleared up and questions about the incident abound, including the question of whether Jerome Barrett was inside the vehicle that was stopped the day after Marcia’s disappearance.

Publishing trends come and go but true crime remains a popular genre. Why do you think readers are attracted to true crime stories?
GOBBELL: I think the main attraction is that we like to see the worst offenders caught and punished for their deeds, which is often the outcome in a true crime story. The complexities of investigations keep readers turning the pages. True crime books add depth to stories that may have made the news and show the many dimensions of the people involved. And it’s a cliché, but truth is often stranger than fiction.

You’ve probably never heard of Thad Roberts, the brilliant young NASA recruit who pulled off one of the most audacious heists in history when he tiptoed out of the Johnson Space Center one rainy Texas night in 2003 with a 600-pound safe containing $20 million in moon rocks.

Even Ben Mezrich, the gonzo-inspired biographer of Ivy League geeks (Bringing Down the House), drew a blank when Roberts called him out of the blue following an eight-year prison sentence. Mezrich fields hundreds of such calls these days, thanks in part to the success of the Oscar-nominated film The Social Network, based on his bestseller about the founding of Facebook, The Accidental Billionaires.

“Everyone who does something kind of crazy calls me, so I get like 10 of these a day and 99 percent of the time it isn’t something I can use,” Mezrich says by phone from Boston. “But this one was different.”

If Mezrich’s hunch is correct, you will recognize Thad Roberts from the talk show circuit by summer’s end and, despite yourself, you’ll either love him or hate him, all because of Sex on the Moon, Mezrich’s stranger-than-fiction, true-life thriller of a man who went where no man has gone before.

For a participatory journalist like Mezrich, who describes himself as “Hunter S. Thompson without the guns, alcohol and drugs,” the Roberts story ticked all the boxes: a charismatic dreamer with a troubled past, a Romeo-and-Juliet love story, a geek-alicious high-tech setting, an ingenious Oceans 11-style heist—and perhaps the most boneheaded mistake any man ever made to impress a girl.

Even better, it was a journalist’s Holy Grail: a truly uncovered story.

“It was completely covered up; there was nothing on it,” Mezrich says. “NASA never wanted this story to get out. In prison, Thad was basically strong-armed not to talk about it. Nobody knew the story.”

It goes like this: Roberts, a working-class Mormon, is ostracized by his parents for having premarital sex. He and his girlfriend soon marry and plunge deep into debt while Thad, a triple major in physics, geology and anthropology, studies hard to earn a spot as a NASA co-op, essentially an astronaut intern. Once at Johnson Space Center, Roberts reinvents himself from loser to winner by daring to take risks, thus becoming a leader of the co-ops.

Thad’s marriage is on shaky ground when he catches a glimpse of a cache of invaluable moon rocks, now considered waste by NASA because they’ve been contaminated by scientific study, and soon becomes obsessed. When a risk-taking new co-op captures his heart, the two cook up a scheme with a third ally to steal the lunar samples, sell them to a collector in Antwerp, Belgium, for $100,000, and disappear into private research.

Unfortunately for Thad, the buyer is well aware that it is illegal to traffic in moon rocks and tips the FBI to the scheme. The night before they’re busted, the daring couple spend the night in an Orlando hotel room with lunar samples from Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 moon walk tucked under their mattress—hence the book’s intriguing title.

Mezrich didn’t know what to expect when he met Roberts in a Utah hotel lobby near where Roberts is now completing his Ph.D.

“First of all, the kid’s a genius, absolutely a genius,” Mezrich says. “He was this charismatic, incredibly smart guy and he had done something incredibly stupid out of love. What was interesting was how complex his personality was. He wasn’t just this guy who stole something to make money; he was on his way to being an astronaut, to achieving his dream. That made him different from all of the other characters I’d written about.”

Mezrich spent months obtaining the voluminous FBI file on the case through the Freedom of Information Act, including transcripts of conversations by wired FBI undercover agents that add authenticity to much of the dialogue.

“When you’re interviewing a guy like this, your first question is, how much of this is true?” he says. “Thad felt his sentence was very harsh, that he was very unfairly characterized by the FBI and others. He did steal a 600-pound safe full of moon rocks, but at the same time, they got them back. For him, it was almost like a college prank. But NASA didn’t look at it that way at all.”

True to his gonzo ethos, Mezrich managed to tour NASA with remote help from Roberts. “They didn’t know I was writing the book and I got this Level 9 tour,” he recalls. “While I was walking around NASA, I was texting back and forth with Thad and he’d be like, ‘Now go to the back of the room, there’s a door there, go through that door, take a left, that’s the room! ’ So I got to see everything with him guiding me.”

Mezrich received pushback from NASA, which labeled him persona non grata at the Johnson Space Center. The women involved shut him out as well, having moved on with their lives. It will be no surprise to the author if critics lodge their usual objections to the way he reinvents dialogue and weaves whole cloth from random threads of speculation. He’s used to controversy, he says. It comes with the territory. It’s not bad for sales either.

“There are always going to be a million articles about the form of nonfiction that I write,” he says. “But I’m very clear up front [about] exactly what I’m going to do and how I’m going to do it. This story follows very closely with the facts. It’s written like a thriller but it’s very, very true.”

Will readers embrace Roberts?

“He’s an interesting guy,” Mezrich says. “I think when he starts going on TV, people are going to be fascinated by him. Some will think he’s awful and he’s a thief; others are going to see him as a romantic character. I think he’s somewhere in the middle.”

Once sleepy Austin, Texas, was beginning to boom in the late 19th-century when a series of brutal murders rocked the town. The crimes were so vicious that when Jack the Ripper started his notorious murder spree in London, some in Austin wondered whether the Texas killer had moved abroad.

Skip Hollandsworth, executive editor of Texas Monthly and an award-winning crime writer, became fascinated by the still-unsolved Austin case and reveals the details of his research in The Midnight Assassin. We contacted the author at his home in Texas to find out more about this intriguing true-crime narrative.

This story is not widely known. How did you come across it?
Actually, there have been a handful of amateur historians who have been researching the case, hoping to find the killer. Eighteen years ago, one of those researchers, an Austin schoolteacher hoping to write a novel about the killings, generously shared with me a couple of newspaper articles she had come across, and it wasn’t long before I was on the hunt, too.

Austin was in full flower when these killings began. How big a part did the desire to avoid bad publicity play in slowing the investigations?
A lot. Austin’s mayor prided himself on its “booming”—exuberant civic promotion in order to draw in more residents. And Austin at the time was changing, in the words of one newspaper reporter, “as quickly as the turn of a a kaleidoscope.” It was transforming itself from a frontier town into a modern, Gilded-Age city, complete with telephone and electric lights. The last thing Austin civic leaders wanted were headlines about mysterious murders.

What surprised you most in your research?
What didn’t surprise me? Let’s start with the diabolical way the murders were carried out, the ingenuity of the killer in escaping detection time after time, and the fact that for nearly a year, none of the authorities could wrap their arms around the idea that one man was behind it all. The killings also set off a huge political scandal that probably changed the outcome of the governor’s race. There was one criminal trial of a suspect—the prominent husband of one of the white victims—that became the O.J. Simpson trial of its day, complete with a dream team of Austin defense attorneys.

Did writing this book leave you with any impressions about what inspires serial killers?
I think the reason the Midnight Assassin is so fascinating is because we have no idea what inspired him, just as we usually have no idea what inspires serial killers today. Why did the Midnight Assassin want to attack women in a ritualistic way, leaving their mutilated bodies on display like works of art, and then disappearing into the night? It’s a haunting question.

It’s unusual to find humor in a book about a serial killer, but the “detectives” trading on the Pinkerton name were funny. Were you concerned about including levity in the story?
Not at all—and talk about surprises. At the height of the citywide panic, the great Pinkerton detectives arrive from Chicago to solve the murders, and it turns out they are frauds. It was such an unexpected twist in the story that I couldn’t help but laugh.

The press was breathless in its coverage of the crimes but seemed to support the view that a gang of black men (or Frankenstein) were committing the murders. Does the media do any better today in its coverage of sensational crimes?
I’m not sure. I do know that if this happened today, the media would be all over this story after the second murder had taken place. Reporters would be coming into Austin from around the country. And their reports would probably be more breathless, setting off public fear by proclaiming that a serial killer was running amok.

Can you point out some of the differences in how these crimes were investigated versus today’s procedures?
In 1885, there was no such thing as a CSI unit. The science of criminology did not exist. Fingerprinting had not been invented. Neither had blood typing. Of course, there was no such thing as DNA evidence. And cops did not yet understand that hairs found on a victim might provide clues to the identity of the killer. Outside of an eyewitness, the best tool the cops had was bloodhounds. They were brought to a murder scene, where they sniffed around, hoping to find a scent to follow. But in the Austin killings, the bloodhounds found nothing.

Did you ever feel close to a viable suspect while writing? Do you think the book might bring the case to a conclusion?
Throughout the writing of the book, I would wonder, Could it be this man? Or that man? Is the killer a barefoot chicken thief? Or is he a famous politician? Is he a Malaysian cook who disappeared suddenly just after the last set of killings? Or is he well-known young doctor who worked at the state lunatic asylum? The answer has got to be out there somewhere—in an old musty record in a police department filing cabinet, or in a letter hidden away in someone’s attic. Maybe this book will lead to the answer. But then again, maybe not. After all, this killer was unlike anyone ever before seen—a brilliant, cunning monster who set off a citywide panic, and then disappeared forever.

Author photo by Laura Wilson.
 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Midnight Assassin.

Patty Hearst? Jeffrey Toobin was skeptical when his Doubleday editor suggested writing about the sensational 1970s kidnapping saga that Toobin would eventually recount in riveting detail in American Heiress.

“The first thought that came to me was that there must be a million books about Patty Hearst,” Toobin says during a call that reaches him in Washington, D.C. Toobin, whose bestsellers include The Oath and The Nine, is a staff writer for The New Yorker and senior legal analyst at CNN. His wife is an assistant secretary of education in the Obama administration. Their two children are recently out of college and on their own, so as an empty-nester, Toobin says his work is portable. Although he has offices at both The New Yorker and CNN, his real desk, he says, is the dining room table in their apartment in New York City—or his laptop just about anywhere.

To his surprise, when he looked into the Patty Hearst case, he found that “nothing had been written about it for decades. For decades! I was a young teenager when it happened, so I was vaguely aware of it but not really following it. Just a bit of preliminary research suggested that it was an amazing story that had not been told in any detail.”

For those who don’t remember, on February 4, 1974, Patricia (or “Patty,” as she disliked being called) Hearst, a 19-year-old U.C. Berkeley student and the granddaughter of media magnate William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by a shadowy group of revolutionaries known as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Two months later, Hearst publicly declared she had joined the SLA and taken the nom de guerre “Tania.” She appeared heavily armed on a videotape taken during a bank robbery in San Francisco. Months later, she and fellow SLA members Bill and Emily Harris were out buying supplies when police surrounded the SLA’s Los Angeles hideout. A fiery shootout, the first such news event to be broadcast live nationwide, left all the SLA members at the house dead.

Over the next year, Hearst and the Harrises joined with others, including Kathleen Soliah and her brother, Steve, and continued their revolutionary crime wave with bank robberies and bombings. Hearst was finally captured in September 1975, but the drama continued during her trial on bank robbery charges, where she was defended by the blustery F. Lee Bailey.

With great clarity, Toobin takes readers through all the perplexing twists and turns of the SLA’s misadventures. The SLA, for example, was led by a plum-wine-drinking escaped convict named Donald DeFreeze. His leadership was tactically proficient but strategically hapless, almost comically so.

“There was an element of theater to what they did,” Toobin says. “Guerilla theater can be effective. But every time you think of the work of the SLA, it’s imperative to remember Marcus Foster and -Myrna Opsahl [two victims of the SLA’s murderous rampage]. That quickly takes their behavior out of the realm of funny. . . . DeFreeze attracted a small cross section of an extreme of the counterculture.”

Toobin excels in giving readers a sense of 1970s-era counterculture, the petri dish in which the SLA  was spawned. “One of the things that I found so fascinating researching this book was how insane the ’70s were. I mean, there were dozens of bombings in Northern California alone. Can you imagine what cable news would be doing with dozens of bombings?”

Two big research scores allowed Toobin to add texture, detail and a sense of the complex interpersonal dramas that play out in his narrative. After Bill Harris was released from prison, Harris collected all the material about the case he could get his hands on—court documents, FBI files, private investigators’ notes. Toobin found out about the materials while interviewing Harris and arranged to purchase what turned out to be 150 boxes of documents. “For a journalist/historian looking at the era, this was a gold mine,” he says. Even more interesting was the acquisition of the jailhouse love letters exchanged by Hearst and Steve Soliah. Passed through their lawyers so they remained protected by attorney-client privilege, the letters speak loudly about Hearst’s state of mind after her arrest. 

And Hearst’s state of mind is a central question of the book and was the question at her trial. Toobin offers a balanced portrait that is surprisingly complimentary of her courage and strength. And in some ways he believes her behavior was entirely rational given the circumstances.

“One of my goals in portraying anyone is complexity,” Toobin explains. “People are not one-dimensional. Their behavior is not accurately defined in black and white. I think that is especially true for Patricia. She was kidnapped, and it was a horrible experience. But she also was a willing participant in a lengthy and extensive crime wave, long after she had the opportunity to walk away. I certainly understood why the jury in her trial convicted her. And frankly, she was fortunate that she was not prosecuted for the other two bank robberies that she participated in, or shooting up Mel’s Sporting Goods and setting off bombs in Northern California. That is very serious stuff. If you want to evaluate her conduct, you have to take all that into account.”

Toobin’s portrait of Hearst is nuanced enough that readers are likely to hold different opinions about the extent of her culpability when they reach the end of the book (just as people in the 1970s differed, often vigorously).

“I always thought this was bigger than just a legal story,” Toobin says at the end of our conversation. “It is really about this era and these people. It would have been a mistake to see Patricia Hearst’s experience as simply that was she guilty of a bank robbery. This is really about the question of who this woman was, why she got involved with this craziness, and how did this all happen.”

American Heiress offers compelling answers to these questions.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Traveling to Accomack County, Virginia, journalist Monica Hesse uncovers the complex triggers behind a pair of lovers’ five-month arson spree in the small, neglected town.

Accomack County Sheriff Todd Godwin told you he couldn't imagine anyone writing an interesting book about his county. But holy moly, the saga of Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick's five-month arson spree is like something straight out of Fargo, without the snow. How did your Washington Post feature, which later evolved into this book, originate? At what point did you realize you had enough material for a book?
I live in Washington, D.C., about four hours from Accomack. It’s close enough that the fires made the news here, at least occasionally. Every few weeks I’d see something about how the fires were piling up on the Eastern Shore. When Charlie and Tonya were finally arrested, I thought, “Huh, that’s interesting. You don’t see a lot of female arsonists. I wonder what happened there?” So I drove down to cover one of the first hearings, and it happened to be the one where Charlie talked about why he and Tonya had started lighting the fires to begin with. And then I thought, “Holy —-.”

You've written three novels for teenagers, one of which is called Burn, and your first nonfiction book is about arson. Have you ever witnessed an out-of-control fire? Did you see any with the Accomack County firefighters?
The Tasley firefighters, who I embedded with—they gave me my own pager and let me sleep in the firehouse—used to joke that I was a fire reseller. Every time I stayed over, the night would be quiet except for a fender bender or non-fire-related emergency call. It got to the point where I was feeling really ghoulish, because you obviously never want to wish for something to catch on fire, but at the same time, I really wanted to see the Accomack firefighters in action.

Accomack County is where the Misty of Chincoteague books originated. Did you read these as a child? How long did you spend in Accomack County researching this book? How does life there compare to life in Normal, Illinois, where you grew up?
I’d heard of the Misty books growing up, but they just never became favorites of mine. I didn’t reread them until after I started working on American Fire, when I was going through a blitz where I’d read anything remotely related to the Eastern Shore. I rented a house down in the county for two months, and then I probably made nine or 10 other shorter trips down there. Accomack is a little more rural than Normal, but a lot of things felt the same. The low, flat land and the fact that you can drive for ten minutes in any direction, and suddenly be in the middle of cornfields. The people, too: the fact that friendliness was a default. In Washington, D.C., you don’t wave to strangers you pass in other cars, but you do in Accomack, and you do where I’m from, too.

What was your most memorable experience while writing this book? Your biggest surprise?
I was really sure that Charlie Smith wasn’t going to want to talk to me for the book. He hadn’t talked to anyone else, and people had tried. But I wrote him a letter that I guess stuck with him, and one morning I’d just stepped out of the shower when I saw an unfamiliar number pop up on my cell phone. I picked up, and he just said, “This is Charlie, are you the girl who’s trying to write about me?” I was flying around my apartment in a bath towel, searching for something to write with; my notes from my first conversation with Charlie ended up being on a roll of paper towels. But that’s how this whole book went. I would have completely given up on someone talking to me, and then they’d come through at the most unexpected time.

Todd Godwin, the Sheriff, wouldn’t talk to me for months. He was the nicest guy about it, but completely gave me the brush off. Finally one day my mother said, “Have you brought him a pie?” I don’t make pies, but I do make banana bread, so I brought a loaf over to the Sheriff’s office. He laughed when he saw me; I’m sure it looked as desperate and pathetic as it was. But that’s how these things work. You have to earn trust, and be patient, and show people that you’re going to put in as much time as it takes to get their story right.

Your book notes that “[a]rson is a weird crime.” Did the arsons change the county in lasting ways? Do many of the burnt buildings still stand?
Oh, a lot of them. The fires burned some buildings to the ground, but others they only singed. I don’t think the arsons particularly changed the county—it’s not like nobody trusts each other anymore, just because there was a serial arsonist—except that there are some places that end up having particular and peculiar dates with destiny. You can’t think of Holcomb, Kansas, without thinking of it being the setting of In Cold Blood, for example. And that’s what the arsons did. They took a place that nobody was paying attention to and made it briefly famous.

Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick truly had, as Elvis would say, a "Burning Love." Each of them tell a very different story about who's responsible for these crimes. Will anyone but them ever know the truth? Do you know of any other arsonist couples?
I don’t think anyone but them will ever know. Which is part of what makes it so fascinating. I heard a writer once say that the best mysteries are ones that leave more questions than they answer, because the real mystery isn’t who does what, but why. To me, American Fire is a book about arsons, but it’s really a mystery about the unfathomableness of the human heart. I had a million theories for what really happened and why, and they would change every time I talked to a new person.

Do you have a favorite song about love and fire? Did you make a playlist as you wrote?
I’m one of those weird people who usually needs silence to write. But the house I was renting in Accomack had no television, no internet and no radio, and it was alone by itself at the end of a dirt road. I ended up needing some noise in the background, just so I wouldn’t jump out of my skin every time the house settled. I went to a flea market where a vendor was selling a boxed set of all the Harry Potter movies for 10 dollars, so I bought them, and then had them playing in the background the whole time I was down there. I don’t think I ever need to watch the Harry Potter movies again.

As for songs about fire and love: “Laid,” by James is oddly appropriate for this book, and it became more appropriate every time I heard it. Go listen!

What most surprised you when you spoke with Charlie and with Tonya?
How, even though they ended up having wildly different versions about what happened in their relationship, they both remembered and told me the same, odd little details about it. Like, how they would pass notes in the jail yard by pressing tiny pieces of paper between pieces of cutlery and burying them by the flagpole. It was obvious there had been a lot of love there at one point, and then it combusted. It made me so curious to try to understand what had happened.

As you wrote the book, Tonya refused any more interviews. What question would you most like to ask her? How does a person whose criminal record consists of stealing a box of Junior Mints from a grocery store in her late teens become a serial arsonist?
The things that I’d most want to learn about Tonya are things I don’t know that she’d ever talk about. It’s clear that she’s a proud, complex woman who doesn’t want to appear weak.

I have theories about her, which I didn’t put in the book because they were purely my own theories and it would have been irresponsible to print them for the larger public. So if she and I were going to have a truly honest conversation, I guess what I’d want is to be able to say, “This is what I’ve learned about you, and this is what I think happened. Did I get it right? Do I understand you?” It’s such a self-serving question, but that’s what I’d want to know. Did I come close to understanding you at all?

Can you imagine a movie about these Eastern Shore arsonists and the men and women who stopped them? Which actors can you envision playing Charlie and Tonya?
I’d always pictured someone like Sam Rockwell for Charlie. My agent told me she’d been picturing Channing Tatum—which was hilarious, that our brains had gone in such different directions. For Tonya, maybe someone like Jessica Chastain. I think she could have the right steeliness. The only character I can cast with certainty: the Tasley fire chief is a man named Jeff Beall, who made me swear up and down that if a movie was ever made I would do everything in my power to get Tom Selleck to play him. Tom Selleck, if you are reading this, call me.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of American Fire.

An excerpt of this article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kirk Wallace Johnson was fly-fishing in the frothy waters of a New Mexico river when his guide told him a whopper of a tale he could hardly believe. Be forewarned, once you start the book that was born from this moment, you’ll be just as hooked as Johnson was.

“This whole story kind of grabbed me by the throat,” Johnson recalls. “I still sometimes can’t believe that it really happened and that I was lucky enough to be able to write about it.” Speaking by phone from his home in Los Angeles, the likable, earnest author is discussing his highly improbable true crime story, The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century. The thief is flutist Edwin Rist, a talented young American with two great loves: music and the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying—creating elaborate artificial flies for use in fly-fishing.

One night in 2009, after performing at London’s Royal Academy of Music, the 20-year-old broke into one of the world’s largest ornithological collections, the Natural History Museum in Tring, England. For a fly tier like Rist, who lusted after exotic feathers, this museum was Fort Knox. He broke a window, climbed in and stuffed a suitcase full of 299 priceless and rare preserved bird specimens used for study and display. Some had been collected 150 years before by a contemporary of Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace.

Unbelievably, the theft wasn’t discovered for more than a month, and Rist wasn’t arrested until 507 days after his crime. What’s more, Rist never went to jail, receiving only a suspended sentence. Numerous specimens were never recovered; they were likely either sold on the black market or are still hidden somewhere.

“Part of what drove me into this madcap search was a sense that justice has been denied here, that [Rist] had gotten away with it,” Johnson admits. He spent years researching, interviewing and traveling to different countries, even creating what he calls a “ridiculously obsessive timeline” of Rist’s life. Johnson yearned for “some kind of dramatic moment where some suitcase would be opened up and I would find all of them—as improbable or naive as that is.”

The author certainly knows about justice, having founded a nonprofit in 2007 known as the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies and written To Be a Friend Is Fatal: The Fight to Save the Iraqis America Left Behind. “I still have these waves of guilt that I should only be doing refugee work,” Johnson says. “What an indulgence to go chase the feather thief around the world.”

Johnson discovered that Rist was something of a Victorian fly-tying savant, having fallen in love with the art at age 11, and by 2005 he and his younger brother were being hailed as “the future of fly-tying” by the editor of Fly Tyer magazine. Rist won numerous fly-tying competitions but wasn’t himself a fisherman. While many other fly tiers do not use expensive or exotic feathers, Rist’s particular type of fly-tying is an intricate art form that focuses on “a cult-like attention to detail” and the worship of expensive, often rare feathers.

“He would always just stay one step ahead of everyone else. Until he didn’t.”

“The vast majority of these guys not only don’t fish with them, they don’t even know how to fish with them,” Johnson explains. “It is just an aesthetic pursuit and obsession. One of the many absurdities in this whole story is that the salmon don’t know the difference. There’s no earthly reason why a salmon in Scotland should be attracted to a king bird-of-paradise feather from New Guinea. It doesn’t make any sense—they’re never going to meet.”

Even to this day, Johnson is still “a little shocked” that Rist went through with it. After visiting the Tring museum during normal hours, Rist first created a computer document titled “Plan for Museum Invasion.” At the time of the theft, he was hoping to buy a $20,000 golden flute. His history with the fly-tying community gave him the means to connect with potential buyers for the valuable exotic feathers. “The number of mental fail-safes that just malfunctioned here, where he would have talked himself out of this, is kind of staggering,” Johnson says.

As to why Rist succumbed to temptation, Johnson can only speculate: “I get the feeling that for most of his life Edwin has been the smartest person in the room. I think that he reasoned, How would anybody catch [me]? He would always just stay one step ahead of everyone else. Until he didn’t.”

Rist only received a veritable slap on the wrist with his suspended sentence, largely because the British court system believes he has Asperger’s syndrome. His reputation did suffer, yet he continues to work as a professional musician in Germany under a different name.

Surprisingly, Rist agreed to be interviewed for the book. In Düsseldorf, where Rist was living, he and Johnson talked for nearly eight hours, while Johnson’s wife manned several tape recorders.

“My wife, who is a lawyer by training, still asks this question: ‘Why on earth did he talk to you?’ ” Johnson says. “Because there really was no good to come of it. And there were moments in the interview when I could sense her lawyerly side kind of leaning forward to say, ‘Edwin, don’t answer.’ ”

But answer Rist did, steadfastly maintaining, “I am not a thief,” and claiming not to know the whereabouts of the still-missing bird skins.

The mystery of the missing specimens continues to haunt Johnson, who says, “Every now and then I’ll be at a red light, and I’ll be like, ah, does he still have 50 of these skins in his apartment?”

He adds, “My hope, to be honest, is that the book will summon others to the hunt.”

 

This article was originally published in the May 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Photo credit Josee Cantin Johnson

Casey Cep discusses her new book, Furious Hours, which explores the true case of an Alabama serial killer who fascinated Harper Lee.

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Harper Lee has obviously captured your imagination. What keeps you and so many others fascinated? Do you have any prized possessions related to Harper Lee or her writing?
I think some great works of literature are so widely read and so deeply embedded in a culture that they become a kind of secular scripture, helping us revisit and interrogate our shared values generation after generation. That’s what happened with To Kill a Mockingbird; if anything, the questions it raises about difference and tolerance have become more urgent as our society has become more diverse. I suppose that’s why, despite all the exciting things I uncovered in the course of reporting this book, my most prized possession is still the novel itself.

What was it like for you to first read To Kill a Mockingbird, or “The Bird,” as Lee called it? How old were you? Did you have any idea then how important the book would become in your life? Did publication of Go Set a Watchmen change your attitudes at all?
I first read To Kill a Mockingbird as a kid, and like a lot of tomboys, I identified strongly with Scout. She’s adventurous and brave, but also fiercely intelligent and bookish. My father isn’t a lawyer, but I love him dearly, and although I have two sisters rather than one brother, I was moved by the way that a sibling relationship is so integral to the plot. My parents indulged my love of Mockingbird so much that they got me a pocket watch that I carried around everywhere. If you’d told me all those years ago that I’d be publishing this book, I don’t think I would have believed you; I probably wouldn’t have even believed I’d get to write any book at all, much less one about Harper Lee.

If you could spend a day with Lee, what would you have liked to do? What questions would you ask her?
It’s hard to know whether it would be most revealing to spend a day with Harper Lee in New York or Alabama, the two places she called home, but if it’s Alabama, I’d want to go to church with her in the morning and then take her fishing. She was extremely astute about the role of religion and spirituality in Southern life, and I’d love to sit through a Sunday service with her, but she also loved fishing, and so do I, so then I’d demand that we head to the river to talk about it all. If we met up in New York instead, I’d want to do what she let almost no one do: visit her apartment on the Upper East Side and pore over every single book and scrap of paper inside it.

Why do you think Lee guarded her privacy so fiercely? What might Lee have thought of your book and your research about her?
This is such a central question to any consideration of Lee’s life and work. A lot of writers love publicity and enjoy the attention to their process and persona, but Lee was not one of them. She put up with a few years of interviews and profiles after Mockingbird came out, but then she stopped answering questions about her work. Some people are just private, but in Lee’s case that privacy was almost certainly fueled by her struggles with writing, which were in turn fueled by—and fueled—her struggles with perfectionism, addiction and identity. There’s a letter of hers I quote in the book in which she says, “Harper Lee thrives, but at the expense of Nelle,” and I found that notion of a split self to be heartbreaking. I doubt that Harper Lee would have been happy to know I was looking into her life, but I hope she would be pleased by the result: a book that takes her seriously as a writer and an intellectual.

The true crime story that Lee hoped to write―about Reverend Willie Maxwell, accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in Alabama in the 1970s―is a wild, convoluted and fascinating saga. What do you think most prevented Lee from completing her book? Was it because, as she noted, “I do not have enough hard facts about the actual crimes for a book-length account”?
It’s true that some of the facts of the Maxwell case were hard to come by, even back then, but plenty of great books have been made from a lot less, so I don’t think a shortage of information was the only thing stymieing Lee. In addition to her general struggles with writing, she also felt pressure from her agent to write something pulpy, from her publisher to produce a bestseller, and from her fans to produce another wholesome novel—incompatible goals that she never found a way to square with each other, let alone with her own vision for the book. I definitely worried at the start of Furious Hours that I was a fool for thinking I could write the book that Harper Lee never could, but then I realized I was writing the book she never would: a version of the Maxwell case that included her own story.

Did she confer with Truman Capote about the Reverend Maxwell story?
Certainly In Cold Blood must have been on her mind as she researched and wrote. Might worries about comparisons between the two stories have paralyzed her? One of the great losses to literary history is that, so far, no letters between Lee and Capote have ever been found. They almost certainly exchanged them—not only as children after he left Monroeville but when she first moved to New York and in all the decades that followed—but not a single one has turned up, so we don’t know what, if anything, they said to each other about the Maxwell case or anything else. Some other letters of hers reveal how critical she was of In Cold Blood, so she probably wouldn’t have been asking Capote for reporting advice, but I do think his book helped clarify for her what kind she wanted to write: one that stuck scrupulously to the facts. And there’s no doubt that her work on The Reverend would’ve brought back memories of their time together in Kansas and that, partly thanks to that time, she knew exactly what to do when she started reporting her own true crime project.

For all who love To Kill a Mockingbird so much, it’s heartbreaking that Lee didn’t publish more. She led a busy life, it seems, and an interesting one divided between Alabama and New York City. You write that she struggled with alcohol, and she seems to have had many lonely moments as well. Can you speculate whether she was happy? Did it bother her not to publish more?
I want to say first that lonely moments are a really interesting and possibly necessary experience for a writer. Good writing comes when a writer sets herself to the task of thinking carefully and quietly and often in solitude about some idea or problem. One can have friendships across great distances and nurture relationships without being in constant contact; that feels countercultural in a hyper-connected society like ours, but I don’t think that being alone, even for considerable amounts of time, and even sometimes at a certain psychic cost, is necessarily a problem. That said, such moments can obviously become too numerous or too costly, and someone very close to Harper Lee described the years that she was working on this true crime project as “dark times.” So she definitely did have periods in her life when her deep desire to produce art made her unhappy and encouraged her most destructive habits and tendencies. But her sisters and extended family tried hard to watch over her, and she had a few close friends in New York who helped companion her through these difficult periods. It’s also clear that, in ways I think few people really understand, Lee was a genuine intellectual, and her correspondence reveals a real delight in reading and thinking—gifts she brought to a small circle of friends and family even if she never again figured out how to share them with the wider world.

There are rumors that Lee kept a diary. Thoughts?
Don’t I wish! A few people told me that she did, but whenever I asked her family or close friends about the possibility, they laughed and then sighed. Those who knew Lee well scoffed at the idea that she would ever have written down her thoughts and feelings in a way that could one day be made public, but they also noted how therapeutic such an exercise in self-examination would have been for someone otherwise so resistant to introspection. I share that feeling, but I also wish that she’d kept a diary for posterity’s sake, or written her own memoirs, since there are so many questions about her life and work for which we’d all love to know the answers.

Has anyone (or anything) else caught your fancy as much as Lee? Are you tracking down any other literary mysteries or recluses?
This is such a lovely way of asking the question of what comes next but also such a keen way of describing Furious Hours. It’s a book that, like its author, is obsessed with mystery and secrecy and the knowability or unknowability of any given person, event or idea. That said, I’m also obsessed with suspense, so I think I’ll leave the question of what comes next unanswered, although I hope it’s a story as incredible as this one!

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Furious Hours.

Author photo by Kathryn Shulz