Jane Howatt

True Crime Writer
My life as a housewife and mother was ready for a change. The boys were eight and ten, and my husband was devoted to his career as a physician. The time had come for me to follow my dream and write.
The journey took an unexpected turn one morning when I read a newspaper article about how Detective John “Jigsaw” St. John had just won a medal for solving a major murder case. Here was the story I wanted to write. After several phone calls, he finally agreed to meet me.
For the next thirteen years, he led me into a world I imagined existed only in crime novels: dingy motels, scary crime scenes, startling autopsies, and maximum-security prisons. Along the way, I grew to know and be fascinated by not just murder business, but a man whose compassion for victims, passion for justice, and unmatched sleuthing ability earned him the LAPD’s Badge Number One.
The Cop & Me
Detective John St. John was a nationally recognized serial murder expert. He not only solved over one-thousand murders but also worked on twelve serial murders, including the Trash Bag Murders, the Freeway Killer, the Elderly Women murders, and was one of the original detectives on the Black Dahlia case. When we met, I was a neophyte writer, a woman half his age who’d never seen a dead body. Slowly, as I earned his trust, he led me into Dante’s Inferno, where I learned much more about life than death. Both of us were forever changed.
The Killers & Their Victims
They were young adults with their lives still ahead of them. Steven was sixteen, Tracey was fifteen, and Shari was twenty-one. John took me to each of their crime scenes, introduced me to mothers whose stories I chronicled, and the District Attorneys who prosecuted the Bill Bonin and Bill Bradford cases.
Blog
In the beginning…
I’ve asked myself a thousand times how a simple newspaper article of fewer than one-hundred words had started my heart racing, fired my...
Rocks and Sand
August 31, 1984. I wrote about this trip to the Miller/Campbell crime scene in the first chapter of my book. But now that I have a blog, I...
The Peanut Wars
About halfway through my collaboration, lunchtime had become an uneasy truce. Most of my adult life, I never paid much attention to eating...
The Cop and the Coroner: Part Three
Same Day: Philippe’s Restaurant, LA. John and I walked into Phillipe’s lunch hour crowd, put in our order, and headed for a back booth....
The Cop and the Coroner: Part Two
I expected the usual ten minute-drive from the Parker Center parking lot to Philippe’s in lunchtime traffic to take just a few minutes....
The Cop and The Coroner: Part One
September 20, 1985. I stepped into our master bedroom closet, dodged the wicker laundry basket, a pile of clothes and stack of shoeboxes....
“They Shot and Killed My Parents!” – The Menendez Murders
I sat on a cold, hard bench in a crowded courtroom listening to testimony about the mental state of two teenage boys who murdered their...
“Don’t Worry. It’ll All be Over in a Couple Minutes.” -The Petit Murders
Peter Vronsky, author of Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present, wrote this about how the term...
A Double Tragedy: Steven and Carl Wood
January 1989, Los Angles California. Walking into Taylors Steak House on a chilly afternoon reminded me of the Oxford winters when Jim and...
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