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...
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...
Bill Bonin’s Pickup Line “Hey Kid, Want a Ride?”
Back in the beginning of this journey, I wasn’t sure if me–a newbie writer who’d only met Detective St. John twice–had the chutzpah to...
Barbara Bien Talks About Her Peanut-Butter and Jelly Son
January 2021. Camarillo, California. Thirty-eight years have passed since I interviewed Barbara Bien, mother of Steven Wood, the...
Two Intruders, Four Victims, and A Brilliant Storyteller
I remember the chilly night in San Francisco, with the Bay Bridge off in the distance, when Truman Capote’s classic, In Cold Blood, lured...
What are you doing here?
Summer, 1958. I was a thirteen-year-old geek with thick glasses, frizzy hair, a scruffy dog named Laddie, and two girlfriends who lived up...
The Clutter House: Murder in the Heartland
I can almost remember the scene – clear as Autumn in the Sierras, when in 1967 I purchased a book I'd been anxious to read in an airport...
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