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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 imagination, and steeled my determination locked and loaded. But why him and why me? What was there about that story about a...
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 decided to include a few photos so readers could get the look and feel of what it was like for me to be there. John let me go...
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 lunch at a certain time. If I was playing tennis or out with friends or working around the house, lunch happened when it...
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 me from a tiresome television program and into my reading chair wrapped in a blanket. I expected a fast-paced, true-crime thriller...
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 street. Our family lived in Wilmette, a suburb of Chicago. My father was a corporate attorney; my mother was a housewife and...
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 bookstore, Truman Capote's, In Cold Blood. I was in the spacious Pacific Heights living room I shared with five fellow...
Serengeti and The Circle of Life
October 2019 --Serengeti National Park. Dawn broke over the wide plains of the Serengeti with the power and perfection of a Turner landscape. Sunlight cast a soft brilliance over celery-colored grasses and the famed, flat-topped Umbrella Thorn trees favored by...
Jane and Jonathan at the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference
June 1984. I hadn’t noticed the man in back of me as I stood in line to pay for my breakfast at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Barbara – home of the famed Santa Barbara Writer’s conference. I’d just spoken to the young man who’d waited on our table about the difference...
The Great Frog Launch
August 31, 1984. I’ve never been a big fan of birthday parties, birthday cake, birthday bottles of perfume, and a day that celebrates getting older. But Detective John St. John believed in birthdays as much as I believed in the ASPCA, voting, the value of long walks,...
Peanut-Butter & Jelly Kid
A few months ago, our writing group leader asked, "How many of you can pinpoint the moment you realized you had to tell your story?" One of the many pivotal moments I had while writing my book wasn't the morning I read a newspaper article about a legendary detective...
Hat Squad
Camarillo, California. Summer,1990. John St. John and I had been working on a chapter for way too long. I suggested we have an iced tea break, but first, I had a question. “I looked through some of the photographs you gave me and wondered - what was the deal with the...
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Two Intruders, Four Victims, and A Brilliant Storyteller
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