The public has had a long held fascination with detectives.
Detective see aside of life.
The average person has never exposed her I spent thirty four years as a cop. For twenty five of those years I was catching killers. That's what I did for a living. I was a homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead, I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated. The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some of the content and
language might be confronting. That's because no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged. Join me now as I take you into this world. Most people go on honeymoons to relax Kansas. Fox goes to San Quentin to hang out with serial killers. She's an award winning force of nature I'm happy to call a friend and one of the sharpest minds in crime writing. Today we're diving into the real life murders that fuel her darkest plots.
This is Candace Fox. Candace Fox, Welcome to I Catch Killers.
Hi, Gary, thanks for having me.
Well I'm excited about getting on. We've got a lot to talk about. I think our paths first crossed when we were or when I was out of the cops at the writer's festival or whatever. You were the well known, established fictional crime writer. Yeah, and I was the unemployed, criminally charged ex detective try and make my way in the media.
I thought to myself, this guy is the best dressed guy at this festival. You know, it's a whole bunch of fiction writers walking around in hoodies and that kind of thing. And you had like the nice shirt and the suit and all that. You look great, you're up on the stage.
Yeah, well I wasn't. I wasn't trying to make a statement. That's just how I thought you had to dress. Now, I just turned up in the casual.
Gift dacks and uggies, you know, where you.
Turn up at that fancy dress party. That's not a fancy dress party or whatever.
So I dressed like a frog or something.
I'd never dressed like a frog. Now, last time I spoke to you were looking for a home for twelve chickens.
Yeah, that's right. Things have changed. I mean that was what forty eight hours ago. Things have changed since I've rescued a gigantic muscovy duck and a pekin duck that were both dumped at the same park, and somebody's called them in, you know, thinking these don't belong here, and they don't because they're farm ducks. And I've gotten rid of the chickens. I've picked up two fantail pigeons and
seven wood duck ducklings. My daughter loves poultry. She's six years old and she's had a long fascination with eggs and chickens and ducks. So I started out with wires doing wildlife rescue, but then we ended up getting chickens and ducks and just filling the driveway with them and rehome them. It's just so much fun because it's good for her because the wildlife bite her and scratch her, whereas these ducks and things that don't they're kind of mild.
Well, given the fact this is a true crime podcast, we better put this in perspective. Not only are you a renowned fictional crime writer, you've also been working or volunteer work. I believe it is for wives rescuing wildlife.
I don't stop well, I need I need something to distract me because I can't write from nine to five. You know, I'll send Violet to school and I'll sit down and I'll do a big burst of writing, you know, for an hour and a half, and then I need
to get out and think. So sometimes when I'm driving to these rescues, you know, there's a possum stuck in a down pipe or something, I'm thinking, what am I going to write next when I get home, you know, drive out there, pop the possum out of the pipe, chuck it in a carrier, come home, put it in the garage because I'll go back and release it tonight there's nothing wrong with it, and then hammer the again. It's like a little refresher.
It seuns like you must have a lot of empathy for animals, rescuing them, and I put my detectives hat on here. I look at some of your novels and you go into a very dark place. How do you get into the dark dark place when you've got empathy so you understand things, But how do you get into the dark world that you do when your.
Crime not It's I really think that animal rescue shows you the best and the worst parts of humanity. You know, I've gone out to chicken dumping and there's this, you know, there's there's four chickens and they're starved half to death, and they're covered in disease and they're super sick, and it's a raging hot day. And I think, whoever has put you in this situation is a bad, bad person,
you know. But then whoever's reported them and brought me out there is dropping everything in their life to help me wrangle them, you know. And then you take him to the vets who are rushing there trying to save the lives of these chickens, trying to CPR to this chicken. It's the heart of people, And yeah, I get to super dark places. I kind of grew up like that.
You know.
My mother had four kids, and then she adopted two, and then she fostered one hundred and fifty five kids as I was growing up.
A lot of people coming through your house.
Yeah, Yeah, it was just a madhouse because she did the animal rescue as well, and she also loved to rescue things off the side of the street. So this house was crammed with all of these kids who all had terribly dark stories as to how they'd gotten there. My mum is someone who was born without subtlety, so she would tell you. She'd say, oh, that kid's uncle's been sexually abusing him for the last year and a half, and those kids, their parents have just done an armed robbery.
Okay, that makes it. It's because, sadly, the type of kids that pass through foster homes might have that backstory of growing up in not the perfect, perfect world, not the perfect childhood. I know in your book Red Belly Crossing, I'm reading that and I've seen them and done a lot of things, so there's not much that shocked me. And you know, you take me to a dark place.
I've seen that or heard that before. But there was one particular early in the book, and we won't give away the storyline of the book, but where a father comes across his two sons in a car parking with their girlfriends as teenagers do at night, stopped them, got them out, berated the boys, berated the girls, and then directed his sons to get back in there and continue on what the teenagers do in a park car at night while he watches And I thought.
That's really icky, that's horrible. Where do you dig up this stuff?
Yeah, that's that's real deep character work for me. That's a lot of contemplation of that father, Arthur and how he feels about his sons. For Arthur in this novel, it's all about control and humiliation, and for them it was all about escape and fantasy. So Russell and Evan are the two teenage boys and they have fixed up this car so that they can just have, you know,
a couple of hours of escape from this guy. So they're there with these girls and he turns up, of course, because he's just this malevolent presence in the novel who just knows, he knows what they're doing all the time, and he says to them, you know, you can't get anything past me, I know. And in that moment, I was thinking to myself, you know, how would they try
to escape? What would they do with themselves? And once he's caught them, how could he humiliate them as much as possible, just you know, spun the wheel of things that he could do to them. And Yeah, sometimes it's things that I just come up with, and sometimes it's stories I've heard from people. I pride myself on being someone that anyone can talk to. And you know, my husband says to me. If you get on a train and there's eighty people in the carriage, but one of
them is like a half psycho. He's been in prison half his life. He was accused of murder and he's now homeless. He will wander through the carriage and he will find you, and he will sit next to you and tell you his life story. Like I just attract, you know, talkers, and it must be that I'm listening and making them feel validated, and then they just keep going. They keep going because I'll listen to anyone. And I've had whole novels inspired.
You know.
I wrote a novel called Devil's Kitchen and it was inspired by these builders who came to my backyard. They're building a deck in my backyard. There's four builders and just listening to them, the way they talk to each other, the way they all henpeck to the apprentice. Everyone in that group had their role and the way that the guys would all tense up and everything when the boss
Matt was coming. You know, they get a call and they go mad, I'll be here in ten minutes, put that away, do this, do that, And I'm.
Just watching and watching and a story can evolve from that in the dynamics of that group and the power plays and bullies and all that. Yeah, it's interesting. But in terms of writing, you told me so much about that person at that particular point in time. If he's prepared to go that far, I wonder what else he would do. And yeah, very very descriptive. But I got to say, I'm thinking, oh, like, that's taking that too far.
What about breaking it up?
Like in a crime the way I look at it, You've got you've got the offender, you've got the victims, and you've got the police. Are you looking for something in each of those characters.
Yeah. When I'm writing, you know, someone like Arthur the villain, I'm trying to channel all of the seriously vile people that I have even known, and things that they've said, and how they've undermined their own children, you know, and the how do you display that callousness? You know. So one of the worst people I've ever met in my life was an actual serial killer that I went and I sat with him, and I did that because I
had written twelve novels at that time. So I've written about twelve killers, but I've never actually met one sat with one.
I want you to tell us about that, because that I won't say funny because there's nothing funny about but that is a little bit funny.
And how naive you were.
Oh yeah, the toolbox killer, like they are. Well, because there was two of them, wasn't there. Yeah you met what was it.
Lawrence Lauren Vitecker.
Yeah, I did.
So tell the story, tell the crimes, and tell the story because people will just be shocked. This is what you do for research for a book.
Yeah. I wasn't researching it for a particular book. It was just one of those experiences that I thought, I'm going to go and do that and we'll see what it feels. Do that a lot in my life. So I was watching a documentary. I was living in LA because I had TV and film stuff that I was doing, and then we're just my husband and I just love LA. So we're just living there and having all sorts of experiences there. And I watched this documentary and I stopped
what I was doing. Because I'm a multitasker, I stopped and I just watched this thing. This is the worst crime I think I've ever heard of. These two guys were driving around La in the late seventies, and they were picking up teenagers and taking them in a van into the mountains, the San Gabriel mountains, and they were doing horrific things to them for up to three days at a time, and then throwing their bodies off the.
Canyons, basically torturing them with tools.
Yeah, with tools and pliers and screwdrivers and ice picks and stuff. And they're victims, are you know, thirteen? And one of the girls was walking home from church, you know, and they've picked her up and they've done this. And so I just went down this deep spiral of who are these men? And I sort of through the court documents and that kind of thing. I found that Lawrence. There was Roy and Lawrence, and Lawrence was sort of the ringleader. I felt like he was the one that
was in control. Certainly Roy was saying it was all Lawrence was idea. So Lawrence was in San Quentin on death row, and that was only an hour and a half away. So I said to Tim, I think I'm going to write to Lawrence and say, you know, I have some questions that i'd like you to answer, and if he says yes, I'd like to go and visit him because I want to look at him. And Tim said, you'll have fun, you know, I'll stay here if you go,
And so I did that. I wrote to Lawrence and in that first letter, I'm starting the first letter, and this is where the moral gray territory will come into it later with red belly crossing and what inspired that. But I wrote, dear Lawrence, and then I went, oh, dear, like dear Lawrence and Lawrence, and I just thought, this guy is clearly a psychopath. He's gonna manipulate me and lie to me the entire time, you know. So I'm going to be brutally honest. And I said in that
first letter, I've just watched the documentary about you. I have the feeling that you might be like an absolute monster. Are you interested in trying to bring my bring more complexity to my understanding of you, because you seem to be just the worst person on the planet. And I said, please understand, there is no romantic underpinnings to this whatsoever. I'm not interested in you romantically. And I'm really not.
If you're going to come to me and say I didn't do it, it wasn't me, don't bother because I really I want you to be accountable.
So interesting, interesting approach. But I understand why you put those barriers.
Yeah, well, you know, because I don't want to waste my time going there.
It wasn't me. You don't understand.
There's nothing more boring than hearing someone plead that they're sitting in there.
So he wrote back and he said, yeah, sure, great, Come you know what else am I? John? I'm sitting around in a cage or twenty three hours a day, you know, and then for one hour a day I go to a bigger cage. Come. So I filled out all of the stuff I'm supposed to fill out and I sent it off. And what they give you when you visit San Quentin is the visitor's handbook, okay, which
is not a book at all. It's an a four sheet of paper, one sided, three columns, and it says this is you know, this is the prison, and this is where it is, and this is where you should park. And then yeah, it says this is what you should and shouldn't wear. So don't wear denim, don't wear ten because the prisoners wear denim and the guards wear ten. And if there's a riot, you know, we're going to need to know who to shoot, and don't wear an underwire bra because you'll be X ray and that kind
of thing. And column three was like, you're allowed to bring in, you know, twenty dollars in one dollar notes only, you can have ten a four sheets of paper. You can have twenty photographs and bring everything in a plastic bag so we can see through it. And then there was like a little line that said, if an inmate takes you hostage, we will not negotiate for you.
So that's a big disclaimer.
Yeah, like no monkey business with the you know, oh, the hostage, you know, none of that. So I went, okay, it doesn't say anything about how the visit's going to go, but I imagine it's just he's getting to be a screen with a screen and the phone and all that, like you see in the movies. So I'll get there and I go through all the levels of security and the guards are really stern, and I had like a V neck back on my shirt that went pretty low, like mid back, I guess, and they were like, no,
you'll have to wear a jacket over that. That's too provocative and all this. I was like okay. So I went back to my car, I got my jacket, and they said stay on the line. Follow the line, do not go anywhere else in the prison. You know. I'm walking along this line and there's dogs and barking and fences and stuff. Then then I got to death row and maybe I go in the door clank shut, and there's no one telling me what to do. I was like, okay.
So I see all of the phones with the windows, and there was a guard just standing there and he's like picking his fingernails, and I said, Hi, my name's Candas. I'm sorry. I don't know what to do. I'm supposed to be meeting Laurence Bittaka, you know, the serial killer, you know him, meet him here at eight o'clock. And I don't know which window is mine. And the guard goes, oh,
you know, and and in this thing. I said, actually, as well, while I'm at it, can I borrow a pencil because I got my paper but I don't have a pencil. He goes, oh, yeah, well you're gonna have this pencil. I saw his pencil. He said, you're gonna have this pencil. And no Lawrence will be He's not one of the ones with the phones. He'll be in that cage there, and I went, oh, oh, he's going to be in the cage. And there was this floor to ceiling shark cage style thing with steel mesh and
bulletproof glass all the way around. There's a whole row, two rows of them with an aisle. I said, oh, he'll be in there. Where am I going to be? And the guard said in there and I said at the same time, and the guard was like yes at the same time, and he's like, didn't you know, And I'm like, no, I didn't know, and he said, didn't you read the visitor's handbook. I said, that's not a book, it's an a foor sheet of paper. And I said,
nothing about this, you know. And at this point that they're leading Lawrence out because then he's all cuffed up and everything, and I didn't want to be rude and be like making a fuss, like I don't want to get in a cage with you type of thing, because this is like the start of the relationship, I suppose I don't want to, and so I just went off. And so they unlocked the cage and they put him in, and he's cuffed and the guard said, all right, in
your hop. So I got in and we both sat on our plastic chairs and we were sitting closer than you and I are sitting now, like there was a gap like this between half a yeah, yeah, yeah. And he sits down and I was saying, oh, thank god, he's cuffed, you know. So then he turned sideways in his chair and he stuck his wrists through a hole and they uncuffed him. And they while that's happening, they've shut the grille on the cage and they're threading a
pet a padlock through it and snapping it shut. And I'm watching all of this happen like this, and then the guards went around the corner.
So no one's getting in there.
And I was like, well, you know, and but like I said, I feel like one of my skills as a writer as I can talk to anyone. So I was just matching his energy and he was like, oh, so how are you going? And I'm going fine, but how are you? You know? I like what you've done with the place. It's very industrial chic, you know. And but then in terms of like nerves, I just started like word vomit. And I was just like well, I'm kind of surprised that this is happening. Actually, you know
that we're in here and the cage together. And he said, yeah, it's full contact visit. Didn't you It's in a handbook, isn't it. It's not handbook. And then he said, yeah, it's a full contact visit. We can touch each other if you want. And I was like, okay. He goes, I'll put my hand out. Will you shake my hand? And then I was like, oh will I though, you know, because these are the hands. I'm looking at the hands that tortured and murdered the girls, you know, at least
five and I and so I shook his hand. His hand was ice cold and super soft. I was like, oh, like full bodies shiver.
How do you feel like with that? Because I know I've sat opposite serial killers and just evil human beings and when they offer the hand, and invariably if I'm sitting there trying to get a rapport and all that, and you shake the hand, and what you were going through and as a police officer, at least there was a build up to by the time I'm sitting opposite like that going in there.
That must have freaked you out.
I was going in thinking this is incredibly moral gray territory because one of the any joy yeah and attention. And I'm listening to him, and you know, I'm thinking to myself, if he asks me to buy him commissary as payment for this, what am I going to do? Am I going to buy this guy muffin? Does he deserve a crumb? This guy for what he's done? Shouldn't he just be put in a hole and forgotten forever.
So it's very it's very hard morally. And I'm sitting there and I'm starting to get him to talk about the crimes. And the two things that I'd said in the letter was please don't tell me that it wasn't all your fault, and please don't try to come on to me. And that's exactly what he did for the five and a half hours. He just blamed it all on Roy, essentially. And when I really pressed him to say, you know, you took over five hundred photos of this
one victim. Five hundred photos were entered into evidence. You know, you can't tell me that you were taking five hundred photos of something that you weren't enjoying or that you weren't participating in and you know, Roy, even if Roy was the A man doing all of the stuff, you were the b man sitting there not into he would just start crying and I'd go, okay, well, you know, but the more I allowed him to speak, the more he said. And I didn't kind of press him on.
I didn't press him on it too hard, and I just got more and more and more. And what I was getting out of him is a real understanding of psychopaths. And yeah, it was morally gray, but and I wasn't able to use that knowledge that I gained until years later when I was talking to the victims of homicides and they were saying to me, you've met a serial killer. What are they like? You know, is he sorry? And I had to say, you know, to these these husbands
of these murdered wives, know he wasn't sorry. And maybe that's a hard question to answer for these guys, but at least they're not wondering anymore. People say to me, you know, murderers and killers and psychopaths, do they live with it for the rest of their lives? Do they think about it every day? No, they don't. You know. Lawrence was talking about his victims. And he said, oh, you know, by the time we got to number five,
what was her name? And I said her name and he went, oh, whatever her name was like this, yeah, I And I saw the hand flick and like a piece of dust, like, oh whatever a name was like that, And I thought, oh, you're not sorry. There's all this crying and saying that you're sorry, but I don't think he has the capacity for that. He's dead now, he doesn't have the capacity for anything.
But he.
Wasn't sorry, and he wasn't able to be sorry. And maybe that adds a level of understanding, you know, to me of what these murderers are actually like. But also, you know, victims of murder to say you were dealing with someone who didn't have it wasn't a person who had a layer of evil genius added to them. It was a person who had something to taken away the ability to see this girl as a real human being.
Like I was saying to Lawrence, you know, not only did you kill her, and you deleted her from the rest of the life that she would have had, you know, the children that she would have had, maybe whoever she married, the friends she would have had, the rest of her life that she would have had without you. You deleted her from that strain, but you also deleted her from the rest of her mother's life and the rest of
her father's life. And the cops. You know, there was a police officer who committed suicide and he he named you know, he said this, Yeah, this case really messed me up. You know, you deleted that guy. And the effect that you've had is so huge and profound, it's massive, Like do you understand do you understand what I'm saying? And he said, oh, you know, the mother of that girl, like it was thirty eight years ago, she'd be over it by now. I'm thinking she'd be over it by now.
You don't understand that people don't get over that kind of thing ever. But he, you know, he couldn't get it, and I think because he wasn't able.
To and that getting that experience, so I would imagine that that helped you in what you're doing writing or understanding. And as you said, when you speak to speak to parents or people that have experienced murder, quite often it's in any climax meeting these people. You've heard and read so much, and that the crimes I'm looking at the crimes A committed. We're talking about the worst of the worst,
what they were doing. There was two of them that was planning and enjoying it that but yeah, you just get nothing from them. There's just no soul, is there and no comprehension.
No, And I was saying to him, literally, the only good thing that you can do now is you can reveal other victims, or you can reveal the locations of their bodies. That's all you have left until the day you die, and you're gonna die soon, like he was old, and that's all you can do, and you can do it today right now. Today, you can admit to this killing, which was so clearly you. It was two guys. They looked exactly like you in the van you live two blocks over from this girl. It was so clearly you.
You can do a good thing today if you admit to that crime and solve that case. And he's like, oh, no, it wasn't me.
I always think it's a little bit of power they have hanging on to that. That's like people like my latt before he passed away and cops going to see him and all that, that was power that he had still.
Control keeping relevant. They need me for something, But yeah, how did you walk away?
You personally walk away, because in a room like that, you walk away, you feel a little bit dirty and conflicted, and just yeah.
I was absolutely shattered. I didn't realize that it was a five and a half hour visit, you know, because he said, you've come from more than fifty miles away, so you get the extended visit. But I feel like it felt like it passed in an hour. And then I just felt like i'd really scratch the surface. So immediately after that, I wrote a letter with all of the questions that I didn't get in, and we exchanged
letters for two years after that, and he died. And in those two years, I was just hammering him to say, what about this girl? What about that girl? I was occupying this arrogant space where I was thinking, he hates law enforcement, but he has these girlfriends. You know, he has four girlfriends. He's trying to recruit me as number five.
So he's not going to eat you didn't say.
I like, no, I would just ignore it, and he would be bragging about the other girls and saying, oh, I had some German girl come and visit me. The other day, and you know, she said she wants to have my baby and all this kind of stuff. I was, Oh, I thought, maybe between the girlfriends, he's not going to tell them what he did, and he's not going to tell the police what he did. But maybe if I stay on him for long enough, right at the end, he'll tell me, you know, and I'll be able to help.
Because the helping and this completely arrogant idea, maybe I can be the one to help. That's what fueled the.
I don't think it's arrogant, may be a little bit naive, but incredibly like thinking outside the square. I think with these like if you come at from a police point of view, and then the girlfriend, I'm trying to impress the girlfriend, I think when you're dealing.
With people like that, you've got to think outside the square.
So yeah, I gave it a red hot go and he, you know, over the years, displayed a tiny bit of curiosity in me. He was only able to see himself as this great sun and all the planets, you know, they all go around him. And in that five and a half hours, he didn't ask me a single question about myself, not one, you know, where'd you grow up? Or your husband, what do you do? Nothing? And that kind of fueled me for my understanding of other psychopaths,
because that's happened to me before. I had the mother of a kid that Violet went to daycare with over for a playdate and she's there three and a half hours. She didn't asked me a single question about myself, not one. And I thought I could be anything from an airline pilot to a bloody Olympic swimmer? Are you not curious at all about what I do? And it just never came up, and she never Yeah, because I'm proud of what I do and I'm ready to tell you I'm
a crime writer. It's super interesting nothing you know, not what does Tim do or anything like that. And once you've seen psychopaths, I'm sure you can spot them a mile away and you go, I know what that is?
You can they give out an energy? I think that's something without even articulating the signs, there's an energy, there's a darkness or something.
You meet a.
Person and you feel the energy from that person. You meet one of these evil types and it's sort of it's just like a black hole. You're looking and just
thinking what's there. There's nothing there seeing there, and they function and they talk and they communicate, but I would imagine that I've had situations where I've had to know the friend is probably too strong a word, but that's the way I'm trying to build a relationship people that I hate for the crimes that committed, but I'm speaking to them, I'm talking to them and all that, and
I always walk away from it. I just feel a little bit lucky at the end of it, because you've got to give a little bit of yourself, like shaking the hand. I would do that with some evil people.
And I'm thinking, but the sadness in it and what I explained to the victims of homicide later, the only way you can feel sorry for them, and the way I felt sorry for Lawrence is that no one in the world love him. And also he had never really loved anyone because he doesn't have the capacity for love. And you know, having my daughter Violet, that is a love that it's unlike anything else. I would throw myself
off a bridge for this child. And that the selflessness that you have, I mean nothing in comparison to what I would give you. He has never felt that and that is a beautiful thing that just doesn't operate in his brain. And then also I don't think that anyone had truly ever loved him, because he was this just this bad person who couldn't reciprocate it, you know. And he was very he was just reptilian. It was as close as you'd come to knowing an alien, you know.
And he's like, so, how do things happen in your world? You know? And I'm like, how do things happen in your world? You know? And trying to understand each other. I was telling him a out. When I was in La, I did a few animal rescues, but so I wasn't part of an organization. I rescued a gopher and I was telling him about this gopher that had been poisoned. People poison their whole lawn full of gophers and they all die. And I found this one, little sick one.
After watching Shack.
Yeah, yes, like that. It was. It was called a bottle's pocket gopher. It's only as big as a golf ball. And I nursed it back to health and it would sit on my knee and I was, you know, and I was telling him all about it, and he said, why would you do that? Why you know it could bite you, You could get rabies, you know. He said, there's nine hundred different types of ticks in the US. I don't understand you, and I'm saying I don't understand you either.
He's like, it's not even comprehendive. Yeah, if you did.
You ever see the work of doctor James Fallon, Yeah, yeah, I spoke to him, had a lot of communications with him about psychopaths, and he's a neuroscientist. Did a pet scan the brains of some of the psychopaths that have been caught in America, the worst of the worst, looking for that pattern in their brain, and he he needed something to test it with, so he did the PET scan of his own brain. He had the same whatever it was, pattern in the brain that the psychopaths had.
And he said to me, and I learned a lot from this. He came up with it because you were talking about your mate in prison, Lawrence, who you could have been his fifth girlfriend, missed opportunity, not having the love support when he was a kid, and all that and what James Fallon talked about, and it made a lot of sense to me in those formative years from
birth to the age of two or three. If a person has a predisposition as in the brain pattern like James Fallon had other psychopaths, he's not term psychopath, not a psychopathic killer. If they have in an environment where they've got love and nurturing and the type of environment
that kids should have, it won't play out. But if you have that predisposition with the brain to start with, and in those formative years you haven't got love and you know, the type of kids that you would have seen come through your own home, the foster kids, that's where it can go terribly, terribly well.
Yeah, adding the violence. You know, I've known psychopaths that that aren't violent, but they just go through workplaces and they go through relationships and that's just a it's just carnage, you know, like a tornado going through leaving all of these girlfriends in their wake, and manipulative and lying and it's fascinating, you know, And and so that's how you make the fascinating villain. And then you come to it,
you know, you're writing the book. You come to it with a hero that you have something in common with, and you know, in Red Belly Crossing it's a it's a father trying to get to know his teen daughter again. And I have daughter, so I have that, you know, I was writing about that yearning to know her.
It was interesting and I'll choose my words carefully so I don't reveal the plot because you wrote the book and I don't want to.
Give away the plot.
But yeah, that relationship was interesting, and from a bloke's point of view, the struggle to make that connection and you know, the focus of other things that are more pressing and trying to make that connection with a teenage kid, how difficult was so that certainly came out.
Yeah, oh good, well, thank you. I'm trying well.
I think you've been doing pretty good so far. Twenty two books. Maybe one day you'll prove yourself. And you're still trying. The people that knock back your first novel, you still I.
See him around. I see publishing people, and they've said, you know, the first time they meet me, they go, I don't know if you know this, but I reject you, and I think I know, of course.
Finger up.
Yeah, hey guys, it's Gary jubilin here. I want to get more out of I catch killers. Then you should head over to our new video feed on Spotify where you can watch every episode of I Catch Killers. Just search for I Catch Killers video in your Spotify app and start watching today. Tell us a bit about your background. You said you grew up in the family, had two kids adopted into the family for other siblings, and then one hundred and fifty foster children.
Yeah, my mum was counting them and taking pictures of them all and putting it on. She had like a wall of all the kids, you know, that she had fostered, and then she also had a wall of all the animals that she had rescued. So it was kind of weird to have the two walls, and you know, and they were just I was taking them to school and saying to my friends, this is Eric. Eric's going to be here for an unknown amount of time, you know.
As a teenager, it was kind of annoying because I was like, please, nobody date him, and that kind of thing. And it was also kind of my role in the family was the capable child. You're capable, you're responsible, you're smart, you know what you're doing, so for that reason, you don't need help. So I would come to my mum as a teenager and say, you know, I'm being pretty badly bullied at school. Can I get some help? And she's like, well, actually, you know, these kids have just
lost their parents. They're in jail and you know, so they have problems. You don't have problems. And I'm like, well, okay.
That's an interesting way to grow up. It would give you a resilience.
Yeah, and it's given me a lot of things. It's given me a desire to solve all of my own problems all the time, and a perspective. And they always had perspective on things. My father was an interesting characters as well. He worked in prisons, his prole officer in several Sydney prisons, and so as a kid, I worked out that he had this big Vinyl recliner that he would sit in right in front of the TV, and Mum would sit on the end of the couch here.
And I found out that if I crawled around the back of his recliner and sat in the gap, neither of them could see me because the arms of the recliner and the couch went like this. Neither of them can see me. So I'm there and I'm hearing all of the prison talk. Oh, right, okay, yeah, he was saying things. I remember he was talking at one point about that a prisoner was about to be released and they had him on suicide watch and he committed suicide
using the lid of a tuna can. And I remember as a kid sitting there going what like, what does that mean? How did he do it? You know, and feeling like this whole body rush. And then in a household like that, there wasn't a lot of supervision either. So I was reading dad's police magazines and law enforcement magazines. Remember I was on mum and Dad's bed, and I was looking at these. They had graphic.
Crime scene favor yeah, the.
Crime scene phatus. I'm looking at them all, you know, I would have been seven or eight years old. Wow, And my mom comes in and I froze because no, I'm not looking. I'm not supposed to be looking at this naughty stuff. And Mum leaned over me and she goes, oh, yeah, that's what the inside of your leg looks like. So that's the muscle, and that's the fat, and that's the skin. You can see the bone there. Isn't that interesting? And she just walked out and I was like, you know,
but I got in trouble. I think I was in fifth grade. All my friends were reading the Chronicles of Narnia and I had been reading all her True Crime, and I said, I'm reading this book at the moment about these kids. It's kids who kill and these kids all murdered this girl named Shanda Sheirah, and I described all the ways that they tortured her and all this kind of stuff, and they burned her alive. And then my friends all and told the teacher, and I got in trouble.
How old were you then?
In grade five? So probably I don't know, nine or something. And then mums like, you can't read any of the true crime, none of this. These shelves are off, you know. And I was like, oh, so that left me with the crime fiction.
Do you think that was the attraction to it? Like you've had that little bit of exposure to it. Your interesting in crime because your fictional crime writer, but you must have an interest in true crime to get you there. Is that a little bit of exposure, a little bit of curiosity, and that's what's taken you down that path.
It's that feeling you know that this is real, this really happened. Those kinds of people who would do these things are out there in society, and you know, being someone who had no subtlety, Like I said, my mother, she would warn you about certain things. She'd say. You know, she wouldn't just say don't talk to strangers, or if anyone you know comes up and says, can you help me find my puppy, you know, don't help them. She
would say, there were these children. There was this girl named Elizabeth Smart, and then this happened to her, and she'd tell the whole story. She told me about the Mare's.
Murderers right they were over in the UK.
She was like, oh, a little boy was walking along and a woman said, can you help me find my glove? And then they did this, and then they did this, and I'm sitting there as a kid going they did what.
You know, it sounds like got no filter, But was that the way of preparing you for society? Because you can only shield kids from so much, You've got to give them a bit of Okay, this is.
What the world's like. So yeah, maybe street wise at their very young age.
Very street wise and just seeing things that I couldn't really explain. I remember, you know, for that as a teenager, I'd get home from school, chuck my stuff in my room. I've got twenty minutes to write my stories because I
was furiously writing the books as a teenager. And come downstairs and Mom's like, right, it's the it's the night routine for the toddlers and then the bigger kids, and then the sort of teenagers, and just for the rest of the night, it was night routine, you know, feeding, bathing, putting to sleep. And she said, wash this kid. And I was washing this kid in the laundry tub. I take his shirt off. This kid has just got here this afternoon. Pulled his shirt off and he's covered all
over in white spots. And I said to Mom, I think he's got ringworm or something. Can you come and have a look, because ringworm was something that kids would come with ringworm all the time. And she's like, oh no, there's cigarette burns, scars, it's all over, you know, and they've all healed. And he just and I remember going, whoa.
How.
Too, you know, to fit in a laundry to dub he would have been too, you know. So all you think about all my friends as teenagers, they're all going home and they've got like one brother and play with the dog and do your homework and I was just in a factory. Yeah, and it was exciting. I remember with the phone would ring and everyone just freeze because we just hear like is it an animal? Is it?
You know?
Three kids are coming? How old are they?
You know?
And you'd all listen for what chaos was going to come into the house next.
Did you have any attachments to when the kids that came through? Was there?
Mom did short to medium term care, so sometimes that was, you know, overnight. We had three kids come in overnight because they were found wandering around the car park of the Star City Casino in their pajamas and the police were like, whose kids are they? You know? So they just were with us for a couple of nights while the police number one find their parents and number two find out why did you leave them in the car
and go to the casino. And those three kids ended up having to come to my brother's wedding because it was my brother's wedding the next day. Yeah, so Mum's called him and gone, I've got three extra kids coming to the wedding and he was like, you can't out and she was like all right, bye, see there by, you know, and yeah, so it was short to medium, but you know, she had four and she adopted two. She tried to adopt another three kids out of that collection.
And those kids we had for longer while their parents went through the court system to say can we have custody or not? And then an aunta and uncle would try to take custody and it was all being worked out in the courts. Mums decided that she wanted to adopt them and that it hasn't it hasn't worked out, so she would have had nine of us.
You know, all good on your family.
Like I see the importance of sadly in police and you come across it a lot fostering in kids that need to go in the foster homes. I just full courage to the people that can take kids in because you rescue animals, and I would imagine that's hard enough giving away an animal, But when a child comes into your house and you're giving that child a bit of love and comfort and security for the first time in your life, perhaps it must be so hard handing them back to where the future may lie.
And especially when you send them back and then two months later they came back back and they're thinner. And this kid came back one time and his mother had tried to shave his head with like a big razor and she'd cut his head all over and this kind of stuff, and he was he would really plumped him up, and he was all seen and he come back again. You go, and then you got handing back again.
I can see how it gives you a distored not a distorted view on life, but the understanding of the dark side life. Making the career out of the writing, is that what you aspired to do? So what you left school?
What did you like?
My mom? I wanted to leave school at sixteen and Mum, you know, because I've big bullied. And Mom said, I said, I've got a big plan. I'm going to become a famous author. And she said, well, you're missing a few steps there. You can't just go from sixteen year old child to famous authors. She said, if you want to be a writer, you got to get a real job, and that'll be a side hustle, and then when you make money enough money doing that, you give up your
real job. So I joined the Navy at eighteen. The experience, oh yeah, it was a very strange life choice. I think to myself, why didn't anyone who knew me as a massive creative person, super spacey, not disciplined at all. I get violently seasick. Why didn't anyone say this is not for you? What are you doing?
Yeah?
I wanted to join the Cops and the Navy, and I thought the Cops is just the Navy is just the cops at sea? Really, And I put the applications in and I said, whoever comes back first, I'll go with them. Yees. So I went with the Navy, and it was eye opening and I learned a lot. But one of the ways in which I didn't fit in one of them many ways is that I'll talk to anyone and I'll listen to anyone. So I got in trouble one time because I joined as a direct entry officer.
I'm standing there on the bridge wing and all these sailors are talking to me, and they're telling me these fascinating stories and I can't I can't hear enough of it, you know. And my EXO said to me, this unbecoming of an officer. To be a young female officer eighteen years old. You're standing there You've got six sailors in their twenties all talking to you. That's unbecoming. And I'm like, well, we weren't talking about anything unbecoming. No, we weren't. We were.
They were saying spinning warries, were spinning warries. They were telling me things, and I was super interested. And he was like, it look like you were really lapping it up, and I thought, well, I probably was like I'll love to hear things, you know, and I'm just I'll just talk to anyone.
So your first book, when when was your first published book? Sorry, how did you get out of the Navory?
Well, not kicked out, but I left. How long were But they were like bye, I was two years, just two years. And in between that and becoming a published author for the first time, I did every job under the sun. I cleaned houses, I taught kids to swim. I worked in a tattoo shop. I taught at university. I qualified. I went to university and qualified as a high school teacher. So I did high school teaching and I subbed for primary schools. I worked for a magazine.
I did all sorts of different stuff, so all levels of society I'm meeting all and that kind of thing. And then I was just constantly putting novels in for publication.
And right so you were knocking them out, going oh.
Yeah, look at this, this is the greatest story in the history that's ever been told, and people go, oh, thank.
You, Oh yeah, thanks. I thought to myself, I'm going to put one novel in per year until I'm seventy five. And when I'm seventy five, I quit. And after you know, a publisher has rejected five of you not wolves, they start to feel bad and so they call me on the phone to reject me. And oh the crying. I would try to hold it together as long as I could. And then the crying, which is another reason I didn't
fit in the navy. Whenever someone yells at me, I burst into tearsok's not becoming it's not becoming of an officer at all. And so when I finally got my agent, she said to me, do you know anyone in the publishing industry in Australia. I said, I have cried on the phone to every I could give you a list of all the publishers that I have cried too. So I wrote four full novels and then I had a whole bunch of starts with.
The crime crime based. No, they were not all sorts.
They were vampires and wear wolves, you know. And then there was one like kind of crime vampire where wolf crossover. Don't know, it's a hard genre.
So the crime when did you find that was your genre that well? And I should say this because people listening you are a very very successful author to thanks twenty two books at this stage published books, and.
Nine of them I wrote with James Patterson, you know, and so they were all New York Times bestsellers. And then I have the TV show The Tropic made out of a couple of them. But I came to crime slowly because I was intimidated by the procedural aspects. I didn't know any cops, and I didn't know how to approach any cops, and they seemed intimidating. So I thought, oh, stuff it, I'll just make it all up. Who's going
to know? And I was living in the back of the Sunshine Coast with what ended up being my first husband, and we were living in this house down this five kilometer track and we didn't have any garbage collection because it's just a dirt road. So we had to take our garbage every week to this guy and he had like a cutout in the rainforest and he just had a whole bunch of skip bins and all the locals
will come and bring their rubbish every week. And he was this short, stocky guy with little half moon glasses and like a greasy pony towel, and he had all this rescued furniture and he was really menacing looking, and he had all his friends and they'd all sit there drinking and drinking black coffee and smoking, and we'd just drive in with our rubbish. And I kept looking at this guy and going, this guy has a history, you know,
I can tell. And so my first novel, Hades, was about this ex criminal overlord and in his retirement he buys a landfill. He buys a tip, and so people come to him with bodies and he hides him in there for a fee. Yeah, thank you. That's a good idea. Yeah, it's a little side hustle. And that was my first novel that was picked up, and that won the Ned
Kelly Award, and it was very successful. I had two more in that series, and then I was off to the races, you know, I was teaching at university at that time, and in between semesters of university, I was teaching kids to swim and that was my twenty five dollars an hour, and then off I went. And suddenly people are super interested in who I am as a person and where I grew up and I didn't was that was shocking to me. I thought, what do you want to know about me? For? Just read the book?
Yeah, but I think, like, you know, I asked you, where do you come up with these ideas? Like it's one thing to sit down and put words on paper, but okay, where did this story come from? What's clothing around in your head? So that always makes me curious when I read a fictional crime book, I understand the world from the real world, and I've seen that there's not much that I've read that doesn't you know. Oh yeah, I can relate to that because that type of thing happens.
But where do you get it when you haven't? But you've explained that in part the fact the way you grew up and what you were exposed to when you got those first books up. How did that feel like? That must have been?
That was dream come true?
Stuff?
And I just having the one book published in Australia. That was enough for me. I thought, I've made it. And if I don't get a second book, you know, that's fine. And I was holding it in my hands and going I've made it. I've made it.
Walking around the streets.
Yeah, yeah, I'm in big w and I'm like, you know this, and I've heard that's really good, and all of the highlights. Beyond that, the stuff I get to do for research. You're like, you know, writing a book about New York firefighters, I guess I'll just have to go to New York. You know, it's all on tax and just wander around New York talking to New York firefighters and it's just the best job ever.
And that's the type of research you do.
Like if you've got a character in there that's a New York firefighter, you want to get the sense of Sometimes.
The stories come and they're not they're not something you have to travel half of the world away to get.
It's just taking the seed of an idea. For example, my daughter Violet started kindergarten and I'm bringing her to school every day and doing the drop off, and at drop off she's howling, and she's clinging onto my leg and I'm trying to peel her off, and I've got you know, I've got a hand to the teacher like a screaming mental patient being to mommy and all this and every day we would do this, and for weeks, I'm looking at this other mother and she's going, you know, bye, Jimmy.
Jimmy's like, you know, And I took that idea, and I was thinking to my because after a few weeks the mother came over to me and she said, I'd much rather like i'd gone her. And She's like, I'd much rather yours than mine. Actually like that problem. And I walked away and I thought about her, thought, what if you have this child who is cold and callous? And it got me thinking about the mothers of school shooters. Yeah, because they always pointed the mother and they always say
why didn't you know? And everybody's fascinated by you know, Ted Bundy's mother and this person's mother. They always look at the mother. And so that's what's inspired my novel that I'm about to finish and running it right now. I'm always one book ahead whatever's coming out. And yeah, so I didn't have to travel halfway across the world to get that idea. The ideas are just everywhere.
Yeah, we'll take a break now. When we come back, we want to talk about the crossover into some true crime that filtered into the book, and your thoughts on that and the impact that you see with murtherer when you're talking the true crime, and quite a few other things.
All right, I look forward to it.
Okay, cheers.