The public has had a long held fascination with detectives. Detective see aside of life the average persons 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. Welcome back to part two of an entertaining chat I had
with award winning fictional crime author Candice Fox. We're going to talk more about her extensive and strange research that she does to write her books, and how she's finding in the ovlap between fiction and true crime, and two unsolved murders that have had a dramatic impact on her canvas. Fox, Welcome back to part two of I Catch Killers.
Thanks for having me well.
I'm having some fun, but I'm going to hit you up with a really hard question. I've been doing this for years now, probably have had hundreds of guests on and I've never asked this question. And yeah, I do ask prabing questions. Sometimes tell me about your honeymoon? What did you get up to?
So I got to explain you.
Put it in context, otherwise this sounds weird.
So I have this super normal husband, Tim, He's a very regular guy. He has beautiful, gentle parents. They have a lovely home, cream carpet, pastel, art on the walls. Him and his brother and his sister, they all had a lovely children, and they get on really well.
You know.
And then he's married me and I have become in that family, just the family freak, the widow. You know, I'm leaving and I'm leaving Sunday lunch because I've got to go and rescue a wallaby at fall in someone's pool, or you know, I've got to take a phone call from you know, this person in this true crime and they've just accepted me as the family wido, and he has accepted me as his weido wife. So you know, I say on our honeymoon. We were on a driving tour of the east coast of the US and he said,
what do you want to do? You know, this is where we're going. We're going from the Florida Keys up to Maine. What do you want to do? And I said, well, there are so many body dumping sites that I want to visit. All along romantic, I know, and he's like, okay, all right, Well, as long as we can go some dive bars and watch some baseball. And you know, because he's that's the kind of thing easing to. He loves big beautiful industrial areas at sunlight that they're pouring smoke
and it's you know, it's New Jersey or whatever. That's what he loves. And he loves a filthy dive bar where you walk in and everyone everyone looks, you know, and it's really low lit. And he loves going to the baseball And I love tromping through the bush trying to find a particular log where someone's body was found. And we did that. I said, there was this murder case in Maine and I said, you know it's supposed to where the guy found the body, stumbled across the body.
He's here it's supposed to be one hundred and twenty three feet from the roadside. I want to go there. I want to stand in that spot, and I want to look at the road and say, you know, did he stumble across his body or not? And I want to go, you know, to where the Manson family murders happened. And I want to go and look at that. You know, when we fly in, we'll go and look at that. And there was a serial killer at that time who was running around Long Island and dumped all these bodies,
the Gilgo Beach killer. They've caught him, but at that time they hadn't caught him, and he dumped all these bodies. There are seventeen bodies found along this this desolate roadway. And I said, I want to go there. I want to stand there. I want to look.
You know, is this okay? Well you've explained what you got up to in your honeymoon. It sounds great, accepting. Is this the type of research you've got to do to be able to write the novels that you do Now you're successful, Aufer, So whatever formula you got is working. Is this the type of meticulous research you do?
You don't have to do it, but I think it's good, you know, to have these experiences to get out and that's you know. I was on my honeymoon. I was multitasking, so while we were driving from here to there, I was like, let's stop in, let's look. And I stood there, you know, and my husband's standing nearby, going so, do you want some time alone or what? You know, He's not that into it, but I just wanted to feel it.
I wanted to feel the wind going past in this beach and think about this killer dropping this body off and try to get into that mindset. But you know, it's like why here? Why then? What can you see? What can you smell? What can you feel? You might feel the same thing like I.
Do understand what you're saying in that. If I'm investigating a murder, I like to go to the crime soon. I like to be there around the time, if it's at night or whatever, getting a sense of what's gone on. But I was a homicide detect Yeah, yeah, I do understand from a writing point of view, like I'm understanding the writing world a little bit more now. My writing when I was in the place was the facts. These are the facts man, bang bang bang. So I understand
creating that, creating that atmosphere. In fact, when I first started writing, I've got advice from a few people, Dan Box, Clear Harvey on it. You've got to create the atmosphere a little bit like my writing was Okay, at such and such a time, we did this, But okay, when you turned up, what was the hot day? A cold day? Was a windblowing? What did house like? What color were the tiles of the house? Yeah, it was at the
red brick house. And I understand that that descriptive. So if you want authenticity in your book, I can understand your need to visit these crime scenes and understand. And there is an areous eeriness about them, isn't it. If you've been there, you do sort of sit there and think, oh, this is a horror.
Yeah. It's like when I was looking at Lawrence's hands and I was like, these are the hands. I was like, this is the spot. Ye you know, But for me, where it kind of crosses over or where there is a line and I cannot seem to find that line is where does it become exploitative or voyeuristic? You know, this interest that we have because people are desperately interested in these true crimes. We cannot deny that the mushroom saga, Yeah, lit up the entire nation. It was all anyone could
talk about. Yeah. But then you go that ex step and you're, you know, doing the Wikipedia dive and you're going down and you start to get this creepy feeling like, oh, it's it's it's sick. What what I'm you know? And I think that sometimes people misinterpret that about me because I have this bright, bubbly nature that I'm fascinated in
these crimes in an entertaining way. But what I am is disturbed by them so badly that I want to go deep down in there and try to get in the mindset to understand why why did you do this? And for two years I was hammering I was hammering Lawrence and saying why, why, what led you to it?
Why?
And I didn't come out with any further understanding of what drove him to that because he was just like you say, depthless, there's nothing in their blank. So I was I was entering new moral gray areas.
I can see how you get morally conflicted by it. But there's been a lot of progress in catchingerial killers, like from the mind Hunter days with John Douglas and Burgess profiling the serial killers and understanding where they're coming.
From, and that's from talking to them, from actually talking to them, you know. And school shooters I think as well, what ends up happening is that they die in the firefight and you don't get to have them sit down and say this was the progression, this is the point at which I reached no return And there should be more interviewing. I feel, you know, there should be more interviewing of that and understanding pedophiles as well, and saying
what was the point at which you crossed over? And they have done a lot of work with pedophiles to say what kind of victim were you looking for? And then translate out, you know, to parents to say, to teach your child, this is the kind of things that you might be asked to do or say, or this is the kind of victim they're looking for. They're looking for a victim where the parents aren't invested the vulnerable and so hanging over the top of our kid all the time, the teacher can see in that kind.
Of well, I think they shy away from it. They look for the easy mark and invariably it's kids that come from a troubled background are the easiest targets for pedophiles. On the loan shooters and the school shootings and all that, we had am Bergers on the podcast, so I was wrapped to have her on, Like I used to follow what they were doing very early in my homicide career.
But she was saying I think I'm correct here and saying that her daughter's doing work now and part of the work that they're looking like they've done a lot of studies on serial kills, but now they're looking at those loan actors and try the mass shooters and trying to understand that because that seems to be where crime's going or the horror of crime serial killing has I think might be naive but being reduced in part because of the police technology DNA and all that, it's easier
to link crimes. Only in the past week there was we're after on the investigation I worked on years ago. It was a Central Coast rapist, a Cereal rapist, and he was locked up from some DNA and that was at least over twenty years ago. We're looking for that person he raped sexually assaulted five people around the Central Coast, and they were linked for various reasons. But I heard note, I've spoken to a few people that were involved in it. He's seventy three year old man's been locked up and
that's great. Yeah, yeah, but he could get away with it for so long and they were violent, violent crimes, and now he's been being charged with the offenses.
Yeah, so that's so great to get him right at the end. That's the dream I think. You know, you see the Golden State Killer where they came to his door and he's a grandfather and he was a cop at the time, and it's like knock knock.
Ye.
You know, you weren't expecting these, were you.
I love the fact that when they get to the cold case, unsold thomicide or whatever locked people up years down the track because they thought they've got a way of it. And yeah, it's horrible, they've got a wave of it for so long. But I'd like to think anyone that's committed those type of crimes as Sitney there in fear waiting for a knock on the door. That was in your author's note at the back of the book.
With the book it's interesting, and I really when I started looking at it, I was very curious, how are you going to word this? In the introduction to the book, I just read something about so we're talking about red belly crossing here, and some of the characters and events you'll read about in the following pages are born out of the personal connection I've had to a pair of murders that happened in Sydney's Eastern Beaches in nineteen seventy
three and nineteen seventy four. The victims, Lynette White and Maria Smith, who were brutally killed in their homes by persons unknown. Lynette was a new mother, Maria was a new wife, and they had their whole lives ahead of them. I wrote this novel which reimagined that some of the aspects of those real crimes is a response to the horror and heartache I discovered whilst researching those killings and
meeting the families of the murdered women. So that tells me that with all the fictional crime writing, you do understand the pain of murder a homicide, when someone's life is taken expand on. That's how have you weave that into the book?
So this happened, this whole book and this whole experience meeting Lynette and Maria's husbands. It came out at this moment where I was sitting at home. My husband's on the couch, I'm in the armchair, and my daughter, Violet was one and a half at the time, and she's running around the house and she's just wearing a nappy and a top hat and carrying a toy briefcase. And I said to Tim, she looks like a little daughter
door salesman. And as I said it, like a it felt like a drawer popped open in my brain and a memory was there waiting, And it's like if you hear the jingle to a kid's show. You haven't heard that seeing that kid's show since you were three. You go, oh, I remember, you have all the words. Yeah. The memory was of my mother saying to me, she's leaving me at home for the first time alone, which is quite an event seeing as there were so many kids, you know,
in the house. She was saying to me, don't open the door to strangers, you know, if anyone knocks, just hide, Because I opened the door once on someone when I was a teenager and he ended up being a killer, and that was a story she would tell every now and then I knocked on the door. The guy was a killer. I didn't let him in, and I thought, as I've had sitting here having this memory, I thought, oh,
that's like a cautionary tale. And my mother's told me don't open the door, because once I did it, it was a murderer. So but I told Tim, and Tim was like your mother a you know, and he just went back to his crossroad. And I thought, no, there's something in this I want to know, because I remembered funny little details like she said that the guy said that he was an encyclopedia salesman, and that sounded too
specific for a cautionary tale. So I texted her and I said, having this memory, was that real?
Was that just bullshit? You want to tell me you know when I was a kid. And she said, no, it's real. It's a real case. Two women were murdered in the neighborhood. And I don't think they ever caught the guy.
And I went what And I called her. I said, what are you talking about? She said, oh, yeah, the guy came to the door. I was home alone. I was seventeen. Her father had just died, so that puts a timeline on it, like a couple of weeks before her father. So this is April nineteen seventy four, and everyone was up at the funeral home. I was home alone. He knocks. She opens the big wooden door, but not the screen door. He's standing there and he says, oh, hi,
I must an encyclopedia. Say when I'm going door to door, I was wondering if I could talk to you about encyclopedias. And they're having a nice little chit chat through the screen, and as they are, she said she just got this full body rush of all the hairs on her arms stood on end, and she's thinking, why isn't he carrying anything. He's got no briefcase, no top hat, no pamphlets, no nothing.
He's just a dude standing there. And she said he also looked very casually dressed for a daughter store salesman who's wearing a zip up jacket and tan pants, and he had sort of like longish hair. Anyway, she made an excuse because she was having this feeling and said, oh, I've got to ask my dad. And it's really supposed to open the door to people, Hey dad, And as she's called out, hey dad, he just too quickly and walked and I said, well, what are these unsold cases
you're talking about? And she said, oh, oh, well one of them. The girl went to my school, actually, Maria McGuinn, and I'm googling it and I've go on, oh my god, mom, this is These are two unsolved homicides. There's a million dollar reward on both of them. They're you know, I said, you could be the missing piece of the puzzle. You've seen the guy. Nobody else has seen the guy, you know. And she's like, oh, you're making a big deal. And
I said, well it is number one. There's this you might be the key to a fifty year old serial killing and number two. For the last eight years or something, I've been trying to be the foremost crime writer in the country. Do you think you could have mentioned it at any point that.
You've had this new two valid points?
Yeah, I mean you know, I said, did you ever talk to the police and said no.
Oh.
I said, I'm going to come over here tomorrow. Whatever you do in the interim, do not google it. You might, but I'm not a police interviewer. So I'm thinking to myself, even by bringing it up and discussing it with her, maybe I'm corrupting her memory. So she came over and I said, tell me the story, give me the description, and asked some basic questions that I thought I should ask. I said, did you notice an accent? No, what age was he? What did his hair look like that? What?
What did he say exactly? And I wrote it all up and I sent it to the police and they A detective came back and he said, you know, tell me more. So I told him a bit more and he said, yeah, that sounds like him. But you know, without like a name or a number plate, there's not much I can really do with it. So I'm going, what what do you mean There's nothing could do it like. It wasn't enough for me. I'm that person who's always like, well, but but you know, and the arrogance and naivety what
was talking about earlier. I was thinking, I have been called upon to do something about this, and this is not enough, you know what you're saying here and then, and so I thought, okay, that's it. Step aside, everyone, I'm going to solve this myself. I'm going to get a podcast. I'm going to investigate it. I'm going to be the new Headley Thomas watch this, you know. So I wrangled some friends together. I'm like, let's make a podcast. Let's make a podcast. And in the meantime, I'm at
Google how to solve a homicide? You know, and I realized very quickly that that is not as easy as it is to be. It's like a whole profession.
They've just shocked a lot of people.
Like, but this is how it would go in fiction, is the protagonist would be called upon by some strange things that comes up, and they would get involved, and you know, three days later, bingo bango, it's all solved. No, that is not what happens. So I did some fiddling around. You know. For example, one of the things that has come out in the more recent investigations of Maria's murder is they're looking for this mustard colored Forward Capri with
a black racing stripe. So I've got some contacts together, and I got some at Ford and I was saying, I'm investigating a homicide. Can you tell me how many must colored Ford Capris there were in Australia between you know, nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty. Oh yeah, I can help you with that.
No worries yet.
We'll get I'll get back to you very very soon. Never heard from them again. And what authority do I have to say? I'm a crime fiction writer.
Do you know who I am? Yeah?
Do you know who I am? Please answer these questions. So now I'm in this space where the podcast situation hasn't worked. I'm no good at being a homicide detective in real life. I can only do it in fiction. And I'm just sitting around and talking to everyone who'll listen. And I said to my agent, you know, a couple of years had passed at this point. We're trying. We're trying or trying. I said to my agent, I feel
like my talent lies in writing crime fiction. Maybe I could write a fictional novel, you know that kind of reimagines aspects of the case. And she's saying, that is a terrible idea, because you're going to upset you know. Yeah, yeah, And I mean this has really happened. Stephen King wrote
a short story inspired by Dennis Raider BTK. Yeah, and he was imagining it from the perspective of the wife and the family and all this you find out, hey, dad's a serial killer, and that really had a terrible effect on Dennis Raider's daughter, As she said, I felt, I felt exploited. I said, they want my agent, Well what if?
Right?
I met the families of Lynette and Maria, and I said, is this okay? You know, and I'm having further ideas. I'm saying, you know, I've got whenever I bring a book out, I'm talking to thousands of people. I'm in libraries and I'm on the radio, and maybe I can spread the word because there are very practical questions that the police want to know. They want to know who lived in those apartment buildings at that time, you know, they want to know who owned a Ford. You know,
I can ask practical questions of my audience. So why don't I go and meet Lynette and Maria's families and ask permission? And my agent was like, you have had some bad ideas in your time. This really takes the cake. Number One, They're going to stand over you while you write this novel, and if they don't like what you've written, you know, too bad for you. And then if you go out promoting it and put a foot wrong. They're
going to sue you. And then also, you're going to look like this, this person who has exploited these family members to make a book that you're going to bank buck off, Like how are you going to get around that? And so I went, Okay, it's a terrible idea. So I sat around for you know, another year and a half not doing anything about it, and then I just went, oh, fuck it. So I just wrote I had been staring at Paul and Steven online, looking at their Facebook pro files,
trying to find their kids. Yeah, and Maria's brother Peter. I would go to his website and I would just stare at it and I wouldn't cross the border. Then I just crossed it and I made contact through a journalist with Paul. I just sent the message saying I want to talk to you about your wife's murder. And I just said that. So on a rand, I'm at the in laws. It's Sunday lunch. I get this phone call and he says it's Paul White. Oh my god. I had not prepared for it, and so I said
I need to take this phone call. I went anyway into a quiet room and he said, you wanted you wanted to talk to me about what my wife's murder. And I just went blur and I just said, Mom just revealed to me that she had this encounter and it might you know, I might be the guy.
I might not.
I don't know. What's you And I tried to get a podcast up, you know, And I'm saying to him, I really wanted to write a novel about it. But it's not going to be like Dexter, you know, or like I'm the serial killer. I'm enjoying it all that. But I have this idea, you know, and I want to put an afterward in the back of the novel, which is a call to the reader to say, maybe you can help, because there's things that we, you know, we could do as a society. I want to bring
public knowledge to this case. I know it's been done a lot already, but maybe I could get that one person who says, oh, actually, you know, look my mom has My mom said she never told anyone. She said, I told you kids, and I told you Dad, but otherwise I had not told anyone.
Well, solving these unsolved crimes, quite often is that one piece of information that that breakthrough coupled with what we've got in forensic technology. Yeah, so Paul, I know Paul. I met Paul. He reached out to me after I left the cops and talking about his concerns the way the investigation was being approached, and to me, I always choose or tread careful when you're dealing with people who have been traumatized for horrendous situations. But he seemed like
a very balanced person. He wasn't expecting expecting miracles, but he just wanted to make sure everything that could be done was done, and that was his concern when I met with him, that things were not heading in the right direction. I gave him some advice. I don't know if it helped or not, but I can imagine the
reception you got from him. It was probably the best person you could speak to because he is such a nice human being and he still desperately wants to find out what's happened, what happened to his wife.
He said, I'll never give up. Yeah, until the day I don't. I'll never give up. And so it was incredibly nerve wracking meeting him for the first time, because he's, like you say, he's a gentle and balanced person, but it doesn't give a lot away in the beginning. And he said, why don't we meet After I'd done him what's fluttering? He said, why don't we meet for coffee?
And so I met him for coffee and he heard my account, and I said, I understand all of the feelings that you might have towards someone like me who writes crime fiction, who basically turns what has happened to you the worst thing that's ever happened to you in your life. I assume I turned it into entertainment for everyone. And you know, there was someone who did something with
Lawrence and Roy and the documentary surrounding their murders. And I know that at the cocktail party that was celebrating that documentary, they had cocktails that were all named after different tools that they used, So they had like screwdriver and flyers and all that for those cocktails. I'm saying to Paul, I know the terrible, gimmicky things that can come out of crime fiction, but that is not where I'm coming at. You know, if this, if my mother had let this guy in, I would not be here
and she would not be here. And also my feeling, particularly with Lynette. And maybe that's why I approached Paul first, is that I was after a year and a half of having Violet, I was really enjoying being a mother. I was out of the trenches and I had this beautiful child. And Lynette never got to that stage. She
was murdered in her apartment. Paul was off to work and she was there with an eleven week old baby and this guy has come in and murdered her, you know, at something like ten o'clock in the morning on an everyday morning, and that journey was ended for her. And the unfairness of it of saying, I'm going to put this experience that I want to have with you over
your motherhood of that child. In the same room, I was pauled, and I was crying at the at the table with Paul and thinking, at what right do I have to cry over the loss of your wife? But it just started happening and he said, I feel like you have good intentions, and I thought, oh, good, Okay, I'm trying to do something and I don't know what I can do, and this is the only thing that I could do. And he said, no, I think it's a good idea. You know. So then through Paul I
met Stephen, so Steven's wife Maria. It's the same thing. Ordinary morning, you know, Stephen goes off to work at seven point thirty. She's supposed to arrive where she was being a student teacher at my mother's school at eight thirty. She never makes it there. He comes home that night to find she's been raped and strangled with pannyhoes, Yeah, in their apartment. Then we get into the journey of
how do I write this book? And you know, I met the two guys, I met the wives, and I'm saying to them, I cannot write this book how it happened for you. I can't even set it in the Eastern Beaches because I might be implicating people, even unintentionally, with these characters with red herrings and things that affects real world people who might have been looked at for
the case, or the cops as well. I don't want to have a cop character and say, well, this was clearly that guy who worked at the Kuji Police at that time. And I was writing the novel and I was saying to them, I can only have one husband in the book because I can't have these two separate scenes, you know, where they go and meet two separate husbands and hear the same thing. I've got to roll them both into one. So I'm sorry. I've essentially deleted one of you. And in the novel, I didn't want the
reader to place so much suspicion on the husband. I wanted you to just come into the scene, empathize with the husband, and then get out again and keep looking around the book for the killer. So I've had it so that the husband doesn't find the bodies. So that experience that you had coming home to a darkened apartment, flicking the lights on finding your wife murdered in this
horrific way, I've had to delete it. And what a thing to have to say to someone, because I'm trying to say, I'm not discounting what happened to you, but plot wise and crime fiction wise, I can't do it that way. And it was so hard, and these guys were so understanding.
I haven't met Steve, but Paul, I can imagine, and I think, and this is a testing my memory. Paul was also trying to push for cards in prison where unsolved murders the prisoners sit there playing cards and they have rewards. It's a trigger, and I think it's been tried. I'm not sure if it's a different state or tried overseas, and there's been some success from it.
He said, I'll try anything, but.
What you've discovered, Yeah, you might write fictional crime, but what you've discovered is the pain of homicide. This is what fifty years ago, these crimes, and it's still impacting on people to.
This day every day. And he was getting tiery. And I've seen Steve get tiery, and it seems to me that the emotion is right there all the time with these guys, and it never goes away. It just sits there, and as soon as you start talking about it, it's right out. And that's half a century later, and it's exactly what I was trying to say to Lawrence. I was sitting there with the serial killer, saying, this person is not a hand flick and then get over it.
But he couldn't understand. And so, yeah, listening to Paul and Stephen, I was wandering around this territory of trying not to retraumatize them and saying, oh, so what was they like, you know, or saying, you know, how did you guys meet and that kind of thing, and their wives are there as well, so it's like, how do I do this? And then, you know, I wrote the novel. They didn't see it at all until it was completed,
and then I sent it off to them. I emailed it off and then I just sat there just buzzing with terror. I think it was three days or something before Paul got back, because I've tried to encompass emotionally in the novel what these guys experienced, having not experienced it at all myself, you know, and they've trust they've really trusted me to do it and to go out and to talk. And I said to them, the day of printing is going to be December nineteen, so all
the way up until midnight December nineteen. Yeah, I said, you let me know. If there's something I say, or something you read, or you just get a feeling and you want to say, I'm out, then you'll be out. I'll take them right out. I'll change the novel so it's unrecognizable. I'll take the afterward out, and I won't talk in interviews at all. I'll never speak your wife's name.
Look, I think one thought a couple of things I want to pick up on. You mentioned Headley Thomas the podcast will that helped solve a murder, and that was initially I know, police was skeptical about it. Police are going, no, this is not going to happen. The family law court Bomber. I think there was an episode that what was the Channel seven equivalent of sixty minutes at the time, back in the day that came out and on the back
of that that case was solved. Now the police are going to deny saying that I was working in unsolved homicide. What goes on and that pressure, that focus puts the police putting resources into it, getting the breakthrough. The reason I raise that you're doing. Some people might call hair brain schein. How's that going to help? Who knows? Who knows?
But I think from a victim's point of view, the family of victims, they just want to make sure everything's being done that can be done, and so is there any any harm in trying that? And I think policing has got to understand that when you're dealing with traumatize people following murders, unsolved murders, or disappearances, that it doesn't go away. You have experience that now in real life fifty years down the track, and you see the pain that's so raw. So they've got to make sure they
do everything possible. Keep the families informed, keep them informed, because that was a lot of the anks with unsolved homicide is that the family members that are not being informed by the police what's happening, and they sit there and quite often the family are too polite to phone the police up and go, hey, what's happening. You said you'd keep me informed. It's been two or three years since I've heard from you, that person no longer works
here or whatever. There's I think a lot of the pain can be reduced by keeping keeping the families informed. Having said that, like unsolved homicide, I love it, and we talked about in part one where you see old cases that have been solved, whether it's from someone coming forward or improvements in technology forensic technology. But yeah, it's worth worth giving giving a try to what you've done.
My last thing that I want to do, ever, is piss off the police and also suggest that they've done.
All right, don't worry about that.
No implications to that's possible.
We happened to.
Look, you know, because it's been fifty one years. This case has got a lot of work on it, it's reviewed a lot. Yes, there were mistakes in the beginning, like there is no physical evidence whatsoever, you know, remaining
of these cases. And Paul and Stephen have been driving, driving driving the police to say, I've just seen this case where where somebody's box of evidence turned up in an attic, And I've just seen this case where, you know, and I'm hearing rumors about these about homicide, drawing all these evidence boxes in and then them sitting there and they're not categorizing them. And Paul and Steven are saying to the police, is the is the evidence really missing?
Is it really missing? But there have also been wonderful things done on this case where after forty seven years they went back to Paul and yeah, yeah, I used it in the book as floorboards, but it was carpet. Our detective pulled up the carpet and took a DNA swab from a bloodstain that you found it, so that they have some DNA of the killer. So and I don't know, I'm sitting there going how many forward capris were there in you know, it's possible that police have
already done that. They're not going to tell me everything that they've done. I'm sure they've been hammering this case a lot. But what I'm trying to do is something different. I'm trying to reach a reader, maybe like my mum, who thought it's not important and I wasn't sure and I never told anyone. Maybe I'll get that one person by doing this. And I hope that I wrote a story where I kind of paid tribute to the pain and complexity of being involved in murder. Like I'm taking
it from two perspectives. In this book. I'm looking at victims of murder. I'm also looking at family members of a murderer and what it's like to be around a murderer and to not know. And so I said it somewhere rural. It is based on a real town, So I hope I don't annoy anyone from that town. I haven't said which town. I hope I don't annoy anyone
from there. But you know, the book is going out there, and I am trying to do everything I can to because you know, like I said, I was handed this hot potato and I'm just now feeling like I'm passing it on maybe.
Well, the fact, I think in any eventure you go down when you're dealing with a true crime event that's actually happened. The fact that you've reached out to the family so that they've had some input and all that. I can imagine how they feel exploited if no one reaches reaches out to them.
Yeah, and I don't think it's ever been done. I think crime writers, you know, not ever ever, I'm sure it's been done, but I think that that crime writers will write about a crime and they'll put it in there and they'll disguise it. And I certainly have done this. Hope that you disguise it well enough so that you know that murderer's brother or that victim's father doesn't read it and go, oh, clearly this is inspired by what
happened to me. I've just come out, and this time I've come out, and because obviously I wrote about Lawrence in those books and what he did, and I was tapping into the mind of a murderer. But I didn't want to tiptoe through that gray area anymore. I wanted to stomp through it and find my way through this.
And I'm thinking, surely there's a way to do this where I don't hurt anyone, because I said to the guys hurting you or your kids or you know, Maria's brother, if there's any threat of that at all, I'm out.
Well was it years ago? Got it in the notes here where the police were making public appeals for information, so they must think there's looking for that missing missing piece.
Yeah, and in Paul and Paul and Lynnette's apartment block, they still don't know everyone who lived in that apartment block. If you can find someone who just lived there. There was a group of UK backpackers from the UK that lived there, very interested in them, and they can't find who they were, you know, because it was backpackers moving in and out and paying cash and yeah, all this kind of thing.
Well, it's worth worthwhile. But I understand you reluctance or concerns about doing something where you're delving from fiction into real. That's why when I looked at the cover and thought, oh this is brave. Where are we going here? I enjoyed enjoyed the route. It's yeah, and I know the area that you're talking about because I did a lot of I did a lot of policing out there.
I won't because I go there and I don't want to.
Yeah, I've had some interesting experiences out in those parts.
I knew it was I knew there was a history there. I could feel it. I thought, this is where the weirdos are, you know, not all of them, but they're hidden in these hills.
Yeah, yeah, there's some interesting things. 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. Just before we've finished talking about those particular cases in your book, this is in the author's note, and I think I just want to read that out. And so this is
at the end of the book. In the end true crime fictions, conventions and expectations, we meet the killer. He gets what he deserves, the answers and closure. At the time of writing this afterward, none of these things have been available to Paul and Stephen and everyone who lost Lynnette and Maria. I will never be able to write a book of fiction that completely encompasses the tragedy of
experience murdering real life. I don't believe anyone can. I'm glad you put that in because that's what the message I try to get across, because I'm conflicted too. I'm now in a space where I used to work in the cops and now I'm working in the media and the focus is true crime. But if you can do anything doing the podcast that we do, letting people understand the pain of what happens when someone's been murdered, because unless you've seen that firsthand, I'm telling you you don't get it.
And the thing about crime fiction as a mode is that, of course you get closure because that's what the reader wants and expects. And so I had to say to Paul and Stephen, it's going to be solved. I'm going to tell you who the killer is, and they're going to get what they deserve. But you don't get that, and I'm sorry, and you may never get that. I hope that you do, but you may never. And that's something that I cannot do in crime fiction is try to paint a picture of that forever and forever and
forever of not knowing. There's so many things that went into this book, and because they went in, they illustrate for me the unfairness. You know, when you meet the husband of the murdered wife, he defiantly says, well, I never moved out of this house. I stayed here because he wasn't going to take that house from me. Took my wife. He's not going to take my house, and
she was happy here. Well, guess what, both Paul and Stephen had to move out of their apartments, and they would have walked into those apartments for the first time with Lynette and Maria, and they would have been young and married, and Paul and Lynett had got a baby, and they would have walked in there for the first time, excited, this is our new apartment. How wonderful. And at the end of that story, it's Stephen and Paul walking out alone because that's where their wife died, and that dream
of that home was destroyed by this personal persons. You know, they don't the police don't know whether it's one killer or two. You know. I go into great detail in the afterward about these cases and what police want to know. So I hope people will pick it up and read it and think to themselves. But that's it's not possible to do it with fiction. And so I guess this whole journey has been in about, you know, because like
I said, I was going to solve it. I was going to I was going to be the person who knocked on the killer's door and he comes out and he's eighty and I'm like, guess what ding dong, motherfucker, and I punched him in the face and then the cops swirling and they get him. It has been all about learning the name of Heley.
Who's Headley Thomas.
That's right, that's right. She was there, she punched him, and I'd say to the judge and I'd do it again, you know. And it has been learning that. I have very big dreams about how you could get rid of that pain of homicide, but they're all incredibly fictional, you know.
Well, the pain of homicide and put this into your memory for potential future books. After I left the police, I went and visited the mother of Michelle Pogmore. Michelle was murdered in Mount Dreuitt a long long time ago, I think fifteen years ago or more. A third year old girl just found dumped in the park.
She'd been to a party.
I remember that she'd been there. It was just horrific, and I was the on call, the officer for it, went to the crime scene and spoke to Michelle's mum and we've stayed in touch over the years. I wasn't running the investigation, but from the initial long call I
made the connection with the mother. After I left the police, I thought that I'd go around and see her because she contacted me when I was in the police and she had a bedroom set up for Michelle exactly the way it was when she left, with tweety birds on the on the walls and all that. I asked, what's that about, and she said, I just can't bring it to take it down. Yeah, now that is carrying pain. That's unimaginable.
Yeah, it's for me. I look into the photos because I've seen photos that aren't out there in the press of Lynette and Maria, those personal ones. You know that that Paul and Steven keep to themselves, and you can see, you can see how happy these women were. And I feel a particular affinity for Lynnette, who.
Was like me.
She's got her hands in everything. You know, she's a dancer and she's got a salon and she's you know, she's selling products, and she's got a kid, and she's juggling all this kind of stuff, embracing life, yeah, really living and never stopping. And that was part of the you know, the suspect pool is enormous because they know so many people, and I felt like, you know, I felt something for her, and then meeting Steven and learning
about Maria, I just I stepped deep into it. So I hope the effect that I've had is good.
Well, we're talking about that's that's it right now. I think the fact that the families and that's frustration that their loved one has been forgotten. And so the fact that people are talking about I think that pays tribute to the victims in a way that their life counted and they haven't been forgotten, and it helps, it helps her families and place. Quite often they're doing a really good job trying and the solver murder, but they're not
updating the families. And yeah, that's that's concerning. Let's lighten it up a little bit. Okay, just a little bit, because you probably take us into a dark place anyway. You all the same, these crime writers and types, your favorite characters. Oh, Goshi a kid? Is it?
It is? It is? Look Russell and Bridy in this book. Ten out of ten would write them again. I love them. They're so much fun, and particularly Bridy with the animal rescue. She's an animal rescuer.
What was that based on that?
That's a little bit just on experiences I have had this.
You know, sure the listener wouldn't have picked that up, picked that up.
So at the moment, it's probably Russell and Bridy. I've written the next book in the row and almost finished your first draft, and I feel like after the first draft, I've only just starting to get to know those characters. So I've sketched it out. The builders that I based the their heist crew for that book. It's called Devil's Kitchen, and I based it on these real builders who are in my backyard. I still see one of those builders around and I'm like, ah, there is you know, and.
So you're they're they're four men building crew, but you put them doing.
Robber yeah, the highest Yeah, they had a vibe they had. I'm sure they're not criminals. I'm sure they're not, but they had a kind of a gang vibe. And I could very easily see them as a.
High st still trying to solve that robbery fan where they turned up as a group of builders.
Really, I could see it.
What about in fictional crime stories a dysfunctional detectives? Are all detectives dysfunctional in some way?
See this is when whenever somebody comes up to me in a book talk and they say, oh, I'm a police officer, I always go, I'm sorry. You know, they're so corrupt. In my early books, they were always corrupt because you're trying to throw as much bad stuff at the protagonists as you can. And if they're working in a police station where you know, there's all this underhanded ness going on and bullying and sexual harassment and nobody knows how to do their job, it's just hard for
that protagonist to do their job, you know. So I always go, oh, my god, you're either about to tell me about some factoid that I've gotten wrong. You know, there's more than two people on a crime scene canvas, there's like thirty people like, hey, yes, but for plus reasons this too, you know, you know, or you're about to say, could you stop making all the cops so corrupt?
But yeah, now in this In this novel in Red Belly Crossing, Russell's the cop and his mo o is just to walk around and just be aggressively awful to everyone you know. Have you ever known do? Were you reading that and thinking I know a guys.
Just like that. No, I saw no similarities whatsoever, So help me God. No, I understand it in different contexts. But I would put on, not put on, but I would carry a persona. If I'm in the middle of a job, there is absolutely no time for niceties, and forget your f and cup of tea like we're having a briefing. I don't care if you haven't had your coffee. This needs to be done and maybe I could have done it, done it differently, but it's not in me
because I think I think investigations are too important. People that get to name me go, hey, you actually smile. Well, I'm not going to smile in the middle of a homicide investigation when we're all under pressure. Just do your work and will smile afterwards.
Yeah, you've got to be more like a Doberman energy rather than like golden Retriet.
And I saw like I'm easy to work with, but the persona when things need to be done, and they need to be done now, and don't stuff this up. I've had investigations where people have made mistakes and literally murderers have got away, which we all make mistakes. I've made mistakes. We all make mistakes, but they've made mistakes out of laziness and that pisses me off. And then when you front them on it, they don't even care.
Like I've had people that I spoke to that have made the mistake and I'm thinking, I better keep a watch. That might be self harm. You want to you know, that's how do they live with that? They walk out and then they're laughing with their mates straight away.
But did you have you enjoyed the ways in which you've been represented in fiction? I know you've had the crime writing colleagues at mine specifically say you inspired that character. Have you enjoyed that or have found it weird?
Or look, I find it funny? And yeah, I think I've gone past because my experience with the Underbelly thing where the TV series where they're representing me in my personal life and all that, like any sense of privacy was gone at that stage. So I know I've had a lot of people that have contacted me to get the nuances of what life of a detective is. And for some reason they think, yeah, a couple of failed marriages, a little bit of getting charged, high profile, high profile jobs.
See that story is very popular in the genre of crime fiction going back decades. It's the rogue detective, the fouled marriages because he's wedded to the job. You know, so now he's single in the novels so that he can find a leading lady and all.
This, and yeah, well, yeah, the period.
What I'm saying is you very cliche, I feel like, and when I would come home and sit there in my empty apartment because of another failed relationship, eating my.
Pizza whilst having come from a crime scene, I think, what But I know in like, I half joke about this. Well I do joke about it. I don't really mean it. But I would often say to people, what, once you've had your first divorce, then you'll become a real detective. And having said that, I fully support the sanct of marriage, and yeah, and I promote marriage. And there's some great detectives that never have a divorce, but there's lots of separation.
But I worked on one and I won't mention the name, but it was quite quite funny because I've been there when I was going through let's say, relationship issues. It was harder for the crooks because I had so much time on my hand, and it's a weekend, I'm going to work, and I would do that just because that was easier than dealing with the pain of my own stuff. Ups. Yeah, to just throw yourself in the work and you felt
good about yourself. But I had one young bloke on a investigation and he will always seem to be available, and like, who can work back? I can, boss, And he was from the local area command, hadn't worked homicide before. I can, boss, I need someone to do this, I'll do that. And that went on for about three months and I was impressed, totally committed. And then it got to a bit weird, like he could I'd be in on the weekends working. He'd be on weekends working, And
I said, what's going on? He said, ah, bit of trouble in for private life is to bury myself in the work. So yeah, and he's a great, great detective and now he's happily married and he's got a kid. But we might we might wrap it up here and we'll keep informed if any any breakthrough is on the case from the book. But yeah, normally if I thank thank guests for coming on, I thank them please for their services. I'm going to thank you for the wildlife
of this country. Oh yeah, the amount of rescues. How many you were telling me the other day, how many rescues have.
You done this year? I'm up to seventy two birds this year, and they're mostly dumped chickens, ducks, quails, fantail pigeons. Yeah, I'm specializing at the moment on poultry and birds. I'm up to seventy two.
Well, good on you, that is. I'd say it like it sounds like it's coming across as a joke, but there are people out there like you that are doing these things. Also, congratulations on your career from the Setbacks. Imagine if you just gave up after the first novel. Yeah, and I'm not a giver twenty two. By the time we speak to you next week, you've probably got twenty four books. So yeah, pleasure speaking to you.
Always have fun, and this has been a real career goal Bingo card coming on eye catch killers. I thought one you know, when you started the podcast, I was like, I said to my publicist, start pitching now, I want to be on that show.
Well, I'm glad you came on the podcast. So it's a privilege sitting down having your chat with you and a lot of fun.
Oh good, thanks cheers. Nineteen two ninet