ABOVE SUSPICION-Joe Sharkey

paid informants and busting drug rings and bank robbers. But when one informant fell in love with him, passion and duty would collide with tragic results. A coal miner's daughter, Susan Smith, was a young, attractive, struggling single mother. She also was a drug user, sometimes described as a con artist. Thief and professional liar. Ultimately, Putnam gave in to Smith's relentless pursuit, but when he ended the affair, she waged

a campaign of vengeance that threatened to destroy him. When at last she confronted him with a shocking announcement, a violent scuffle ensued, and Putnam, in a burst of uncontrolled rage, finally fatally strangled her. Though he had everything necessary to get away with murder, a spotless reputation, a victim with multiple enemies, and the protection of the Bureau's impenetrable shield,

his conscience wouldn't allow it. Tormented by a year of guilt and deception, Putnam finally led authorities to Smith's remains. This is the story of what happened before, during, and after his startling confession. Revised and updated. This book also includes photos and a new epilogue by the author. Book we're featuring this evening is above Suspicion, an undercover FBI agent, an illicit affair, and a murder of passion, with my

special guest, journalist and author Joe Sharky. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Joe Sharky, Hey, Dan how are you doing. Thank you very much. I'm doing fine. Thank you. This is an incredible book. Tell us a little bit about how this was when this was first published in I Believe ninety three. Tell us how you came to be the author of this book, why you became involved, how you became involved.

And my agent at the time heard about Kathy and put me in touch with Kathy, And as I got to know her, I thought, this is really a remarkable story, a remarkable event. It was. It was below the media radar because it had occurred in this very isolated portion

of Appalachia, and I thought more and more. Kathy was extremely forthcoming and her husband was available to talk in prison, and as I got you know, I spent some time in that part of eastern Kentucky and Pikeville, and then farther east along the Tug River where Susan Smith, the victim had grown up in a coal mine town, and more and more I realized there's a lot of richness in this story. So I sort of just dug into it, and above suspicion was the result.

area that has a great influence on this story. Tell us a little bit about this Pikeville, East Kentucky.

near Pikeville. I think it was a place where outsiders traditionally had come in to extract things, starting with the lumber industry and then and then of course the coal mine barrens. And there was a place of up and down economy with with the coal mines. By the time I got there, and by the time this book was set a few years before that, everything had fallen on hard times. The coal mine economy was was in its

just flopping around and not doing very well. It was It's a place where, I mean, I got very fond of eastern Kentucky, and particularly not just a Pikeville, but of the town where Susan Smith grew up, Cold Freeburn, which is right on the river, very much a coal mine town. Used to be a company town. Uh this let's you know, Susan grew up in this environment of isolation, suspicion, but extreme family orientation, if you know what I mean. There were there were always people around her who basically

put up with her. She was a remarkably complex girl who had who had dreams of of getting out of that that that life, and I never sort of had the skills to uh to achieve those dreams. She was sassy, she was pretty. Uh. The picture of her that I have in the book is the only picture if I could get, and it doesn't really, you know, do justice

to her. She was pretty, she was that, she was smart, although uneducated, uh, and she was desperate to uh to be something and had absolutely no no skills in order to get there. The the area is one of the themes in this book is the not just the isolation, but the important, the critical importance of what I think of as hillbilly hearsay. It's an area where at the

time I don't know how it is exactly now. Word of mouth was how information sort of got passed from one place to another, and word of mouth had a tremendous influence on the way this story played out, or particularly on the fact when Susan Smith disappeared from her home and her family and her kids in Freeburn, Kentucky.

The word of mouth helped to cement the idea that she had as she had gone, as she had done in the in the past, that she might have been off on some caper, that she she was involved in petty drug deals with some you know, shady characters, as was her husband, and she had been known to disappear before. She always took care to make sure that her children

she had two kids, were looked after. And she wasn't that she was a horrific mother, that she had no major mothering skills, but she did look after her kids. So she disappears, and the hearsay is that, well she was, she's off to you know, Chicago or some place in Ohio on a drug deal, and that accounted for the fact that it took months, maybe six months, for it to become clear to particularly her sister who lived also in Freeburn on the on the River, that something was

desperately wrong. Susan had not been in touch at all, and then the the mystery began as to who was who were the suspects, Who were the major suspects in Susan's disappearance, And of course, as is always the case, the husband in which this guy was a near do well but also a charming guy named named Kenneth Smith. He was the prime suspect. The local you know, the local cops had no crime to investigate. The county cops, so they you know, they did talk to him. They

figured there were other suspects. There was a notorious bank robber again, a charming guy named Cat Eyes, who was you know, could have been a suspect. The Cat Eyes was in prison at the time. But the investigation, such as it was, was a missing person investigation and it really went nowhere for months and months and months and months. Well, Susan Smith's sister, Shelby, kept pressing the local cops to uh, you know, to get on with it. And Shelby knew

one thing, and only one thing. She knew that that she had never met Mark Puttnam, the FBI agent. But she knew that Susan was always on about Mark Puttnam. Susan was Mark Putnam's informant. She was on the payroll of the FBI. She was helping Mark crackcases. And Susan told stories and it was hard to sort out what was really was, you know, what was a pipe dream for Susan. And Susan told stories about her affair with

Mark Putnam. Now these stories were being told in far away, you know, forty miles away from pike pike Field, and people sorry shrugged and said, well, you know that's that's Susan. Maybe she is, you know, romantically linked with this guy, but there's no you know, there was no evidence of that at the time. So eventually Mark Putnam became focused, it became more out of focus as a potential suspect and what at the time was just a disappearance a

missing person. It took Shelby a long long time to knock heads together and get the cops, to get the FBI to sort of get on this case because the FBI was horrified even the idea of one of its star young agents would be involved in something they the disappearance of a girl, and that all finally, about almost a year later, started to come into uh started to

become a more serious investigation. In the meantime, Mark Putnam and his wife, who was a very assertive woman who got involved in the FBI's business very much in an office in Pikeville that was basically unsupervised from the higher FBI. They had gotten out of Pikeville on you on good terms, and Mark was as part of his reward for being such a crime fighter in Pikeville, was transferred with his wife and two kids at this time to the Miami Bureau,

which was quite a prize. And in the Miami Bureau, as all this stuff was going on back in eastern Kentucky, Mark's Mark was a real boy scout and his conscience really preyed on him. Throughout the entire year. He kept thinking, well, they're going to find out, They're going to find out, but he didn't doing it. He didn't say anything until

about a year later. He started making moves like we've got to get this thing clear, and it all came It all just came to ahead a year later when Mark, through a series of machinations with lawyers and with the prosecutor in Pikeville, decided that he was going to fess up, tell them that he had killed Susan Smith in a fit of passion, and tell them where the body was. And suddenly we had not just a missing we had not a missing person's case. We had we had a homicide.

And the process of getting marked through that confession period struck me as very very interesting because the district attorney in Pike County, in Pikeville was kind of in a. He was a really interesting guy. John Paul Runyon was

his name. Because he didn't have a body. He had somebody confessing to a crime that he had no evidence of except the fact that the person had been missing, and he had to very carefully, step by step concoct along with the attorney for Mark Putnam, on the other hand, a crime basically that Mark Puttnam could comfortably, comfortably I don't mean comfortably, but that Mark Putnam would in fact

plead to eventually. The crime was second degree murder, and the deal was Mark had to tell them from Miami where the body was. Once that was agreed to and negotiated and put in place, the cops and the FBI were led to this scene where Mark had dumped the body on a sort of a mountain ravine not far from Pikeville itself, and they found the and Mark confessed. And in Kentucky, first degree murder is extremely hard to

prove and the best the prosecutor could get. And I talked to him at great length when I was researching this book. Was second degree murdered, a prison sentence of twelve years, and Mark fled guilty, went to prison, to a federal prison because FBI agents I thought to be at some risk if they were in a state prison. And that in turn ignited another controversy in Pikeville, which was yankee, fair haired Yankee boy gets an easy easy, an easy sentence, and so that controversy is still going

on in Pikeville. To me, the overall thrust of this book, that as I spent more and more time there and got to know Mark Putnam and his wife and the people who knew the citizen Smith, is that it was almost a classic track in that you had a hero who was brought low by his own hubris. Mark Putnam was was driven, he was up. You know, he literally was a boy scout. He was a high school and college soccer star. He believed firmly in the FBI. That

was his dream. His wife was behind him, pushing all the way, and this this was really his dream, was to become an FBI agent. He was a really really good one. For most of his time in Pikeville. He was cracking cases. Susan Smith became an informant and she really helped him cracked some bankruptbery cases and things like that. He was looking really really good until of course it all it all just collapsed on everybody, not just Mark, but on Mark's family and of course on Susan's family

and her two children. So that was the niche of my interest in it.

was at this outpost. What you have in the book, though, is the complex relationship between his wife and this is a person with a little bit of a checkered past as well and redemption in her life, and then she met her dream Mark and Susan Smith, and the relationship with his wife Kathy, because she became an ally of Susan relating to her. So tell our audience about this relationship that developed that contributed to Susan falling in love.

Tell us, as you do in the book, about this evolving relationship that contributed to this, as you say, tragic death.

and he was a goof off. So Mark Putnam was basically operating without in essence adult supervision, if you know what I mean, Kathy, it was a very I mean Kathy was a really aggressive, assertive woman who helped Mark in every way to becoming at the Eye agent in Connecticut where they both grew up. She because she involved herself in the the i's business because basically there was no there's no secretary in the office. She got to the point where she was handling a lot of the

business at the FBI office. I don't mean the investigations, but taking the phone calls. And she got to know because Susan Smith had become so deeply involved as an informant with Mark, she got to know Susan and the one thing that I mean, I got to know Kathy very very well and also Mark. But Kathy was a helper She was one of these people who involved yourself, involved yourself in sort of not hopeless cases, but desperate cases.

And Kathy fell in as a helper to Susan, and Kathy made it her business to try to put Susan on a better path. She kept telling her, you can, you can straighten things out, you can get there's a way to get out out of this situation. And Susan, for her this would mostly telephone conversations. Susan, for her part, began to model herself after Kathy. Kathy had a bit of a checkered background, as you say, but Kathy had had as a young adult, had really cleared all those

things up. Kathy was pretty, she was poised, and to Susan Dies Kathy was the frosty queen, I mean, Kathy was nothing of the sort. But Susan began to model herself after Kathy in terms of the way she spoke. Susan was cognizant of the fact that she and I don't use this term hillbilly in any pejorative sense, but that she was considered a hillbilly. Susan tried to improve

her grammar. Susan was always a reader, which always which fascinated me, and more to a great extent, Susan began to act like Kathy, and I don't know how that affected Mark, because Mark was thrown into intimate relation with professional relations with Susan. Kathy had no idea. Susan told her that she was in love with Mark, but Kathy had no idea that Mark would ever get involved into

a romantic relationship with Susan. But it was interesting how those two I think of these two women as Kathy and Susan as orbiting around Mark, and I think to the extent that I that I could, you know, it being a non fiction book where you have to be accurate, I think I got that idea that these two women

were involved in this tragic orbit around around Mark. And actually, actually when the movie was made many many years, not long ago, the star, the woman who the actress who played Susan the Dead, the dead Girl, the dead coal miner's daughter was Amelia Clark from a Game of Thrones, and that on location it became a Wilia made it clear that she really was driven to that aspect of the book in her portrayal of Susan Smith, and I said to her, Amelia, after I watched her work on location.

I was a consultant on the shoot. I said, you've really brought this young woman to life, which is something I tried to do in the book. But I was astonished at how well Amelia understood all that and got the very interesting facets of Susan Smith, and she worked. Amelia worked day and night for three months on this movie shoot. But I think obviously I was not able to interview Susan Smith. I talked to both the people who knew her, and I got these various parts of

her personality. But somehow Amelia seemed to just synthesize all that and she just nailed it. So I'm interested in seeing the finished movie when it comes out, and finally seeing Susan Smith almost in the flesh, if you know what I mean. But those two women fascinated me. I was Kathy was was determined to get the story told.

Kathy was furious at what she thought of as the FBI having abandoned her husband in the sense that he wasn't supervised, that they kept pushing him to get more and more involved in these these crimes, and that her husband was not a victim. She never never saw that, but that her husband was pushed into areas that that should have been supervised a little bit better. There was an agent, another agent in the bureau who was in love with Susan Smith. He was a no good guy.

He was an IAGO and he didn't he didn't know it, and he kept needling trying to get Susan Smith interested in him rather than interested in Mark. And Kathy just was determined to get to get this story out. And you know, I talked to the FBI, and particularly to the FBI agent in charge of this after the after the crime became known, and they were they were very very astonished at Kathy. Uh. They they they did. I

think they did the right thing after Mark. You know, at the point that Mark confessed and they understood Kathy's frustration. She uh, she never let go and there was basically nothing they can could do about it at that point. But Kathy was right that and the FBI finally, the FBI UH supervisors finally admitted to me and and and also to the record that this was a real mistake.

This was a black eye for the FBI, not just the fact that one of their star agents killed a female informant, but that he had been allowed and encouraged in fact, to keep that relationship going. And that was just that was just trouble. And I think the the FBI finally, you know, came to that conclusion. We made a terrible mistake here in letting in encouraging this guy to keep pushing and pushing and pushing, and in not giving a better advice about, Hey, this informant is UH

is going to be trouble for you. You better, you better back off of it. So that that was the precipitating event was when Uh, Susan desperate. At this point, Susan was was almost delusional about her relationship with Mark. It was a short lived relationship. I'm hill billy. Hearsay is that these two had this torret affair. They didn't as far as I can determine, and I worked hard on this aspect of it. Uh, they might have had. They had a sexual relationship a couple of times in

a motel in Pikeville and maybe once on a mountain road. Uh. From Mark's point of view, uh, and I you know, I blame him for this. He saw Susan essentially in a transactional way. She was helping him. She was deeply in love with him. He wasn't in love with her. She saw him as the white knight as they the nied on the white horse, who was gonna, you know, collect her and leader out of town to a better life. That was the case that that she was tragically mistaken

in in how she saw Mark. She at some point in uh towards the end of this relationship, she thought she was pregnant. She had a pregnancy test at a local clinic that seems to indicate that she she was. There's some there's some dispute on that. It doesn't really matter. She confronted Mark. Mark had come back to town for a trial on a case that he had cracked earlier, and he had to come back for the pre trial motions.

She confronted him with the fact that she was pregnant, that this was his child and that made certainly made sense. And unless he this, unless he agreed to marry her and you know, carry her off, she was going to expose the relationship to not not just to Kathy, but to the FBI and to the public, and that would

ruin Mark's career. He suggested. At this point, they had a meeting place up up at a mountain up at a mountain plate the mountain part of town, away from prying eyes, because the prying eyes were everywhere in this part of the world. They went to this mountain place that they had gone to, this pull off that they had gone to many many times before it to discuss bureau business. And she I'm confident that this is this is accurate. Obviously I couldn't talk to her. She precipitated

a fight. She was a fighter. I mean she was a physical fighter. If you crossed her in any any physical way, she'd fight. Uh. And she precipitated a fight, which Mark tried to tried to tone down the fight over you better you know, you'd better marry me and or I'll expose you. And here it became very intense at this dark mountain road away from any eyes whatsoever. That as she was beating on Mark, he grabbed her around the neck and told her to shut up, and

then lost it. He strangled her. She this is this is from Mark's point of view. Now I talked to him in prison. She she sort of collapsed and he realized, oh my god, I might have killed her. And he realized that he did, and then he did something that I've never quite fully understood, although I understand it partially.

The next morning, Mark was supposed to drive from Pikeville, where he had come back for this pre tile business, to Lexington, which is at least a two hour drive away to the FBI had to an FBI bureau office in Lexington to discuss the case that he had, the trial he had been working on with some FBI supervisors in that area. So Mark, being you know, the the the the obedient and Gunghill FBI agent that he was, now had a body and in a panic.

he was hung over. And after the after the day's business in Lexington, minds you with a car with his car parked and a body in the trunk. He drives back to Pikeville and drives up to an air another area that he knew uh in the mountains that was actually a strip mine area. Uh finds a pull off. He knows this area very well, and in a panic, dumps the body into a ravine and and drives off back to his motel, thinking, well, they're going to find this body and it's all going to be over, but

then you'll have to fess up. Nobody ever found the body until he until a year later, So that that always struck me as first of all, horrifying that he drove with a day with a body in the trunk of his car. I talked to him in prison. He was very cooperative. He didn't try to make excuses, and he talked about that. And the reason I know how he felt is that he told me and I was.

I came away from, you know, two days in talking to him in prison, with the impression that what he said was true, but there was no evidence that he that there was another part of this story. I was horrified by what he had done, of course, as was he, but I thought, okay, this guy's being straight. Every the stories matched up Kathy's story matched up the you know, a year goes by and he's frank, he's frantic with guilt, and finally, as the he's in Miami and he realizes

the FBI. The local cops have got the ear of the FBI, and the FBI is beginning to look into this case with the absolute certainty that one of the agents could not possibly be involved. The FBI team that went to Pikeville basically came there with the idea, we got to clear clear this guy's reputation up and Mark, sensing that he was being figured as a suspect, went to his superior in Miami, gave some indication that he was ready to take a lie detector test. Reluctantly, they said,

you know, you don't have to do that. What are you crazy? He did. They failed the lie detector test, and then the FBI started to be Okay, we got a problem here. This guy might be it might be the guy. And Mark, knowing that things were coming to a rapid conclusion, that that night told his wife that they were She had picked him up at an airport. He had gone for the lie detector test. Told his wife in an airport are a motel bar near the airport, he said, She said, you know she was obviously he

was distraught. She said, all right. He indicated that it was a problem with Susan smith disappearance, Kathy said, And I have this from both Mark and Kathy. Kathy said they both had a couple of drinks. Kathy said, well, did you sleep with her? And Mark said yes. And Kathy had no idea that that would that would be the answer. Kathy was kind of naive on this point. And then Kathy sort of almost like just being sarcastic, what would you kill her? And Mark said yes, And

Kathy's world crashed at that point. She wrote that her her world, her family's world. I mean, everybody had thought this guy was was just Dudley do right. Everything collapsed, and Kathy did her best to try to make sure that that Mark negotiated at least as good a deal as he could. As I said, none of neither of them ever indicated to me that they felt like they

were victim victims. Kathy felt that she was. Kathy was furious at the FBI, but they both absolutely agreed that this is what happened, and that Mark never ever in my time talking to him and said that tried to deflect guilty was he almost felt like he had to punish himself.

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join Honey slash murder. Now, Joe, we are just going over, skipping over basically some of the incredible dynamics of this complex relationship that Susan finds herself in before in this fantasy that she has that she will rest Mark from his wife Kathy, even though she's friends with Kathy, and he'll leave his children, and like you say, she's delusional at this point, but we haven't talked about the situation with her husband, Kenneth that puts her in this incredibly

vulnerable position. And then you talk about the tryst that they had a few times it had sex. Of course, Mark makes the incredible stupid move of not using a condom, and so he believes rightfully or at least he believes that he could possibly or could likely be the father of this child. And when you talk about the car and the meeting. She is is provoking him, and he is provoking her with talks of possible abortion, and then

he and Kathy taking over the child from Susan. Well, you talk about really go ahead.

Mark knew how to treat women. He'd grown up you know, in a in a I don't mean politically conservative, but he grown up in an environment as a kid. And also you know, as a college student and getting into the FBI, where you behaved, well, you had some you had some sense of courtesy and comportment. And he always treated Susan with respect. He treated her as a as a person of some some you know, worthy of respect. She was blown away by that. No one had ever

treated her that way. And I think it kind of led to her absolute misapprehension about any future that she might have with Mark. And she certainly thought, well, this guy and I are going to get out and my kids are going to get out of this awful environment and go to something much happier life. So that was really important with Susan's this apprehension. And I talked to, of course, everybody who knew Susan when she was growing up and had absolutely fit with their assessment of her.

She had pipe dreams. She she she thought she might be an entertainer at some point, because she was apparently not a bad singer. She she she always thought that things were going to be better than they were, and she never really did anything to achieve that. Kathy kept importuning her, as it were, you can you can get out of this environment, but you got to take step A, step B, step C. You have to get yourself away from her husband kind of was abusive, kind of friends

were shady characters. She's got all these other characters that that sort of braided through her life, including Cat Eyes, the notorious but actually kind of inept bank robber. There were a lot of banks in this area at the time. No big banks had come into this part of halp of A that there were small banks in every town and cat Eyes made a living robbing these banks. He'd spend time in prison and me get out and he'd rob some more banks. Cat Eyes was always if cat Eyes

had money, everybody, all his friends had money. He was generous and he wasn't violent. He was just a kind of an antique character who robbed banks. And he was part of that environment with Kevin, with Kenneth, Raather and Susan had the good sense and of this is not this is not going to end well. So she kept flailing about trying to think how am I going to get out of this mess? And Mark Putnam was the way out.

build his career in the Bureau. This was more and more endangering her with her own family, and people that had threatened her and had actually made their threats turned them to beatings. So she was increasingly in a precarious, doubtful situation. Then she believed she was pregnant, told people she was pregnant, told people she was vulnerable, invulnerable and

had FBI protection. And those are the kinds of things that she said to him, to Mark in that meeting, that she was provoking him and provoked him to kill her, didn't he.

against Cat Eyes. Now, this is an area where everybody knows everybody, everybody knows everybody's family, and I mean this goes back and back. You know, grudges are being are held here. This, as you noted, is where they had Field McCoy few who played out exactly right there. And it's that kind of an environment where there's there's suspicion, there's there's an idea that you don't you certainly don't wrap anybody out. And Susan went public at the trial,

well uh, and that really expected that. That was the most I think, the most brave things she did, but also the most stupid things she did because she put herself out front, and that of course caused lots of you know, Cat Eyes's girlfriend Sherry, a couple of you know a bit later after the trial beat Susan up I think in Pikeville. But it also created an atmosphere where you had, you had potential suspects when Susan went missing, you had certainly, you know, you had you had criminals.

You had friends and family of criminals. And when I say criminals, it's again it's kind of an antique kind of I don't mean to, uh in any way justify the crime, but we're not talking people shooting each other in the head, with bank robberies and drug deals and things like that. That kind of crime at that at

that level. But you had a bunch of were involved in this in this area, and so there were suspects to look at when Susan disappeared, and Susan had created a bit of a local scandal by going public with informing on a bank rubber.

This FBI guy named Ron Poole that has the hots for Susan is calling Kathy, Mark's wife. And then Kathy, like you said, she's a very interesting character, but she is holding back some information from Mark. She wants to get the hell out of Pikeville.

of Susan. And at the point we're now talking about, Kathy was desperate, desperate, desperate to get her, Mark and their children out of Pikeville because she said the environment was just stultifying to her, and it also had become terrifying as more and more criminals became involved in basically the family life, because there was no separation between her and Mark and Mark's wife Mark's work. So Kathy is very much a a force here here. Uh, well, Kathy's

working very hard to get Mark out of town. Ron Poole, the FBI agent you just mentioned, uh, is a real uh screw up. He's the reason he's a veteran agent. The reason Ron is in Pikeville is because nobody wanted to deal with him in more important offices. Ron as just as you said, had the hots for Susan. So you've got you've almost got an Iago character here that he's he's just working conniving to get Ron wants Mark

Putnam out of the way. And Ron is pressing on Susan, pressing her, and she is aware of that, and she's terrified of Ron. Uh. And she's aware that if Mark Putnam is not on the scene. Ron is the guy she has to deal with. He had been wheedling Kathy, telling Kathy that Susan of course, was telling everybody that she had this relationship with Mark, telling Kathy that that Susan was was going around ragging about her intimate relationship with Mark and making Kathy even more uh frantic and uh.

Ron never knew anything really about about this relationship except with what Susan had had told that what he'd heard Susan saying. He's sort of he's almost a peripheral character, but he's just in there. He's just causing trouble that that actually adds to the to the the circumstances that make this whole thing blow up. Eventually. Ron was in there just a needling Mark. Ron was the guy that told Mark that he'd seen the showed Mark the medical

the clinic UH report that said Susan was pregnant. So Ron was a fascinating character. Me and and Ron's idea was I mean, Ron's goal was this, He wanted Susan. That was his goal. He was basically he worked drug deals, but he was all over the place. He was he was just off the reservation, frequently running drug deals. Rond's most interested The thing that interested Ron Ron is dead now. The thing that interested him most was women. He was he was just that was that was his goal was

an FBI agent, was was to just have women. And eventually the FBI sanctioned him after all this ended. And you know, as I talked to Jim Huggins, the FBI supervisor on this case, who became involved very late in the process, but just went down the Gangbusters and into Pikeville. Uh, Jim Hoggins just basically shrugged his shoulders in dismay at the role of Ron Pool in all of this and just said that the agency should never have sent round Bull to this place. And they were just horrified at Rumbull.

He died five or six years ago, but he was a factor, and he was the one that was working on Kathy to try to get her even more frantic about getting out of town. So Kathy being who she is, and Kathy explained all this to me in great detail

over a long period of time. As he was researching the book, Kathy began to on her own make overtures to known criminals because Kathy knew that if an FBI agent's family was considered to be in danger, the agent would be transferred bome right out of town to Kathy. In a very strange and almost perverse way, worked on one particular criminal trying to get at least enough information that they were in danger that would cause the FBI to transfer her and the transfer Mark and the family

out of town. That was all part of the weird circumstances that were playing around this fairly basic case of murder. But you had all these people that had different goals, that had no idea. It was like these two like a bunch of trains that were coming at each other and couldn't see each other that finally just collided.

I'm not really good at this at all. He had covered up his wound on his hand with some lame excuse. But it's very interesting, very very interesting, how savvy and how strong and how supportive Kathy was when she found out the truth and then Mark again was trying to commit legal suicide by submitting to a polygraph. This is one of the most exciting and interesting and edge of

your seat parts of this book. Tell us about this meeting that was supposed to be and what Kathy does, which is instrumental in him not spending the rest of his life in prison. I think.

a case. He's obviously a suspect. But they don't have a crime, they don't have a body. What they have is a missing person's investigation. So I mean the FBI jurisdiction except it's one of their agents, is kind of limited in a missing person case that's kind of a

local or state case. Kathy beats it into his head that he needs to he needs to get some good legal advice and that obviously he has to face the music here, but there are ways that he can he can limit his exposure, and through Kathy's pressure, he does decide.

They do decide to get a lawyer who then negotiates, very very skillfully negotiates with the the good old boy John Bull Runyon, who has seen everything in Pikeville, negotiates a step by step if this guy tells you, I finally you know it comes down to this guy will tell you. This guy will admit that there's a there's been a homicide, tell you where the body is, and then this whole thing can be can come to a conclusion.

But we need a deal, and they did work out a deal that Mark would be would receive twelve years in prison, which is a fairly light sentence, and John Paul run in. The prosecutor in Pikeville is of course aware of the local reaction to any any when when this whole thing finally comes explodes. He's I mean, he's

an elected prosecutor, he's been around forever. He's aware that he's going to be on the spot for giving what may look like a break to this this FBI guy, this this yankee from Connecticut who sailed in and murdered a local girl and kind of gets a break. So he was in a terrific fix. And I think, you know, he took me over this step by step, and he was always troubled me to the end of his life by the reaction to it, because, as he told me,

he had no he had no other choice. He had to get the best deal he could get in terms of being a prosecutor, and that was to have more confess to clear this thing up. And Okay, so he gets twelve years in a federal prison, and that's the best deal they could get. There was a lot of furious reaction in Pikevielle to that, and I think to this day, these things never go away in that part

of Kentucky. To this day, there's a fury about that and I went down back to Pipeville and Freeburn Well right after the movie had been shot a couple of years ago, and kind of re researched a lot of these talked to a lot of people who had been who were in the original edition of the book. And it's still very raw. It's amazing because it's now, what thirty years later, how raw the emotions are over the fact that this outsider, this yankee got a deal. Now Mark is out of prison, Now he got out and

ten I think it was. I guess I'm not spoiling the story because in the apologue of the current edition of the book, Kathy tragically dies of a heart attack at age thirty eight. Now, I was in touch with Kathy throughout this process because she just became essentially after the book was published. She became in a way of friend, and I was always I always had an ear to

listen to her. And what I didn't realize, and I truly didn't in long conversations with her on the phone, was that Kathy was drinking very heavily at the time. She was basically ruined, her life was ruined, and she stayed faithful. I mean she still you know, stayed faithful to Mark, but eventually her health just went downhill and she had a heart attack and she died at age thirty eight to one of that's in the epilogue of the book of just one of the additional tragedies in this story.

whenever they could be. From Mark's point of view, Kathy was now here is where I You know, I have to reassess a little bit about Mark, because he became a little hostile talking to me about Kathy. That Kathy was she wouldn't give up on this FBI obsession. But I think he did realize that that Kathy was drinking something I didn't realize, drinking a lot, something I didn't really twig on, and he became in prison, deeply frustrated

and worried about the children. Now that's the part of the story that I know much less about at this point, except you know, when it all when it collapsed and Kathy, Kathy died and the grandparents took the children, and Mark is now out of prison, the kids are living and there of course adults, they're living in Florida, Marcus in Florida, And that's sort of just where things stand after thirty years after this horrible thing occurred.

Because there are really two parts of the story. There's the there's the crime, and then there's the other stuff that's very complex, including Mark's year of being having his guilty conscience weighing on him. I thought, how are they going to tell this, and that they did it. You know, a movie is two hours long, and you know, I looked at that. I saw the script and I thought, okay, well,

they kind of boiled this stuff. One of the hitches was when the movie started filming and they had to shoot in Harlan, Kentucky, because Pikeville had sort of become a little spruced up, and Harlan, Kentucky, a coal mine town somewhat to the west of Pikeville, looked like pike what Pikeville looked like in nineteen eighty nine. So they shot there and throughout it. There was a three month shoot. The director was Philip Noyce, who's been accomplished director, and

of course the star was Amelia Clark. Amelia was deeply concerned that she'd get Susan's death right because she was playing basically, you know, a dead girl. And Amelia told me she'd read read my book a couple of times. She had a dog eared, but she really was she was a really hard worker. She really tried to get Susan right, and I think I think she really nailed that. I myself, I've never been in loved in a movie.

I actually thought it was a wonderful experience spending time on a location where you have like two hundred Hollywood people, crew and stars show up with this little isolated town and accommodate themselves to it. And I thought, this is interesting. You've got all these skilled people who are you know, just they just show up like it's it's just like

an event to them, and they make themselves comfortable. It was a dry town, dry county actually, and so they arranged those runs two hours across the mountains to Tennessee and brought back. You know, there were supplies of booths and by and rage. There was like one motel in town. They were all crammed into that. Some of the stars had houses that were rented, you know, nearby. Amelia and her assistant were in a house nearby. But it was like interesting to me how these people basically just got

into it day in and day out. They start shooting at seven in the morning or even before sometimes and wrap up at eleven o'clock at night. Nobody was complaining, And I thought this is an interesting business. I looked at the you know, when you write a book, you do it on your own. But I saw the movie and I thought, look at the collegiality here. Everybody is working toward the same goal, and that's a bunch of

people involved. So I really enjoyed the movie experience, and I can't wait until the movie comes out.

and in Turkey. Uh So it was months ago it was available at the you know, the cinemas in Dubai in with Arab with with Arab Arabic subtitles, and in Turkey where where it was dubbed uh. And so the movie has been released in in in the Middle East and Turkey, also in Spain on pay per view, which is weird. Right now, there's no release date. I'm told it's going to be early in two thousand and twenty,

but we shall see. It's very it's very frustrating, not just to me, of course, but to the you know, the people who worked hard on this movie felt noise. And Amelia and Jack Hughes who played Mark Putnam, and one of the interesting characters was Johnny knox still is in the movie on the location. Johnny was like the star in town. She was he was the one that says, this tiny little town, but he was the one who

was the celebrity. And Amelia, who of course is brown hair and she's you know, unassuming and and sort of quiet. They felt that she would be the celebrity, but she really wasn't. People didn't really recognize her from from uh uh, from the TV series Game of Throw.

you know, difficult circumstances, got got it basically right. He and I went round and round initially, but then you know, I realized Chris, Chris wrote.

were as well as the stars. Just I felt that I was part of the process, and I tried to stay out of the way as much as possible. Once I walked into a shot, not knowing that they were that they were filming, and I heard Philip from down the street cut and then through his megaphone, Oh you're in the shot, And I.

And so if you're going to look for a consultant, somebody that's going to advise on set, he might as well go to that author and It really is a great package deal that that person has given these filmmakers and done all that investigative work, so they certainly don't have to go back and do it. And then as the author and the expert on this subject and this story, they go to you and understandably they get what they need. So very interesting.

you know, with many publishers. Open Road was a delight to deal with, and they encouraged me and I of course jumped right into it to add what I could to the existing book, and I did that, particularly in a new, lengthy epilogue. They were absolutely delight delightful to work with, and they still promote the book very effectively.

On Amazon. They have every once in a while they have a sale that you can you can buy the e book edition, not not not the print edition for whatever one or I'm like, okay, uh, the printed the print edition is Uh. It was a good experience. It's a good editorial experience. And the book is available of course on Amazon or wherever else you might you might buy a book. I assume it's in bookstores and they get the new edition because that's got a lot of news.

The epilogue. I'm very proud of the epilogu because, as I said, I went back there right after the movie was finished, and spent time talking to everybody in Pikeville that I had taught in Freeburn. And some of these people don't come out well in the book, and I thought, well, maybe something I want to shoot me here. But it's just this hospitable area and people were welcoming and ready to tell me what they knew that they didn't know

thirty years ago. So overall was good experience and I'm pleased with the current edition of the book.