CAITLIN ROTHER TRUE CRIME RETROSPECTIVE-Caitlin Rother

and six. Caitlyn Rother went on to become a Bulletzer nominated investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author. Caitlyn Rother has written or co authored thirteen true crime books and several kindle e books. Her book Death on Motion Boulevardist, slated for release in two thousand and twenty one. Caitlyn's true crime body of work includes the books Poison, Love, Body Parts, Lost Girls, Wherehope Begins, Slash, Deadly Devotion, Dead Reckoning, Secrets,

Lies and Shoelaces. I'll take care of you then no one can have her, Naked Addiction, Hunting, Charles Manson, Love Gone Wrong, Twisted Triangle, A Complicated Woman, Dead on Delivery, and Kill Him some More. Caitlyn Rother will discuss how she got started in true crime writing, the cases that have most affected her career, and the background behind some of the most shocking stories in true crime history. My guest tonight, Caitlin Rother True Crime Retrospective with my special guest,

journalist and author, Kitlyn Rother. Welcome back to the program. Thank you very much for this interview. Caitlin Rother. Hi, good to be back, good evening. Glad to have you on this very special true crime retrospective.

to get published. No, it took me fifteen years to get my very first book published, and it happened to be a true crime book, Poisoned Love. So I spent many years working as an investigative reporter for various newspapers. I had to fight just like everybody else. It's a lot different today with journalism. It's you know, I think people can go to work when they're very young and inexperienced.

And that's some of the issues that we veteran journalists have with with newspapers these days, is they're the experience level. You know, a lot of people who are my age or even younger, you know, who have years and years of experience, have been laid off or pushed out, you know, because of the financial shrinkage of the whole industry. So I was working on my research skills, my investigative reporting

skills at newspapers where I worked for nineteen years. And while I was working at the newspaper, I mean, I've always wanted to write a book. I always wanted to

get published, so I was working on fiction. Actually, so my first book, Naked Addiction, that I wrote, I started in a writing workshop in little town in western Massachusetts, in Northampton, where I lived, and I was working for the newspaper there, and I was reading Patricia Cornwell and I was reading Michael Connolly, who are crime fiction writers, because that's what I wanted to do. So I mean, you know, I learned how to write fiction by reading

and by taking these writing workshops. And meanwhile I'm working on my writing fast skills on deadline at the newspaper, writing as fast as I could type, essentially, and learning how to be a researcher. And so you know, it took many years to actually get my very first book published, and it wasn't the first book that I wrote. So my first book that I wrote was Naked Addiction, which

I wrote much of when I was in Massachusetts. But it takes place where I grew up here in San Diego, which is where I am now, and actually in La Joya, where I went to junior high in high school. It's a you know, wealthy community on the beach, and so it's basically about you know, sex, drugs and murder at the beach. I just couldn't get it published because I had not been published before other than in the newspaper.

And so I just worked on it, and I kept rewriting it and rewriting it and rewriting it, and I'd send it out and I'd go to conferences and so basically, you know, you have to learn your craft first then, and what I do involves two crafts. One is research and one is writing. And then over time I learned how to write what we call narrative nonfiction, and so I started doing that in the newspaper long stories. But

that's basically you have characters and you have scenes. And so I basically got that published in the newspaper, and then I started, you know, my first book that I finally was able to get published, with Poison Love, and that was about the Kristin Rossam case with the county toxicologist who stole drugs from the lab at the Medical Examiner's office and poisoned her husband with them and then staged a suicide scene and put red rose pedals all

over his body. That was actually my first book that I got published, and I'm so grateful that it sold really well. It is my best selling book to date. In fact, it's still selling and it's not in print anymore, but you can still get it in audio and you can still get it as an ebook. And I actually have copies of all my books that are out of print in my special collector's inventory that I sell to people who want to buy private copies. But that was

my first book that I got published. Then it took me another I had Twisted Triangle, and then my novel I finally was able to get published as book number three. So even though it was the first book that I wrote, it was book number three when it got published, and it was you know, it has a detective in it who is kind of a little bit based on me, But he's a man, and I learned the hard way that, you know. Even though I thought I could think like a man, I'm actually not a man. I'm actually a woman.

And so I had to have men read it and tell me men wouldn't think like that or men wouldn't say that. So that's always a challenge. If you try to pick a protagonist who is not the same gender. You may think you know what you're doing. But that took me a long time to get that right. And

then I actually got it. The original publisher went out of business and so I was able to take it and revise it because I was a much better writer by this point, and I had it revised and updated through Wild Blue Press, So it's actually still it's available now and it has a different cover than it did originally, and it's better. So that's still out. But that you know, like I said, it took me fifteen years to get my first book published. After trying, trying, trying to get

Naked Addiction published, I just couldn't get it published. But I wanted a book more than anything, I mean, and then once I got a book published, I still wanted that novel published because I've worked on it for so long, so you know, little by little, you know, I just kept I stuck with the true crime because it's just, you know, something that I kind of have always enjoyed.

You know, I've always enjoyed watching crime movies. I always enjoyed reading true crime, you know, magazine stories and books. But the thing about it that I like so much, and the reason I've stuck with it, even though it doesn't really pay that much and it's you know, doesn't sell that well these days because there's so much TV and podcasts like yours, people think, oh, I already know the story, and so they don't tend to buy as many books anymore. So there aren't as many true crime

authors these days as there used to be. But I, you know, it's what I know how to do, and I'm good at it, and people, well, it seemed to like my books, and so I just keep at it. But I do try to write other books in between sometimes.

So I'm working on another book right now about the San Diego Frozen Zoo, which is about saving the planet and trying to save some of these species that are you know, going extinct and taking their little living cells and freezing them so that they can try to recreate these animals, save them in a kind of a large, you know collection. So that's a whole other topic. But it's not it's not true crime. But that's that's what I'm going to do next. So that was a long

answer to your question. I forget what it was now.

I had covered county government and local government, and you know, and every Saturday shift, which we had to do like once a month, I would ask for the cop beat, so you didn't necessarily get assigned that, but I just like to do that because on a Saturday, you know, there's only one or there's only a couple three reporters maybe who are working, and so I said, hey, let me do the cop beat. So if there was a murder, I would go out and do the first day reporting

on a murder. And the way that it would work in newspapers is the cop beat. They do the first initial few days, then it ends up getting passed over to the court reporter because it switches over into the court system. So there's not really good continuity there in coverage, just as far as I'm concerned. So I would sometimes, you know, stick with the story and try to keep reporting on it. Well. In this case, Kristin Rossam was

a county toxicologist and she got fired. She and her lover, who was her boss, they were both married, but they were having an affair and they were both fired from the County Medical Examiner's office. She was using methamphetamine and her lover basically protected her and covered for her. And then six months six months later, she was arrested for murder.

So I had these sources from covering the county government and they called me and they said, hey, a former county employee was just arrested for murder and I'm like, yeah, and there was you know, methamphetami. She was using drugs on the job. The turns out that her husband, you know, they stayed a suicide scene and he died of fentanyl poisoning. And at this time, you know, people hadn't heard of fentanyl.

So today it's in you know a lot of street drugs and people are dying from it because people are cutting heroin and cocaine and even pot, and you know, it's showing up everywhere. And it's a very very powerful drug. It's a one hundred times more strong than morphinge. But at this time, nobody knew what fentanyl was and it was very difficult to get the only way you could get it it's a you know, very controlled substance. So you know, part of the defense they were trying to say, oh,

her husband could have gotten it on the street. Well, you couldn't get it on the street at that time. So basically she was in charge of the fentanyl that was in the office so they collected patches, you know, for cancer patients, and when they'd go to have they'd have a dead body. They would take all the drugs out of the house, prescription drugs and illegal drugs, and they'd put them into this kind of inventory system which wasn't properly maintained at the time, and she had access

to all this. So she basically had stolen these drugs from the lab and then she took them home and you know, she used some for herself, She used the math for herself, and she you know, sedated her husband and then poisoned him with the fentanyl and they weren't testing for fentanyl at the lab at that point, so it didn't show up and they didn't realize that what he had been poisoned with. So anyways, very clever. It

was a great case. I covered it from arrest to sentencing, and I had to get special permission because it wasn't my beat. So I covered it initially as the police story, and then I stuck with it. And then it became a governmental negligence, and you know, the Medical Examiner's office did not properly, you know, control how these drugs were

kept and monitored and stored and what have you. So the husband's family filed a civil suit against the county, a wrongful death suit, so there's that was going on as well, so I basically stuck with it. I got you know, the court reporter was a friend of mine, and I said, Hey, I'd really like to continue to cover this and actually cover the trial, would you mind?

And he's like, no, go ahead, And so I have to thank him because without him, I don't know that I would have the same career because I ended up writing a book, and like I said, it's how I got started, and it was. I took six months off unpaid from the Union Tribune, where I worked, and I had no idea whether I was ever going to get that money back, because when you start out, your advances are extremely small. So I took a big risk, and thank god, I made back my advance and you know,

many times over. So that turned out to be a good choice. And then I loved it so much. I came back to work and they were so worried I was going to write another book. They kept trying to keep me away from the murder stories, which is kind of bizarre backwards thinking, but that's why I lost newspapers because clearly that's what I wanted to do. So I had a couple book proposals that were out. One was for Twisted Triangle and one was for Body Parts, both

of which did get published. But I ended up getting two offers within a week of each other. So I had already signed a contract for Twisted Triangle and I had already given my notice, and so basically what happened is we accepted that offer and I spent the next you know, nine months working on that, and then back to back we sent out the proposal again for Body Parts that I ended up getting more money than I did the first time, because I was by then, you know,

I had three books under my belt. This would be number four, so I got more money for it, and I had back to back books. And so that was really hard though, because I ended up getting injured from sitting at the computer so much that I ended up having a really bad about of chronic pain. So that was the whole other part of my career where I had to basically switch over from writing on a computer to dictating. So I have actually written entire books using

voice activated software. I'm okay now, but it took quite a bit to get through that. It was very, very painful. So people don't know that when they think, oh, she just keeps churning these books out. Yeah, well it can take a toll, and especially when you're writing about murder and serial killers, and you know, it can get very dark and it can get very difficult, you know, to maintain. You know, it was just very that book body parts.

It was just that that was probably one of the hardest books that I've had to write in terms of the emotional impact that it had on me, because it was just such a gruesome and gory case. And I said to myself, I can't ever write a book like this again, so I try to stick. You know. Overall, the cases that I'm most drawn to are like Kristin Rossam. That was you know, drugs, lying, adultery. You know, you've

got the international intrigue of this family. Her husband, Greg de Villers, had this family whose father, his father was a doctor and he lived in Monaco and his you know mother and father were French, and his brothers, you know, they were all very good looking and all educated, and so it was a story about you know, this person. Kristin Rossam was also really pretty, and she had been a ballerina and a child's model, so it was just about the pretty girl. Everybody loves a pretty murderer in

this country. You would be amazed how many men emailed me trying to get her information in prison so they could write her. It was pretty sick, but you know, the body parts was difficult because it was about this. He was a long haul trucker and he would pick up these troubled women, prostitutes, drug addicts, and you know, lure them into his truck and they'd have sex and

then he would torture them, and it was horrible. I mean, it's I prefer the financial crimes and the greed, the medical crimes, the ones that involve you know, more of the con men and conwomen. Those are I'm more drawn to those than the ones that are about addiction or mental illness. I'm kind of more into those, and I don't like to do the gruesome, gory, bloody, you know,

hatchet people. This guy, this guy drew me to the story because went out and ford he turned himself in, and so I've never heard of a serial killer who turned himself in before he wanted to. He couldn't stop himself from killing anymore. So he called his brother for help because he knew he wouldn't be able to do it on his own. And he even tried to get out of it, even asking after asking his brother to help turn him in, changed his mind, tried to get

out of it. But he had a woman's breast and a baggie in his pocket that he'd cut off her body and stuck her in the aqueduct, and he had it, and he had pieces of her body, you know, buried and in the freezer, and he you know, I hate to even say this stuff out loud because it just grosses me out, but I'll just say this one thing.

He took this So this wasn't her breast. This was his first victim, but the one who he turned himself in with was probably I think was his more recent victim, but this first one, and he chopped her into pieces and you know, put her he basically baked her breasts I think it was her breasts and kept the fat

in a can. I mean, it's just it was like it was very disturbing to have to be in that world he was, and he had a lot of paraphilias, which I learned all about you know, these people who have these fetishes where he liked to poke women's breasts with pins and needles, and I mean that's really gross, gross stuff. And he also had a head injury, so you know a lot of people who are violent in

prison have had had head injuries. I think at the time I wrote that, there was a statistic that I think eighty five percent of the people who were had done violent murders had head injuries. And that seems really high to me, but it's definitely, you know, that's definitely an indicator.

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first Aid. And so he was with his girlfriend who later became his wife. They were driving on the freeway and they saw that there had been an accident and so he says, pull over, I want to see if I can help. So he goes over and he sees the you know, somebody who had been in the car was badly injured, and so he stuck his hand on the person's neck to stop the bleeding, and in the process of that, a drunk driver hit him and knocked him, you know, like eighty feet down the embankment, and he

ended up being in the ICU for nine days. His jaw was like knocked off his face practically, so, you know, he had this horrible head injury. He almost didn't make it. And after that his family said he was never the same and so whatever proclivities he had before that were just you know, horribly exacerbated. The other thing about Wayne Adam Ford. That I thought was pretty interesting was his mother had tried to commit suicide and had told him that his father had raped her and that so he

was the product of his mother being raped. So I mean, there were just so many issues with this case in terms of mental illness, in terms of you know, suicidal ideations, and I mean, he just seemed like he was just such a troubled, complicated, you know, tragic victim, and yet he is killing people. So I mean, you know, he was for me, it was it was he was very intriguing as a character to research. I learned a lot his brother, who I interviewed with, I also interviewed his dad,

who had not talked to anybody else. They they, you know, told me everything. I sat in a hotel for two days with the two of them, and his brother was, you know, a really religious guy and really good guy. Construction of foreman, and you know, he he had no idea, you know, that his brother had been doing this kind of stuff, and he didn't even really want to know, you know, but he and Wayne Ford wouldn't really tell him what he did. He just said, I've hurt some people.

So he helped turn him in and then found out later you know what happened, But it was just it was just a really intriguing, an intriguing case on a lot of human levels, you know, which is those are the cases that I get drawn.

had made it up. And they believed him because they knew that this girl had a crush on him, and they you know, watched her having a crush on him, and you know, being kind of clingy, and you know, coming over when he had a girlfriend and knocking on his bedroom door when he was in there with his girlfriend, and so there was clearly some weirdness. So they believed him.

But in fact, you know, he picked her up at school one morning and brought her back, and you know, she's thirteen, and you can't give consent when you're thirteen, and he pressured her and finally punched her and did all this stuff and you know, she ran across the street. She was terrified and the neighbors called nine one one, and you know she was just traumatized by this. But anyway, he went to prison for five years for that. But yet his family had no idea that he was the

bull of doing anything like that. So, you know, this is again you have somebody who's got mental illness. He's a bipolar and he also had tried to commit suicide when he was nine years old, ten years old, threatened to jump off a building, and even before these crimes that he finally was put on death row for I'm sorry he didn't go to death row. He's in life in prison. He raped and killed these two teenage girls one year apart from each other. The first one was

Amber du Bois. Her her mother was trying to find her and get people in the neighborhood in Escondido in northern San Diego County to search for her. They looked everywhere, but they didn't really get that much help from law enforcement because her mother was kind of a difficult person I'll just use that word, and got you know, the law enforce. She was constantly criticizing law enforcement. She just wasn't she wasn't easy to get along with, and she made it difficult to help her.

be home and she didn't come home. So her parents, you know, she was very she was a bright girl. She was you know, very ambitious. She had, you know, she had the whole world in front of her, and she was definitely going to go go places you could just tell. And so her parents need something was wrong, and they used the they called it her cell phone provider, and they managed to track down her cell phone which

was in her car. So they went to the car, saw her car there at the lake where she had been running, and so they at least had a place to start, you know, with the with the first girl, she was her way to school and she'd never made it to school, but they didn't know until later in the day, and so they thought she was a runaway, even though her mother said, no, no, she's not a runaway.

So anyway, they knew what the second girl, at least where her car was and where she had been, and pretty quickly realized that this was a missing person, whereas in the first case it took them longer to define it that way. So they had the whole Sheriff's department search and rescue. It's a really big area with a lot of trails around this giant lake and a lot of places where, you know, you can these trails, you can run, and there's not a lot of people. It's

pretty pretty isolating in certain parts of it. Creeped me out. I went walking there by myself, and I was like, oh my god, I just like someone's going to jump

out at me at any minute. So basically what happened is he he had been he had been disintegrating essentially during gain and doing you know, drugs, and he was bipolar and so he you know, his mom, who was a psychiatric nurse, could see that he was not, you know, not himself, and took him to a see a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist said, do you feel like hurting anybody

right right now? And he said no. So he said, but I think I could be a fifty one fifty, which is essentially, you know, do you feel like you're going to hurt yourself for others? And he said, well, no, not right now. So the doctor gave him a couple of miles of pills and sent him on his way, and they just made him more manic. They gave he gave him the wrong pills essentially, And so he had

asked for help. He had tried to get help. He and his mother were calling that, you know, substance abuse places, mental health places, trying to get him a bed. But the problem is that he had this record as being a sex offender. So there is absolutely not a single place you can go if you're a sex offender and you ask for help because you feel like you're about to go hurt somebody, there was no place. There was

no place for him to go. So that was something that I managed to uncover in my research that had never been you know, nobody thought of that, and so you know the point of it is, you know, I'm not trying to make excuses for the guy, but by the same token, that's a flaw in our system because that means our teenage girls are in danger if we can't even stop the sex offenders who know that they need help and try to get help and they go

kill somebody. So it was a pretty controversial book though, because even though I had approached both families of both girls to you know, to be to let me interview them and tell their side of their stories, neither one of them wanted to do that, which is absolutely they're right, I have no issue with that. But nobody ever said, you know, please don't write this book. What happened was the first girl's mom was writing her own book and she said, I can't talk to you because I'm writing

my own book. I'm like, well, okay, And so basically my book comes out and she stages protests at my book signings, and so I had, you know, seven TV cameras and this woman marching into the middle of my book signing with all these women wearing orange T shirts and just trying to disrupt everything. So that's kind of you know, that was a whole adventure, and I was basically just trying to you know, shine a light on what happened to educate people. So this is what a

sex offender? This is what makes a sex offender? Because that was a question I had, and I it's not the kind of thing we really talk about. We don't really know where these people, how do they get like this? What makes them like this?

family member. She had been raped when she was in her twenties, and she just couldn't see who her son was. You know, it was like emotionally impossible for her to accept or even recognize the signs because she was so already so traumatized herself and her the whole family was totally dysfunctional with mental illness, small station, you know, drug addiction, alcoholism.

I mean, it was just another case for me to do a lot of research and a lot of education for people so that you know, you can recognize maybe your daughter's dating somebody like this because his next girlfriends had said, I never saw that side of him. He was sweet, he was protective, he was nurturing. And so, you know, my goal in writing these books is, you know, these are human beings. They're not animals. Everybody goes, oh,

they're just evil. Well, sometimes they're not evil. They're mentally ill. And I don't consider mental illness to be evil. They're sick people. They're messed up, and that's not a real popular opinion, but that's how I write these books. I mean, everybody is a three dimensional person. Nobody is all good and nobody is all bad. Everybody. You know, I live in the gray. There's no black and white in what I do, and that you know, it's pretty black and

white in the courtroom, but that's not real life. Those are attorneys trying to win a case, and they only present information that they think is going to help them win their case. It doesn't even mean it's absolute truth, because both sides have their own truth and both sides have their own interpretation of the very same evidence. So my goal is always to sort of present the evidence and whatever else doesn't get into court. You know, the human stories of a who are these people? Who are

their families? How does this affect them? Did they know about this? What can they tell me about these people that didn't come out in court? That helps us understand how people get like this, so we can all, you know, protect ourselves and our families and just understand better, you know, the human condition, certainly because I think we could be doing right now with the with the way people are

acting during this pandemic. I spend a lot of time right now shaking my head, going, I do not understand why people are acting like this, And I spend a lot of time trying to analyze that because I think people are acting crazy right now for so many different reasons.

is a clear cut case of psychopathy. This is a psychopath, very very evident in this incredible case with Skyler di Leon. And then the update, So tell us a little bit, not about the story itself, but just about your experience and the circumstances surrounding being involved with Dead Reckoning and the story and the book, and then the developments that happened that necessitated an updated version in two thousand and nineteen.

go visit Skyler at San Quentin in twenty fifteen. So the stuff that's in the book in twenty nineteen includes that, but also includes stuff that happened subsequent to that as well. So I just want to clarify. I interviewed Skyler four times in twentousand and nine when Skyler was still presenting as a man. But this is basically you know, and I've been criticized for describing it. No matter what I

do in this case, somebody's upset with me. So basically, we have a transgender killer who at the time of the murders of Tom and Jackie Hawks and John Jarvey Skyler was presenting as a man and was married to a woman, Jennifer de Leone, and she was pregnant with their second child, and they had a daughter who was

ten months old. So basically I interviewed Skyler four times right before his sentencing hearing before he was sent to San Quentin, and then I went back in twenty fifteen because the California had recently a federal judge had basically ordered the state to provide transgender you know, sexual I'm sorry, gender, They keep changing the names. Gender confirmation surgery is what it's called now. Basically had ordered this inmate, not Skyler,

but another inmate to be given the surgery. And because this inmate was eligible for parole and had never been granted parole, suddenly was granted Pearl, which gave the state kind of an out so that they didn't have to be setting a precedent by granting taxpayer subsidized, you know, surgery to this inmate. Well, then the judge granted it again to another inmate. So what California, the California Corrections Department, decided to do, was to adopt its own criteria for

transgender inmates to apply for this surgery. And that way, the state felt like a control it better and decide who would get it, rather than be ordered to do it by the federal courts. So they did that. And so I had a magazine editor who asked me to do a story Orange Coast Magazine. So I went to go interview Skyler because the motive for killing Tom and Jackie Hawks, you know, Skyler and Jennifer had a lot of debts. But the other motive was that Skyler wanted

one of these gender reassignment surgeries. So and they'd already put a deposit down. So basically I go up there to talk with Skyler about how she's doing because she's now on hormones and she now actually looks like a woman. She's allowed to wear women's clothes, she's wearing makeup, she's got really long hair, she's got small breasts and So I get there and my interview her for two and a half hours, and it was really surreal. I was not expecting this, but they basically said, okay, you go

sit over there in that cage and wait. So there are like these rows of cages like the size of a room. So they're like like like you're in a bird cage, but it's like for people. Right. So I'm sitting in there and these are you know, Skyler's on death row in and out of the psychiatric unit, and they rock Skyler in in cuffs behind I think behind her, front of her, behind her, I can't remember. Comes in. Then they closed the door and she puts her wrists

through this hole in the door. They unlocked her cuffs and then she's were locked inside together. They an't worried me about this, So I mean, here I am with someone who's killed three people, you know, split one guy's throat, left him by the side of the road to die, and tied two other people to an anchor and drowned them through the anchor over and you know, drowned them

over the side of the boat off Newport Beach. And I'm locked in a cage with her for two and a half hours, so I, you know, I talked with her about you know, medication. She was on how his life in the psychiatric unit, how you know, what's going on, and she pretty much answered most of my questions. She seemed very lucid. She seemed happier than I had ever seen her, more rational because she was medicated by this point. So she'd tried to cut off her penis in jail.

She had she'd had scotters all over her wrists, which I could see. She'd cut herself with this a piece of plastic cup, I think, so, I mean, and they were big scars, and they were vertical, not horizontal, and vertical means you're really trying to kill yourself horizontals like

I'm just playing. I've just kind of scared people. So, I mean, I thought for myself, and you know, So I got back to my house, though, and I had a letter waiting from her attorney saying I couldn't use anything from the interview because she Skuyler was not able to give informed consent. She was mentally not competent to provide consent for an interview. Therefore, I couldn't use anything

from the interview. I'm like are you kidding me? So, basically, some of the criteria forgetting this surgery is that you have to be mentally competent and you have to be able to make a medical decision for yourself, because you know, there's no going back. Once you've cut off your penis, your penis is gone. And if you decide you don't want that afterwards, you know that's you know, that's not that's not the idea. So it's possible that she may

not qualify. Also that you know, there's also another criterion, which is that you the details of your crime are also considered when they're judging whether an applicant will get the surgery. But I know Skyler wants the surgery. I know Skyler was really excited when she heard that the surgery application process was available. I have not talked to a single person who supports that her getting it, except for one person who was visiting her in prison, and

that was the only person that I've talked to. The families are absolutely just furious and outraged because this was the motive for killing their family members, you know. But they don't want her to get this surgery because that just feels so wrong to them and nobody that I have talked to wants they're taxpayer money going for this, which many people see as an elective surgery. But according to the US Constitution, and this is what I always come back to, it's a matter of the Eighth Amendment.

You know, it's part of the whole Cruel and Unusual Punishment thing where you have to provide adequate quote unquote medical care to inmates. Whether you like paying for that or not, you know. So, yeah, people think it's unfair because they can't even get health insurance, and yet we have inmates who are qualifying for gender confirmation surgery at

the taxpayer's expense. But it's a matter of the Constitution and that they have to provide them and it is considered a medical need and not a cosmetic or inelective surgery.

her to call herself she. But I always say, look, it's a journalistic standard when someone is transgender and they asked to be called a she. And in fact, Skuyler has gotten to court and gotten a judge to grant her the legal permission. She basically has changed her gender in court to female. So she is a woman. She is bigally a woman, even though she's still as far as I know, still has a penis.

not in the taxpayer's hands to change this. It's not even in the state prison system's ability to really change this. I mean, it is actually they are being told by the courts you have to do this.

or not, it's irrelevant. You know, I'm a journalist. I'm not an advocate. I'm a journalist.

a con man. This involved a con woman. So and and similar charges to financial murder for financial gain, same charges. So so Nanette, Nanette had so many last names, and I can't even remember what her name is anymore. She's been married, she was married three times, so we'll just call her Nannette Packard because that's pretty much what they

called her. I think during the trial, so I went to so there were three trials and for for dead reckoning, this case had two trials, and and I I live in San Diego County and these trials were in Orange County, so I had to drive ninety minutes or two hours each way to go to these trials. So that was kind of tricky. But basically, this woman, she just didn't want to be who she was. She created all kinds of stories about herself. And you know, Skylar was the

same way. So there's some interesting parallels in some of these killers that, you know, they decided to become somebody else. I don't know if that makes them feel I don't know why. It's kind of a weird thing that I've noticed. But she wanted money. She I think she just felt like having money would make her feel better. And you know, Skylar was the same and Jennifer. That's why they got charged with that, because they had one hundred thousand dollars

in debt that they needed to pay off. They stopped by stealing the Hawks's boat. They could, you know, and going into their bank accounts that they were going to be rich because they owned this yacht, they must be rich. We'll turn out they weren't. Well. So Jannette had a different way of going about it. She decided she wanted a wealthy guy. So she put a classified ad that said for wealthy men only. I'll take care of you

if you take care of me. So what that meant was, you know, I'll have sex with you as long as you pay me right take care of me the way that I want to be taken care of. So this guy, Bill McLoughlin, was recently divorced, had three grown kids. His youngest was I think nineteen at the time, and he had been in a skateboarding accident and had a bad head injury. So he was living at home with Bill, but his other two kids were I think they were both married and living on their own, you know, elsewhere.

So he answers this ad and he doesn't tell his kids that he answered the ad, but you know, and that starts showing up but the house, and then you know, then she moves in, and then her kids are there. She shares custody with her first ex husband and Bill, you know, he's already raised you know, his own kids. But he's like, okay, you know, they could stay here too. So she basically starts helping him with his you know,

his finances and other things. And he liked to take her to business dinners because she was attractive and he was older. And he had made a lot of money by inventing a machine that separates the plasma from the blood, and so he made a lot of money, but he had quite a lot of legal and financial struggles with the former business partner that he worked on some of these projects with, and so he was constantly you know,

in court with this. Meanwhile, he was flying back and forth in his private plane to Las Vegas because he was establishing residency there so that he didn't have to pay taxes. So while he was out of town, Nanette would go to the gym and pick up some guy at the gym and take him out and spend all this money on and when in fact she was spending Bill's money, and so these men thought that she was rich and she was pretending to be someone she wasn't. She met this guy, Eric Napowski at the gym. They

start out being friends. He was a He was a really good athlete, and he wanted to be an NFL football player, and he kept making it onto these teams, but then he kept getting injured, so he ultimately was only able to play five games on the field during his whole career. But he just kept getting injured and just had to keep stopping, you know, in between. And then he went off for a year to Barcelona and he made a big name for himself in their football

league there. But he came back and they started dating, and she told Eric Nepowski that Bill was her boss and so that she was living in the house, you know, but he was her boss. She didn't mention that Bill was her fiance.

was upstairs. I think he had earbuds in or something. So by the time he was able to get down the stairs, he couldn't move very well either because he had this head injury and had problems speaking and had problems moving. He called nine one one, but he stuttered and they couldn't really understand him, so it took a while. But anyway, the police came and you know, Bill was

dead on the floor and processed the scene. And anyway, it turned out that Nannette had been writing checks, signing, you know, forging checks essentially, and she had stolen like two hundred and fifty thousand dollars by writing these checks on his accounts, and she had gotten Eric Neposki to do this. But the problem was they couldn't prove it. So, you know, they could prove the check stuff. So they

ended up separating the case into two pieces. So there was a financial side of it and then there was the murder side of it. There was an argument at the DA's office between the and I actually go into all this in the book, and it had never come out before, but I found the original prosecutor and she was a woman, and all the people working on the case at the police department were men, and so she was explaining to me that it was just a whole gender thing, and nobody wanted to listen to her or

get along with her or do what she said. And it was a big mess. So anyway, they ended up separating the case into these two pieces rather than keeping it together as a murder with financial aspects. They're like, oh, she'll just confess to it. Well, no, she didn't. So they ended up getting her on the financial fraudulent stuff and she went to jail for six months. But meanwhile, Eric Neapowski's like, you know, she just quit talking to him because she had no more use for him, and

so they went their separate ways. She got remarried. She married another guy who ended up, after my book came out, was indicted for financial crimes against people that he was like some kind of Ponzi scheme with development. It was just another crook, right. So anyway, she managed to move on, and then she had yet a third husband who was actually a really nice guy, had no idea who she was or what she was like, and he wasn't a crook.

They had Bible study in their house. She was, you know, looked like she was becoming one of the you know, wealthy, you know, rich housewives of Orange County kind of thing. Meanwhile, you know, the police did a cold case. They had the same cold case investing gator that worked on dead reckoning, even though it wasn't a cold casey, he helped them because the there was another murder in the Hawks case that had happened to you earlier, and he helped him

with that. So anyway, they brought him in on this case and he had to basically go through all the evidence again and he found some stuff that they had overlooked, and he managed to put this case together. And so there were two trials. They were both found guilty. They both got life without pearol so no death penalty, but life without pearl and they both ended up in prison, and that was it was a pretty fascinating case, and I always thought it was a really she was just

another interesting person to me. She'd had breast enhancement surgery but lied about it. She you know, she was just wanted to be somebody else and so and she was just a calm woman. She just lied all the time, and she just I don't know, it's like these people they just don't have souls or something.

little town in the mountains. And some woman who had read dead Reckoning sent me started sending me clips from the newspaper from the trial of this guy who was accused of killing his ex wife of thirty five days. So they had just had their divorce, had just been finalized thirty five days earlier. She was found beaten to death with a golf club in her house. Now, this is what's interesting. There was no forensic evidence tying him to this murder in the house. There was none of

his DNA, there was no there were no fingerprints. But there was so much behavior. There was a life insurance policy, there was a whole bunch of alimony you know that he was going to have to pay. And you know, the more I got into it, the investigation was just a mess. So there were actually two trials in this case. The first one ended up in mistrial. There were ethical allegations flying back and forth between all the attorneys and the judge, and it was, you know, it was really

messed up. In terms of how many mistakes were made. So I'll give you an example here. I want to pull this out so I can remember what the people's names are. Okay, So the medical examiner, for example, was this kooky guy who like, who transported the victim's body your name was Carol Kennedy in the back of his truck in Arizona, where it's like one hundred degrees. You have this poor woman's body in the truck and it's

bouncing around. It's back the truck. It's not like a proper medical examiner's van took her to get her head examined literally by a separate lab, and during the autopsy him clean as nail clippers. So for a year and a half, the Sheriff's investigators, the Sheriff's detectives were looking for this mysterious guy, Mister six three is what they called him, because they found this DNA male DNA under Carol Kennedy's fingernails. So they thought, oh, she fought the guy,

and so we need to find this guy. So they're going all over the country, you know, getting DNA swabs from people who had been in the house or who she had dated. She was doing online dating. This is a whole. This book is an interesting book on some of the sub threads. She met her current boyfriend that she was dating, she met him, I think she I don't know if she met him online or she was

on she was dating people online. I don't remember if she actually met him online or if she But she had other people that she was she had dated that she met online. And Steve was also meeting women online and telling them that, you know, he wasn't seeing anyone else. He'd have like four relationships going on at once. Carol during their marriage, basically counted up all the affairs that he had had on her, and there were that she knew of. There were fourteen, including their midwife when she

was pregnant with their second child. The guy was just really a piece of work. He was. When they met, she was like, Oh, he's my soul maid, and they both said, oh, we're both each other's soulmate. And he ended up getting a PhD in sociology and becoming a professor at this little college in Prescot, Arizona, And so she taught there as well, and she was a therapist

and coincidentally, ironically, she worked with domestic violence victims. And so what was really interesting about this case is this was a woman who worked with domestic violence victims as a therapist who couldn't even you know, save herself from the same fate. And so I interviewed her friends, two of her really close friends who were also therapists. So I was able to really portray a very intimate and

sympathetic picture of the victim in this case. And it was just so sad that Steve Democratist had control of this woman who was a smart woman and a very accomplished artist and carpenter and therapist, and she just didn't have any money. He controlled all of her money. He became an investment broker and was making you know, at least five hundred thousand dollars a year, and he was

overspending that because he was a compulsive spender. He loved going to the resorts and going to dinner, and you know, meanwhile he's going to all these different places and he's having sex with all these different women who don't know about each other, and then she finally says, Okay, that's it no more. And so that's basically the theories that he

felt like he lost control over her. And she was seeing someone else, and he was trying to reconcile even after the divorce, and so anyway, she ends up dead. There's a guy who's living in the guest house, and so the defense was trying to say, oh, it was more likely that that guy is the one who killed Carol, But in fact, he ended up dead six months later and it was suicide, even though they were trying to

you know, he created this is a crazy thing. This guy committed suicide, but he staged his own may try to make it look more like a homicide. And then may have been because he wanted his kids to not know, or he wanted his you know, ex wife to get

you know, life insurance money. It's not really clear. But there's a lot of a lot of these cases I've covered have had stage homicides and stage suicides, So I mean, I do have quite a bit of experience with that, which is has been very helpful in writing the book that's about to come out next year. The Rebecca's a House case, so what else the oh, and then the judge in the Democra case also ended up collapsing in

the courtroom and had a brain ended up dying. It was just like, there were so many interesting bizarre things in this case, but some of the most bizarre things

happened after Steve Demoker was actually in jail. So they have these tape recordings of these phone calls that he's making from jail, and he's basically getting his sixteen year old daughter to send fake emails to the prosecution and to the police and to his own attorneys, basically framing the guy who was living in the guest house or trying to Oh, he was involved in some kind of prescription drug ring and he told Carol about it and

they came and killed her, you know. And then he says, oh, I was there was a voice in the event in my jail cell I over, you know, somebody was trying to tell me that, you know, the same story that showed up into emails. He said he heard another inmate tell him through the because that's how they talk to each other. I guess in jail, you're not in the same cell. They talked to others through the air. Vince right.

So basically he got his daughter and his mother to transfer all this money because the health the life insurance money went to his there was like a whole series of transactions that he basically inserted himself into. So even though it it was just a mess, he basically got all of his family members to do things that were illegal, essentially from jail because he was such a manipulative guy.

And then all these people had to get immunity just in order to testify because he'd gotten them all complicit in doing these things just because he was trying to help frame somebody else for his own purposes.

interesting to one of them are all they're all pretty interesting. Yeah, we were going to get secret Lies and Shoelace.

was known for being a maverick with derivatives. I don't know if you know if you remember that term, but it was really big at that time, and he was investing in all this stuff that was pretty cutting edge. And he completely reallocated all of the investments in the pension fund and diversified it and ended up taking it from a billion dollar fund to a four billion dollar fund.

But he was paid very little money as a county employee, was like fifty nine thousand dollars a year, which is ridiculous, so he was working over time to make more money. And anyway, I was covering the county government at that point,

and so that's how we met. I was actually writing about the retirement board, and so you know, he helped me with some stories and I learned a lot about investments and you know, the investment pool, and it was pretty hard stuff for reporters to understand, and I worked really hard at it. But I had to quit covering that because we went out on a date. I immediately told my editor and so they carved that portion of my beat out because that was, you know, an ethical conflict

by that point. So but he I didn't realize, you know, when I met him that he was a very troubled person. And he had told me some things, but he you know, didn't really tell me the truth. And in fact, he lied about quite a few things. And you know, I just thought he had a really big heart, which he did. He was really sweet to me. He loved me, you know, more than anyone ever had. And you know, my job

was to know when somebody was lying. And I could tell he had secrets, but I couldn't didn't really know what they were. And I asked, I asked my questions, but he didn't tell me the truth. And as it turned out, he had hidden drinking problem. So, you know, the first I remember, like one of the first dates we had. I think it was our first date. Actually, I remember he left some wine in his glass and I was thinking to myself, that's a good sign. He didn't, like,

you know, even finish his wine and we left. So turns out though, that he was drinking at home and when I couldn't see him, because you know, wouldn't live together. So it turns out that the girlfriend of the reporter who actually took over the beef from me, lived in his apartment building, and they thought I knew how much he was drinking, and they never told me, so I

didn't know. So he had this weird schedule where he would get up really early because he had to be up when the markets opened, and so we had a very I had worked the night shift and he worked the morning shift, and so we could go for a few days without even seeing each other. And but he, you know, we we ultimately did move in together because I hurt you know, remember I said earlier that I had hurt myself really bad with the chronic pain and

the typing and everything. That was actually about of the same thing that I had had ten years earlier when I was with him. So it happened again in between books. But I also it happened ten years earlier. So I mean, I've been typing, you know, my whole career, if that's what you do as a reporter, that you do as an author, and I would just get terrible inflammation and pain. So I got to the point where I had to, you know, go out on disability workmen's comp from my

job at this newspaper. And I couldn't even open a door for myself. I could not hold a dinner plate, even when nothing was on it. My arms were so inflamed and so sore. I started freaking out. I was so scared. I didn't know, you know, how am I going to take care of myself? And I you know, I'd forgotten, I had forgotten until I wrote this book. I'd actually blocked out of my own mind the reasons

why I got married. But I kind of told myself that this was a you know, this was going to be a good idea, and I kind of tried to ignore the drinking part of it because it didn't happen all the time, and you know, you know, I didn't really I didn't know how bad it was. Obviously, So when we moved in together and we got married. We had this trip to New York where he was running an investment conference out of a hotel, and I had like this juckle and hide situation with him. I'm like,

who is this person? Because suddenly, you know, I'm around him and I see what I didn't see before. But I thought something was like, he must have a brain tumor or something. Why was he acting like that? He was in like an a fugue state and he was

just acting really crazy. Anyway, long story short, it just was this roller coaster marriage, and you know, he ended up threatening to shoot himself essentially while I was at work in the newsroom, and I was back and forth with the nine one one operator between two lines on the phone while he was driving around and the police were trying to find him. And it's just like my life with this guy who has ended up being diagnosed, who went into counseling, and the counselor told me he

had borderline personality disorder. But I don't tell him, I said, what do you need? Don't tell him. She said, it'll just make him feel even more broken than he already does. And I don't think it'll help him to have a label like this because I just don't think he can handle it. I'm like, okay, this is ethical. So anyway, he was just a mess, you know, and he was in and out of rehab and finally, like the last year that we were still married, we weren't even together.

He was in this sober living series of homes because I had to call nine one one a couple times and had to have him taken away because he picked up a bat and threatened me with it. So that actually is a true crime story. As it turns out,

he was arrested for shoplifting in Phoenix. That's how he ended up losing his job ultimately, because he shouldn't have gone, but he was in a blackout and he took a bunch of items from the gift shop at the Phoenician Resort, which is a flanky place in Phoenix, and he lost his job because he didn't want to admit that he was an alcoholic, which was crazy because when you're in charge of billions of you know, pension fund money, people

think if you're a thief, that's a bad thing. But he actually would rather have been looked at as a thief than as an alcoholic. And that's how much. He was ashamed of his problems. So anyway, it took me nineteen years. I rewrote this so many times because I was pretty angry at him for a long time, and I couldn't really get I couldn't get the tone of this right. I'm like, what is the message that I

want for people to get from this? But basically, he ultimately committed suicide and he hung himself in a motel room in Mexico. And so I was watching the Rebecca's the How trial here in San Diego in twenty eighteen, and this is the book that's going to come out next year. Death on Ocean Boulevard. So I can't talk much about it, it's not out yet, But basically the storyline is this woman was found hanging naked from an exterior balcony at the Spreckles mansion, which was owned by

her wealthy boyfriend. And the wealthy boyfriend had a son, Max, who was six years old. Two days earlier before Rebecca was found hanging, there was a horrible accident inside the house where Max ended up falling. We're still not really sure because no one saw it, but he was found lying on the floor in this foyer of this mansion, and there was a glass chandelier lying next to him in a soccer ball, and a razor scooter and a barking dog. And so they don't know exactly what happened.

They've you know, theorized, but you know, two days later and she was the only one home, She was the only adult in the house. She said she was in the bathroom at the time and came out, heard this crash and came out and found him and tried to, you know, do some CPR. Her little sister was there, who was thirteen, visiting. They called nine one one and

the paramedics came. And then two days later she was found hanging, and her boyfriend, who was the boy's father, was you know, supposedly at the hospital with the boy's mother. And the only other person in the house or on the property rather was the boyfriend's brother, Adam Shackney. So Jonah Shackny was the owner of the house. And so you know, she was found hanging, and so I'm watching

this whole trial. The authorities say she committed suicide. The victim's family believed that Adam shack and I murdered her. So it was a civil case. There was no criminal case and no arrest, so it's very tricky to write about from legal standpoint, but it was basically I got a book deal because of what happened with my husband and my own personal insight into, you know, what someone

acts like when they commit suicide. It turns out that Rebecca Howe was also arrested for shoplifting in Phoenix, and they went through the same diversion program, which is the most bizarre coincidence. So there's a lot there, and there's a lot from my personal background. So you know, borderline personality disorder is actually something that Wayne adam Ford was diagnosed with, and it's something that murderers can often have. So this memoir is a short read. It's only fifty

eight pages. You can finish it in one sitting. It's super intense, but it basically has given me insight into a lot of these people I have written about in all these other books. And it's not because my husband was a criminal. It's just because he had all these problems, you know, and I was angry at him, but he

wasn't an evil person. He was a sick person. So it's also a jumping off place for me, you know, I ended up putting my experience, in my insight and my you know, my unique viewpoint on all of this into this book that's going to be coming out next year. So if you want to read this book now, it'll give you an idea of you know, where I'm coming from. Absolutely, yeah, And it was it was very hard to write. It

took me nineteen years to finally finish it. But after I finished watching this trial, I was able to finally finish it. But I spoke at a domestic violence fundraising event and I gave a speech about it, and for the first time, I basically admitted that I was a do mystic violence survivor, and that was a very hard thing to admit. And then I would watched the trial and then I was able to finally finish this book.

I have to do. You know, it's it's pretty hard, and there's a lot of people who get upset. You know. It's like I always try to be really sensitive to everybody, but people, you know, they feel wrongly acute, used, or they have lost someone and they feel like you're trying to profit off their tragedy and it's their story, not your story. And you know, there's a lot of you know, and I'm not I'm trying to help educate people. And

I honestly don't make very much money. That's why I'm also a writing coach, and I also do TV commentator work, and you know, I do not make enough money off these books for much of anything. So people can think that I'm making a lot of money off it, but I'm not.

you might be weird. So you know, there's a there's a shift. And I think what you present and some other authors are are not prepared to be able to do that, is be be empathetic towards that subject. Yea. And they're not not goal for the sensationalistic perspective.

she called yea an it nobody's an. It's still a person. Whether you like what they've done or not, there's still a person. You can still understand them. And I think that's where we are with this pandemic. It's like, you know, we all want we all were so divisive and and you know it's I mean, I'm angry too at the people who aren't wearing masks. I'm angry about it. It makes me mad to walk around outside because I feel like they're not doing what they should to protect me

and to protect other people. And the longer that they don't wear a mask, the longer I have to stay in my house, which I'm not happy about. But you have to try to understand why people act the way they do. So that's pretty much what I spend my career doing, is trying to understand why people act the way they do, what made them like that, maybe I can sympathize or empathize more. And sometimes it's hard. Sometimes

it's really hard. But and you know, and people lash out at me and they don't even know what I'm writing, but they make these wrong assumptions about what kind of book I'm going to write, and you know, they haven't read it. It's not out, but they've decided that they're going to lash out at me and harass me. And it's not fun. You know, I have that going on right now as a matter of fact, and I've had to report it to the police, and it's it's really

not fun. It's not pleasant. I'm just trying to do my job and it's unfortunate that people, you know, my partner always says, well, this is your choice. You know, you chose to write true crime. And I'm like, well, it kind of chose me. I don't know that, Rebecca, how case chose me. Honestly, I did not go out and you know, work real hard to go get it. I had people come to me and bring me stuff. That's basically what happened. And I couldn't not do it

because of what happened with my husband. I just felt like compelled to try to figure out this mystery of what really happened.

touched on Twisted Triangle. But for those that want to check out all of the books that you have, you have an excellent website. Can you tell us about the website? And also they could go to Amazon and check out the books you have, But tell us about your website.

which is nice. During the pandemic, you know, it's hard to get books these days from like Amazon is out of a lot of stuff, and you know a lot of these other bookstores are still closed and some are doing online stuff. But if anybody wants any of these books, they should contact me. It's not going to work in Canada because the postage makes it prohibit cost prohibitive. But if you live in the United States and you want to sign copy, and I've got plenty at home, even

if they're out of print. But one did we talk about Naked Addiction only a little bit. I just wanted to just say Naked Addiction was my baby, and I want people who read true crime to give it a shot, because I've actually had some people who read true crime and they're like, I don't read crime fiction, and then every once in a while I'll get one to read one and they're like, you know, I normally wouldn't read this,

but I really like this book. So I would encourage people, if you like my true crime books, to try reading my crime novel, because even though it isn't based on any specific murder, it is based on parts of my own experience, in my own life and these characters. You know, there's addiction and mental illness in it, and there's suicide in it, and all the stuff that actually happened in my life or in cases I've written about, they showed up in this book before I published any of them.

So I just think it's kind of an interesting when we're doing a retrospective because it was the first book that I ever wrote. I think if anybody's interested in kind of going back, they want to read my memoir and they want to read Naked Addiction. Those are kind of the bookends of my career and who I am as a writer and as a person.

how do you make anything up? At this point, it's just so unbelievable. Where we are so and do you want to write hard stuff? You know, do you want do people want something real or do they not want something real right now? So anyway, yes, thank you so much. I really I enjoy it and hopefully we'll talk about the next one sometime soon.