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You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski, Good Evening.
Diane Fanning is the author of fourteen true crime books published by Saint Martin's Press and Berkeley Books, including the Edgar Award nominated in Blood about Michael Peterson of Netflix, The Staircase, and the best selling Mummy's Little Girl about the infamous Casey Anthony Case. For the work she began with Through the Window about serial killer Tommy Lynde Sells, she received the Defender of Innocence Award from the Downstate
Illinois Innocence Project. Diane's fourteen true crime books are written in Blood, Baby be Mine, Under the Knife, Gone Forever, Through the Window, The Pastor's Wife, A Poisoned Passion, Mummy's Little Girl, Her Deadly Web, Sleep My Darlings, under Cover of The Night out There, Bitter Remains, and Death on the River. We will discuss how her incredible true crime writing career began, the cases and books that most affected her career, and what's next for the incomparable author. The
books that we're featuring this evening. The story this evening is Diane Fanning True Crime Retrospective with my special guest, journalist and author and a show favorite, Diane Fanning. Welcome to the program, Diane Fanning.
Hi. Dan, Great to be with you and your listeners today.
It is always a pleasure having you on, and especially now to talk about all of the books that you have had in your collection, fourteen true crime masterpieces, many of these true crime classics and by any standard, and here we're going to talk about them today. Diane, take us back to Baltimore, Maryland you growing up. Tell us a little bit about your childhood and this incredible incident when you were nine years old that certainly had some influence in your true crime writing career.
Well, I was born in Baltimore and started my first few years in the city itself, and then we moved out to Baltimore County when I was six I had just a pretty normal upbringing.
I'd say when I was nine to zero.
And this car pulled up and he said that he was lost and could we give him directions. So I told us where we wanted to go, and we tried to explain to him where it was, and he said, I don't understand. Could you please come up and look at my map? Well, he threw open his car door and I walked up in total innocence, and he, instead of a map, was showing his genitals and was shocked. I mean, I was like frozen in place, and he grabbed my upper arm.
And started tugging on me.
I was resisting for all it was worth, but I was a little kid, small in size for.
My age, and.
I was just about to lose my footing and go into that car when another car came up over the hill and laid on its horn. He let go of me and drove off with his car doors still open. I had been a big fan of Dragnet reruns on TV, and I knew exactly what Sergeant Friday wanted me to do, so I memorized the license plate number and I went home and I told my mom and she called the police.
And they stopped the guy a couple days later, and in the trunk of his car they found evidence that he had sexually assaulted and murdered an eight year old girl the month before. It was kind of stunning to me because well, I had to see his face.
On TV, which was shocking, and I.
Was also very confused. I mean, I wanted to know why was I chosen to be a victim? And I wanted to know how could someone do something like that. It seemed so horrible to me and so against everything that I'd been taught as I was raised, And so I wanted to do some reading, and I was a bit of a precocious kid. So I drugged my mother to the library and made her sign because at that time, you couldn't send out books.
From the adult section when you were just a little kid. So she signed so that I could.
And I was getting out criminal psychology books with a dictionary by my thought, and I started that started my interest in true crime.
Now, you write about going to college in Virginia and writing for radio and television working for an ad agency. How did that prepare you for writing in general? And tell us about how you got in the position. What are the circumstances with your very first book?
Deal?
Well, I the writings of commercials and commercial announcements and public service announcements taught me the importance of being concise. So that became a natural trait for me. I when I wrote, and it wasn't you know you can only put so much in thirty seconds?
So many words?
I think seventy five was the recommended account, And so I I learned to get right to the point because I wrote a lot of theater than mine, kind of.
Spot and.
I quickly realized that instead of having to cut things out when I started writing books, I really had to plump things up a little bit because I was being very sparse in my writing, and so that was kind of a different way to come at it. But I had been trying to get an agent for two years, and this is the message to anybody out there that.
Wants to write a book.
Two years I tried without getting to keep trying, And finally one day I was home alone and I was flicking among channels on TV, and I came upon forty eight Hours and this little girl named Crystal Searles, and she was telling her story, and it resonated with me immediately, because what she said was like what I did when I was nine times one hundred. Crystal Searles sat there on the top bunk and watched a serial killer murder her best friend. Then he slit her throat and left
her for dead. That little child got up at four o'clock in the morning and walked barefoot down a gravel road where there were tarantulas and poisonous rattlesnakes and cactus and lord knows what else in far West Texas. And she got to a house where she found a man who had an interesting hobby. Every year, he got up when to watch TV and see every New Year's arrive all around the world. So he was up watching New Year's arriving, I think in a your New Zealand or something.
And so he came right to the door and he saw her, and she couldn't speak. She had a huge blood clot on her neck and she couldn't say a word because her vocal cords have been cut. So she motioned for a pencil on paper, and he got it, and she wrote, get the cops. He killed everybody. And so he got her in and made her comfortable while he got an ambulance for her, and then she was airlifted to San Antonio where she went into surgery. And
she's ten years old, just ten years old. She goes into surgery, she comes out her vocal cords have been repaired, but she's still not capable of speech. And she wrote another note, get the cops, and they brought them in, and they brought it for endsic artist. And without being able to speak, this little child commune cadd so well that with the drawing they had, they knew within an hour exactly who it was, and they were able to make plans go out and arrest that man who was
planning another murder that day before he left tail. And that was like, Wow, she is my hero. And I had to write a story.
It was like a passion.
It wasn't like, oh, I really would like to write her story, maybe kind of, it was I had to. So I sat right down and I wrote the chapter. What the few things I knew from the show i'd watched, And I wrote the chapter. And at that time, you weren't supposed to email anything to agents.
It all had to be.
By the regular rayel. But I thought, well, heck, you know that hasn't been.
Working for two years.
So I sent an email to Jane Distel with the first chapter, and within twenty four hours I was signed up with a new agent. So then I didn't know what to do. I mean, I really was totally ignorant of everything to do with writing books. So she spent a couple of months teaching me how to write a proposal and making corrections, and we went back and forth in the mail with this until I finally got it
to a point where she said, okay, I'll send it out. Well, she send it, sent it out, and in a week she got offers from two publishers for a two book deal. So I had to pick my publisher, which was something I never expected I have to do, but I picked Saint Martin, and so there I was. You know, I had a little bit of panic in my heart because I knew I didn't know what I was doing, and I also didn't have any idea what that second book would be, and so I just got busy. I mean,
I just taught myself as I went. I didn't know any of the rules, didn't know what I was doing, but.
I fingered it all out, you know.
I I wrote for my high school newspapers. So I used what I learned they are from doing interviews and a short internship at a major city newspaper to guide me to what I needed to do. And I did a lot of reading on the side, and then I hit this one really tricky place where I didn't know which way to turn. Somebody was asking something of me that didn't really seem ethical. So I called up.
And Rule.
And Ann Rull was very very sweet.
She was very kind.
She gave me time, and she she ed me, Oh, you're writing about that case. Oh they wanted me to do that, but I wouldn't do it. It was going to be two months work. And so that's whay ignorance is bliss. You step into something that you don't know because you don't realize how hard it's going to be, but you learn the hard way, and I surely did.
It was a big lesson, and I'm so glad that I didn't let my fears an uncertainty stop me from doing that, because that book actually resulted in one woman getting a new trial and being acquitted and ultimately getting a certificate of you innocence from the State of Illinois. And then there's another guy that was Shirly Ray. And then there's this other guy, Rodney Lincoln, who I never mentioned him or.
His case or anything, but because of.
The fact that is the way I described the crimes and everything, and I was willing to be interviewed, and I said, it could have been selves.
It very well could have been Sales.
He was able to get out of prison after decades. So it's just amazing to me that Well Sales put it best. He says, there are a whole lot of people in prison for crimes I committed and I don't care.
Wow, incredible. That was an incredible start to your career. Let's talk about let's talk about Written in Blood, about Michael Peterson, and I mentioned that for people that just a reference Netflix the Staircase because so many people tuned into that series. Tell us about your experience in writing Written in Blood.
Well, that was back in the day when Court TV was broadcasting Trials live and they podcast the whole for our live all three and a half months.
I think it wasn't it.
And I think that even had jury selection there, Yes, they did, but I went out for part jury selection. I was there at least one week every month so I could get the flavor of the of the live and and to meet lots of people and make contacts for interviews. And it was just fascinating Because I went there, I wasn't certain of the guilt. I thought, he's a novelist.
Novelists don't kill people. Well, then the evidence started rolling in, and you know, the people who were doing the original version of the Staircase, which was a French film company, and there's heered on Sundance.
I mean, they were.
So convinced that he just wasn't guilty, and they were doing all the taping directly from the defense point of view, and they didn't really care what the prosecutors wanted to say or anything. And they left out some very vital evidence, the evidence that I and the two nurses on the jury both found absolutely compelling. One of them was a thing called red neurons. Red neurons are something that form in your brain when you slowly bleed to death. And
Kathleen had those founded autopsy. They were in her brain, and that made a complete and total lie of everything Michael Peterson said had happened that night, because he said it was a half hour to forty five minutes. Well, there's neurons have never been recorded as forming in less than two and a half hours, so that that right
away you got a serious problem with the evidence. And the other thing is is they had this state witness that did blind spatter and stuff like that, and he was discredited for some of the things he did, and so you can't really count anything he testified to except to me, there was one vital thing that mattered, and that's because he testified to something that the defense witness, doctor Henry Lee, agreed with wholeheartedly, and that was the fact that in that stairwell there was a point of
impact where something hit the back of Kathleen's skull in mid air. Yeah, so you know that when the defense witness supports the prosecutional witness, you know.
You've got a fact.
And I will always be convinced that Michael Peterson was guilty of that crime and guilty of the murder of Liza Ratliffe. And he you know, I talked to him in the courtroom and he he said that in another end review with BBC, he said that we that we never talked, we never shared a word, and he was just busy name dropping with me when he was talking and digging for information and in his agent UH threatened my publisher uh and said that if they published my book,
you know, that was it. He wouldn't get any more of that guy's clients. And the agent, I can't recall his name, but he was a big deal.
But but you know, I got a credit Saint Martin's. They continued on. They didn't, They didn't pull back at all.
In fact, I didn't let me know about it until the book was out, and and.
It was.
From what I hear on air and off air. Michael Peterson disparages me everywhere he goes Lucky.
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Actually, do I have to say?
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That's okay because I know who he is and I know what he is.
Absolutely let's talk about another. If you can get more controversial than that, Let's talk about one of the most controversial cases in history, and that's the three year old Kaylee Anthony's disappearance from her home in Florida in July two thousand and eight, subject of your book, Mommy's Little Girl. Tell us about the writing A Mummy's Little Girl.
Well, to writing A Mommy's Little Girl was insane, absolutely insane, because it was a feeding frenzy for media at the time I was getting the backs down, but I did manage to get some inside track on a lot of things, and it was really good. And the prosecutor had an interesting philosophy on making records public. He said, if I give them to the defense, then I've given them the enemy,
so I might as well give them to public. So official records who are very easy to come by, and as long as you got credentialed by the Die's office. So I was able to do that, and I had one luxury that no one else did. My book came out before the trial. It was seventeen months for the trial. So I was able to state very clearly what I thought happened to that child, how Kasey Anthony murdered that
little girl. And I did have to put a legal caveat in with it that the lawyer Craft did, but still I laid it all out exactly what happened, and the evidence was there Dan It was as clear as day. It may have been a little complicated because sometimes scientific reports are complicated, but the jury did not ask you look at any of them, and by their own mouths. In interviews after the trial. They said that the defense raised reasonable doubt about her father. Well, that is absolutely nuts.
There was no testimonies leading to the.
Fact that her father might have committed crime.
The only thing was there was the open and closing statements of the defense. Opening statements and closing statements are not evident, they are arguments. They're not supposed to be taken as the truth.
And yet that jury did.
And I am so certain of it, because I'm sorry, they did not find her guilty of even child abuse or neglect. And if a mother has a missing child and does not report it for more than a month, if that's not child abuse, it's child neglect period.
Incredible. That was an incredible case and a surprising, very very surprising verdict. Like you say, this last effort by the closing statement, so nobody you had any indication. In fact, it was the indication that she'd certainly be convicted. And yet a very very surprising verdict.
Yeah, you know, I've never been one of those people to support professional jurors, but after that trial, you know, you start rethinking it because I just don't think that I don't think all of that Jory understood what they were doing and anybody on that jewelry who really understood what they were supposed to be doing and came to that verdict was just not following what they needed to do. They didn't ask for anything. No, they didn't ask for any scientific statements.
I think they tried any cypher.
They didn't ask for a thing, and that was very, very troubling.
Let's talk about another troubling case here. We didn't talk about this in an interview. I never interviewed you about this because this is back before twenty ten. But this is a book, one of your books called Under the Knife and Gang Failure. Had built a thriving beauty business. There was one problem with this thriving cosmetic surgery business. Tell us about Under the Knife.
Well, he was well loved by his clients and they just thought.
The world of him.
And in one segment of his client base were men who were transitioning to be women, and one of their biggest problems was in fact that grew beards. Well, he was really great at doing the laser there, but if you're not a doctor, you're not supposed to be doing that. So basically he was practicing medicine.
With aut a license.
And when he got caught. You know, he's investigated by the Health department, and he was up against charges and so they said, and he was also given prescriptions, and so they said, well, if you help us get the doctors that enabled you to do this, the ones that signed off on prescription pads.
And left the blanks so you.
Could use them, then we will, uh will consider that.
When when we consider your punishment.
So he was cooperating, everything was going well, and they didn't because of his cooperation get the medical license jerked from two doctors. But meantime he realized that this laser was really a good business. He set up in an apartment in Chelsea and was running his laser business there. And this woman who was a Filipino immigrant and had been doing so well in this country. She was making
a six figure salary at Barclay's. I mean, she was no lightweight, but yet she was taken in by Flo and she went to see him for a condition she had in her tongue that he said he could.
Fix with laser.
Well, unfortunately he didn't know enough medicine to understand how critical dosage of lidokane can be.
And on top of.
That, he was injecting it into her tongue, and the tongue is the most vascular system in the whole body. And that light cane went in there was too much of it, and it like.
Threw her into seizures.
So Dean calls up of a neighbor of his in Knewark who is an emergency room physician, and asked him what I should do. He said, listen, three blocks away from you, there is a trauma center. You need to get her there immediately or her chances of survival are next to none. Well, Dean thought, well, I'm already in trouble. I'm going to go to prison for this for sure. I think I'll just wait a little while and see if she pulls out of it. Well, he gambled with
her life, and she lost. She died right there in that apartment. Dean folded up her small body, put it in a little rolling suitcase and took it out to his vehicle, drove back to his million dollar mansion in Newark, and out in the carriage house, he buried her and covered her body with concrete. Then he sold the house
and moved to Costa Rica. It was only because his boyfriend in New York started thinking about all the little things that hadn't seen right before Dean left town, and he went to the police saying that maybe this missing woman has something to do with Jan Fayelo. So they searched his house and Greg had told them about the concrete he had toward the carriage house, so they ripped that up and found the suitcase containing her body.
Yeah, incredible. Let's talk about Baby Me Mine. The very first episode of True Murder, you were gracious enough to come on and talk about a book you had written a little bit before that called Baby Be Mine. Bobby Joe Stinnett is pregnant, eight months pregnant. And this is a very very unusual case, I thought at that time, but as we discussed, it's not without its other precedents of this type of case. Tell us just a little bit about Baby Be Mine, and how hard of a
book to write was Baby Be Mine? And a case to investigate.
It was extremely difficult because I had a daughter that same age at the time as Bobby Joe, and to to talk to the mother of Bobby Joe and have every conversation and in horrible wailing, to the point where she had her best friend call me up and tell me ever, everything she wanted to say since she was capable of doing it. And the brutality of the crime,
absolutely brutal, brutal crime. I had never heard of Cesarean abduction before and it's rare, but it has happened enough that the FBI had written a special report about it. Bobby Joe was a sweet woman. She raised rat terriers, she worked in a pet shop. She loved animals. She was a barrel racer, sweet small town girl, and she was about to have her first baby, and she was so excited about it, and she just happened to talk
about it in the wrong places. She was on a chat group and basically became the victim of an internet scam by a woman named Lisa Montgomery. Lisa was in a marriage and her second husband and he was losing interests, quickly losing interests.
But she knew he loved.
Children because he'd taken in her children she had four from a previous marriage, and he was just great as a father. So she figured the only way to save her marriage was to have a child. But the problem, well, she'd had a tube ligation. Her current husband knew nothing about that, and she proceeded to fake her pregnancy, and her husband, who had physically lost interest in her, was just delighted to be let off the hook of that
part of the relationship. And so she went online, and first she was scamming one woman who was pregnant with twins, so she was telling anybody she was pregnant with twins, and then that woman miscarried and lost both babies. Then she moved on and said, oh, it wasn't twins after all, it was just I'm going to have a baby, baby girl.
And that's when she scammed Bobby just in it, and she led Bobby Joe under a false name to believe that she was looking for a rat carrier puppy, and Bobby Joe gave her directions to her house to come look at the puppy you could pick one out. When they got there, Bobby Joe must have recognized it because she'd seen her at other at rat terrier shows and probably started running right away. Lisa went after her, slid
her up the middle. She passed out, and Bobby removed the body, started to remove the baby's body, and Bobby Joe came too, got up and was fighting for her life, and that's when Lisa Montgomery strangled her to death and then left the house with the baby and drove back to her home a state away. Bobby Joe's mother found Bobby Joe's body, and she called the sheriff and she said, my god, it looks like she exploded. I can't imagine being that mother. I just can't imagine. It's so horrific.
And so that.
Made it very difficult to do.
And in the process I was learning a whole lot about that town of Skidmore. You know, McElroy had been there many years before. He'd been gunned down in the street by his neighbors who were justly distressed at the way he was shooting at other citizens, and how his lawyer was always getting him off and he was not going to prison. He'd been cattle rustling too, and a lot of other things, and he just was the town bullying.
And they finally had enough, and there were a lot of people but witnessed it, and.
He was shot dead, and nobody would talk, nobody.
And then there was this weird thing. It was just by the time I went there, there were only three hundred and fifty people living there, and three of Bobby Joe's Two of Bobbi Joe's cousins by marriage were also killed within a five year period of her murder, one of them by absolute vicious domestic violence assault and the other one Branson Perry just went missing and his body's never been found. And there was a man who had written about murdering Branson without naming him, but it sounded
very much like that. And he was arrested because he was involved in a pornography a plot with child pornographer see with a medical student in Atlanta, and they both got busted for that, but they've never been able to find proof that he actually did kill Branson. And when I was there, there was as much interest in Bobby Joe by the people who would talk to me as there was in Branson Perry and what happened to him, and nobody knowing what happened to him, and the other
people in town. There were people that spoke to me, but there were others who I mean literally, I was run out of a restaurant, I was run away, I was run off and not allowed into a convenience store. I knocked on a window, saw someone staring at me and turn and walk away. I mean, it.
Was it was bizarre.
It was a very unwelcome place, and I thought, well, maybe north west Missouri is like this, But I went to other little towns around there and know they weren't. That town was so scarred by the McElroy story to take trusted no stranger at any time.
Yes, truly truly astonishing case. Let's use this as an opportunity, Diane to stop for a second talk about our sponsor, which is fab Fit Fun. The Spring twenty twenty box has been revealed and is now on sale for a limited time. My wife Lisa starts every day looking fabulous with Goat Milk moisturizing cream from Kate Somerville. She says it's essential. She says it's especially soothing during the dry winter months. She ends up her ends are day with
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Oh my, Well, you know, one of the things I always look for in a true crime book is a case that has something different that I can learn from. And I'd never done a dismemberment before, so that that was part of what drew me to that. The other thing was it's the cast characters. You had a musician who, although he wasn't, you know, a big star, he was. He did performances in the Caribbean, he did performances up
and down the East Coast. He was well loved in his hometown of Raleigh, and that was one of the characters. Then you had an actress who had been in The Step, the new version of the stepford Wise. And to top it off, you had an artist. So what an odd combination an actress, a musician and an artist in this love triangle. And it was really very bizarre. And the bottom line was the custody of.
The children.
Laura had married of him because they were in love. I mean they even shared a birth day. I mean, it was like fate. So they were married, at least that's what Laura thought. But then she had two little boys, and unbeknownst to her, when she had to return home from the Virgin Islands because her child needed medical care stateside, her husband started an affair with another woman, and Grant her husband was ended up returning to New York instead
of Raleigh. When the woman who's having an affair with returned to New York with her daughter. Then they went to Las Vegas and they took the oldest boy who was then sitting with them, and he sent her an email and said, we just got married. I never signed the papers.
Our marriage is null and void.
Wow.
And she was shocked, and.
She pulled out her papers and sure enough, he never signed them. And so then began the custody battle of the children. And he had taken that older boy for supposedly just a few days that we kept the time kept going on and on.
It was months and we're talking through year old boy. So this is a big deal of time drew you away from.
His mom, and Grant came down and with his new wife, Amanda, and they sued for custody. Only they did it away that a legal manner that she wasn't allowed to be there because of the danger to the children, and Laura she was going to fight for her kids because she knew that Grant used drugs. She knew that Grant had some really crazy weird ideas. They were like if you had taken scientology and Christianity in some mix of lunacy and put it in a blender and turned it all
up together. That was his religious belief and it was really weird, including the fact that he was one of the chosen ones. So she needed to get those kids back, and he had gotten custody. The little guy who was like eighteen months was.
Removed from her arms screaming by.
The Sheriff's department. So she wanted to get those guys back and she went to fight for it. And one of that the judge insisted on was a psychological evaluate
evaluation and drug testing. And so the while this was going on and they were being all of them, the whole family was being psychologic interviewed, and the psychologist was getting a real portrait of what was going on in that family, and she was going into their homes and checking out there, and she was very clear on the fact that neither parent was perfect, and she pointed out the things that, oh that Laura needed to do, that she needed to, you know, become more assertive, She needed
to work on herself confidence and in order to be a better parent and to do a better job of that. And there were Laura, as soon as she got any word and stuff like that, she immediately went out and found mentors and stuff to try to make herself a better parent. She wanted to be a good mother for
her boys. And Grant, on the other hand, was absolutely furious when he looked at the report because it talked about him being mentally unstable, it talked about his drug use, and so he flew back saying that, I mean, he was saying she was promiscuous, he was saying that she used drugs. I mean, just on and on on anything.
He could with no grounding in fact. And so it was real clear when the reports came out from the psychologist that he was not even a kids these children. And so he called her, Laura up and asked her if she wanted to go over and have an extra Wednesday visit with the children, and which is outside of the parameters of the visitation that was currently set up, and he said it, we'll talk about maybe giving custody
to you. Well, instead of that, it appears as if she was forced to sign a document that gave up custody of her boys for a some of twenty five thousand dollars, which was not Laura. Laura would not have signed that unless she was pillers.
Now.
Laura always took a tape recorder with her and had it turned on for any encounter with brand, whether it was in person or all on the phone. And though she always downloaded to her computer, she had a special sight that was shared with her best friend. They had both had access to all of that. But the funny thing was there was no tape recorder found in the apartment Grant's apartment, none found anywhere anytime.
Ever.
There was a.
Nick on her neck that looked like it was caused by a knife, and I think it's very possible that's what was held to her throat to make her sign that document. There were polls of blood, which all that was left when the cops got into that apartment was a bleach sting, And it was just amazing how the whole place of reeked of bleach. That there was no Laura. And it turns out that they loaded up the two kings and they got all a truck or U haultering. They put Laura's body in a couple of coolers after
cutting it up in the bathroom. They traveled all the way out to Texas from Raleigh, North Carolina, and dumped those cool the contents of those coolers into the creek across the street from Amanda's aunt's house. Essentially dumping their problem on her. Now, I'm saw that is so freaking illogical. People are so illogical so many times when it comes
to disposing eleviates. Think of all the places they passed on Itan in Louisiana where it would be easy to pull off her bio and throw stuff and nobody would ever see it because the negators would eat it up faster and loot the water.
I do.
They put it near her family member's house, and it was just amazing. Thank god they were caught.
Yeah, thank god for incompetent criminals.
And the thing of it is is Amanda she really really put it on thick, tried to make herself a victim of Grant just as much as Laura was. It was all in act. She used, she had a different voice and everything. I mean, it was just one big act. And so she didn't get into life without pearl sentence. That granted, she got like sixteen to eighteen years, I believe, But then the State of Texas they got into the game. They got her for another twenty years for abusing a corpse.
Wow. Yeah, yeah, of all the you have the opportunity, as a highly respected journalist to be able to speak to almost all of these subjects, these people that are involved in these murder trials, many of the players, but many of the.
Perpetrators as well. Let's talk about what book really. You had an opportunity to speak to the perpetrator and it was the most I would say important, important interview that you did have, the most shocking, the most revealing, the most impressionable interview that you've done for any book.
Well, it had to be Tony and sales because not only did I talk to him, I interviewed him more than twenty times, and I received probably about one hundred letters from him. So and this was my first experience of true crime. And I, you know, Dan, I led a normal, sheltered life up to then, and I couldn't you know, he was the most evil person I'd ever met. But I never met evil people, you know, I met
mastery people, I mean people, but never evil. And so I didn't know if what I thought had any validity as far as him being most evil. But then doctor Michael Stone, the forensic psychiatrist out at Columbia University, he had a show called Oh, Most Evil, That's what it's.
Called, and he.
And he told me that in put on the show that Sell's got the highest ranking of any of them, and so I said, well, okay, so I started out at the top or at the bottom.
However, you look at it.
Absolutely when you talk about the last book that we discussed, and that is Death on the River, what is a what was markedly different about writing that book and covering that case for you.
What was different was that it was really really difficult talking to people to getting documents. It seemed like everybody in their brother had lawyered up. And you know, I was able to talk to a lot of people on the vic inside, but I also like to talk on the perpetrator's side, because you know, it's like when you're writing fiction, if your bad guy has nothing but bad qualities and your good guy has nothing but good qualities,
it doesn't ring true. Like kind of the most evil man I knew he rescued a woman in the middle of a flood, risking his own life. Now, that doesn't sound like a serial killer who would eventually confess to killing over fifty people. But he didn't. He tore up four boards to rescue a kitten who was about to drown under the house.
Uh, you know, so.
There is that thing is absolutely black and white. Even the most evil person is capable of a good deed, and the best, most wonderful, angelic person, even probably Mother Theresa, has done something she wishes she hadn't, and.
That is why I like to talk to people who know those gods. And I think there was a little bit of that, but I didn't get as much, and the prosecutor is very very thin with any documents, and that made it difficult.
I had to really scrape around. And it also seemed to me that police departments have gotten far tighter raised on their detectives and.
Their ability to speak to people.
I mean, in order to talk to the guy in charge of that investigation, I had to have the public information officer on the line with me, and a couple of times she said, no, you cannot answer that question.
So I didn't get information. I was going for it.
It was.
Difficult, and then to see a good offered a stop on the risk, I just I don't know. And I kind of doubt that this was a totally pre meditated murder because there are too many things that happened that she couldn't have any control over it, like the weather, and I think.
That she was.
Someone who had thought about his death and was looking for an opportunity and she saw one. I'm sorry, but if you love somebody as much as she claimed to have loved Viddo, Dan, you would have worked your own life to save that person. I would have done everything. Instead of pulling you or away, I would have tried to find a way to use it to pull them up a tangle in my kayak, so you least hard to get the shore. I'd probably ended up showing myself in the process. But hey, that's low, that's law.
Yes, now, Dane, we didn't have time to cover all of the fourteen books that you have, and but I urge people to go and look at these and and read for themselves. What is new for you? I know that you are a fictional writer as well, but what is are you investigating now for a possible book? True crime book? What's next for that?
Having I am working on a novel right now, the last three chapters I've got to get done.
And I also have a.
Very very old, like eighteen forty serial killer thing I'm looking into and if something contemporary comes up. It seems like nothing is getting the press that Saint Martin's press wants to have in order to get me to write a contemporary book. And the politics are like eating up all the airways, so the coverage isn't there, and.
You want something high profile for me.
I mean, I'd rather not do high profile, but you know that's.
What they want.
So I am I'm just I'm just waiting on one thing and plodding on other one. And I'm also really really excited because Through the Windows has been bought by a publisher in China and they are going to translate it into simplified Chinese and come out with a new edition of the book in Chinese. I can't wait to see that.
That's very interesting. Talk about expanding your market.
And yeah, and if you heard about the the the Netflix Harrison Ford deal, No, okay, not Netflix, excuse me, staircase.
Well, Harrison Ford is supposed to be playing and co producing a thing about Michael Peterson and the options my book.
Oh wow, congratulations. That's amazing, And so I think.
Some cares and for Jorady committed it probably will happen, but it hasn't beged espicially will happen yet?
Yes, Well, that's fascinating And look forward to that. That's incredible, Dan. I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about all of your books and you're fascinating true crime career that's nowhere near from being over. Thank you very much, Diane for coming on and doing this true crime retrospective. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. For those that might want to look at other work, is there a Facebook page a website? Tell us about that, Dan.
Coo, I have.
A separate true crime books page for my true crime on Facebook, and I also have a website which you can read sample trapters from all my books, and that is Dianfanning dot com.
Sounds great. Thank you so much, Dan. I know I will be talking to you again soon. You have a great night.
Bye bye