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But I said who is he? And he said he's a murderer. And I said why does he kill people? And my dad just paused and said he likes it.
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career, research for my many audio and book projects has taken me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories. Meg Gardner is a thriller writer, a really great one. She has several series, but the one I'm most interested in started with a book called unsub about a serial killer, and it's based on two
real serial killers, one of whom she lived very close to. So, first of all, for anybody who hasn't read your thriller books, give me an overview of what you've done so far, how many and what's the premise of different characters you've created.
I now have seventeen novels published. They're all thrillers. Several series, the Evan Delaney series about a freelance journalist in Santa Barbara, the Joke Beckett series about a forensic psychiatrist who consults for the San Francisco Police Department, several standalones about a former thief Skip Tracer, and the Caitlin Hendrick series about a young cop who is eventually recruited to the FBI
to hunt serial predators. Also the book I co authored with Michael Mann, Heat Too, which is a big saga crime thriller, which I'm very proud of as well.
Yeah, so was there a book written about Heat originally before the movie came out.
There was not. Heat was original screenplay by Michael Mann and he wrote it, directed it, and then he had so much material that he still wanted to create in that universe. The movie takes place over three weeks, and he had written biographies for all the main characters, decades of you know, backstory for them, and it always wanted to expand the story. So that's what we did.
Well, I've interviewed boy'd have to say maybe four or five fiction authors at this point who have used, you know, real true crime stories as a jumping off point. Do you think that's pretty common with the folks who were in the mystery, you know, thriller espionage kind of genre to start somewhere? How do you think a lot of people come up with these stories? You do?
You start with a what if and a big character you hope, who's going to deal with that what if? And all you have to do is now, like open your phone or turn on the news, and ideas are not the hard part. It's finding, you know, ideas are everywhere. They're just soaked into the atmosphere. And the trick is to turn that into a compelling narrative, spin it out.
But if you write thrillers crime, certainly the infamous cases that have kept us and the country at the world wrapped for years, decades, centuries, now, how many years have people been fascinated with Jack the Ripper? Then using that as a spark to anchor an event, to certainly anchor the emotional tone of the story becomes enticing.
And you know, I was going to ask before we get into what inspired unsub which is frankly the best title ever. Like you, so you know, before we get into that, talk to me about your research, because if you are a mystery or a thriller writer who is using true crime as a jumping off point, that has to be part of your research. You're not interviewing a serial killer in prison, but you know you have to get into this person's head.
Is that why true crime is enticing?
As far as like an inspiration or a place where you go where you can read real interviews with these folks.
It can be. I think who knows where research starts and ends. I think it starts with the collision of the characters in real life as well as on the page. Every crime arises from physically. If it's murder, it arises from physically the collision of the perpetrator and the victim. So thinking about who they are, where they are, how they came to be together, that becomes definitely part of the what and the why about how you're creating this story.
And research. I mean, you know, research can be this glorious, bottomless rabbit hole that we can just wrap ourselves around in, like it's a big cozy quilt that we can never want to leave.
Sometimes I find it awful, but yes I'm glad. Other people it just depends. It's awful if I can't find what I'm looking for, it's wonderful and everything you described if it's all right there.
But with true crime, you have a lot right there.
I mean, you've got.
Trial transcripts in some of these cases, great newspaper interviews, that kind of thing.
Trial transcripts haven't been that important to me for the books I've written, but news stories books written by investigators. Nowadays, websites where you can look up infamous unsolved cases are now solved cases where everybody in the world has created their own screen name and offers their own take on everything.
And sometimes that's just like the worst subreddit ever. And sometimes it's extremely helpful and inspiring as far as like the dedication that people have, and it's more helpful when professionals have contributed to it, and sometimes you will all
be talking. I think about some of the sites I came across where retired police officers who had worked on some cases could not let it go even though they were no longer with the department, and they would they would contribute to sites like this, and that was fascinating not only for their insights, but to see the emotional total it had taken on them and how invested they still were in trying to solve the case and to
work for the victims and their families. So that becomes as interesting sometimes as figuring out some tricky little clue, like what kind of forensic evidence you can find on a shovel. Because what we're doing when we write fiction is we want to take readers on a journey, an emotional journey, a roller coaster, and do what we can't do in real life, which is bring them back safely at the end.
That's a good way to say it. Okay, so let's start. Just tell me a little bit about Unsubbed. Was this the first book for you? I can't remember.
Unsub was not the first novel I wrote. It was the first novel I wrote featuring a character who was a law enforcement professional, and we can examine why I had always avoided doing that until then. It was it was I think my eleventh novel was unsub and I'd always had somebody who was maybe on the fringes of law enforcement or investigating law enforcement someone who consulted for them or was running from the law.
So my friend calls that cop adjacent, cop adjacent.
So so I'll say, you can look at me and say that I have something to something going on with authority, or you can say that did I really want to just avoid the research it took to find out, you know what duty weapons did this Alameda County Sheriff's Department. She to its officers and to find out what really was required of someone in all the affidavits they had to file when they after arrest and everything like that.
So I realized, if I was going to write about an infamous series of murders, that having someone who had a badge and arrest authority was probably a good way to go.
Tell me the premise of UNSEB. You've got Caitlin Hendricks, and she's what type of officer?
Is she a detective or where is she? Caitlyn Hendricks when UNTEP opens is a baby detective. She's actually working narcotics. She's been a detective for all of six months and barely out of uniform, and she finds herself hunting an infamous serial killer who starts murdering again after being dormant for twenty years. She finds out that this killer, the prophet, has begun committing more murders, and this is a killer who haunted her childhood, terrorized the Bay area, and really
destroyed her family. Because her father was the homicide detective who handled the initial case and failed to uncover the identity of the UNSUB which stands for unknown subject that is FBI LINGO for the unknown perpetrator and a real life who'd done it, Mack Hendricks. Her dad could not break the case. The case broke him, broke up the family, led him to the brink of taking his own life. You know, this killer had sent the cops and the
press weird puzzles, taunting messages. And now I thought, Okay, if a killer came back after twenty years, what would be a way to tell the story? And I thought, okay, let's really, let's sink our fangs into having the detective who's now really got to try to put her skates on and learn how to do this be the daughter of the guy who had taken it on the first place, and of course that's haunted her family. She feels a
sense of responsibility, a sense of faith, failure. She's knew she was kind of destined to be a cop because it was in her family's bones, but she does not want to let what happened to her father happened to her. She tries to say she's going to rigidly separate herself from the job, that when she comes home the batch goes off. She's relentless, but she does not want to become obsessed. And of course her dad warns her away from this case uselessly because she's determined to pursue this killer.
And things start escalating. I don't know spoilers, but things escalate and percolate, and things start swirling closer and closer to her and the people she cares about.
What infamous case became the kernel for this because you know, I'm curious of if it evolved as you started writing it, or did you stick with whatever this case is.
The zodiac really was the initial spark for this case. I did grow up in California and recall as a small child seeing the daily newspaper and there was a police drawing on the front page of a figure with a hood over his head with a bizarre symbol on the front, and I recall asking my parents what's that? Who's that? And they said that's the zodiac, and I could kind of in my memory my mom was sort of waving my dad off in the background, kind of like let's throw this paper away. But I said who
is he? And he said he's a murderer, And I said, why does he kill people? I was probably going into first grade and Catholic school, where we knew that there were always, you know, deadly sins that drove people to kill, like greed less, anger, hatred, and my dad just paused and said he likes it. And that totally threw me. I could not conceive of why someone would like to kill people, and it really threw me for a loop. And I don't know that I ever slept with my
windows open again for a very long time. But of course, the zodiac has never been identified. And I went away stopped killing, supposedly, and at some point later I thought, Okay, if he could set down his murderous impulses for a while at his own choosing, what's to stop him from picking it up again at a moment of his choosing. And that was the genesis for unsub which, of course the zodiac has become this I don't want to say iconic, but notorious case, partly because that killer has never been
officially identified and did taunt the media. The police was very much narcissistically interested in keeping himself in the public eye with these bizarre cryptographic puzzles and letters to the San Francisco Examiner in San Francisco Chronicle, and the bizarre symbolism which makes which always people out to think that well, what is you know, what is there? Is there some kind of a cult thing going on? But the zodiac was just genuinely terrifying. So if it scares me, I
think it might scare an interest readers as well. And I used that as the ground for the killer in unsept the prophet who left cryptic messages and bizarre symbols, the ancient symbol for mercury sometimes carved into a victim's flesh. And yes, I know you're you're making a face there, But honestly, I did not want this book to be grim and dark. I wanted it to be compelling and fascinating and to have readers want to know as much
as I did, what is really behind these crimes? Is there anything beyond someone who's psychotic and there is in the story.
I remember somebody telling me, you know, we were talking about plots and mysteries or thrillers, and you know kind of like, well, someone being psychotic, isn't it enough of there has to be another reason? And I thought, now, being psychotic is enough of a reason to do this. I don't think you have to search around, you know, dig around too much in somebody's psyche to just say, well, you know, personality disorder or whatever else there was, So
do you think that zodiac? And remembering this as a child, I don't want to put words in your mouth here. Was that one of the contributors for you to want to go down the road in general of telling, you know, thriller type stories.
Undoubtedly, I certainly never interrogated myself about that. But I always enjoyed thrillers. I know, like a lot of people, the fact that in fiction we can make things turn out the way we want is part of the appeal of writing it, as well as making readers tear their hair out or you know, bite their fingernails or just
keep flipping the pages. But I definitely like the idea that I would have characters who are in who are put to the test, who are put in jeopardy and have to help each other out, have to find out what's going wrong. And in a thriller, it's not usually that there's a body on the floor who you're trying to identify who killed them. It's that's maybe a body set the floor, which is the sign that something worse is coming down the.
Road to whoever this is a character in your book, is gonna happen to you probably or someone you love.
Yeah, exactly, So I found it a lot more. Come on, It's fun to write stuff where people really have to dig deep against the stakes or life and death and you want to see them rise to the occasion or die trying. And that's that's why I like to write it. I was also really terrible at attempting to write romance or science fiction, so you know, like those stories. You
attempted both of those when I was very young. I did, and you know, it's like sucked harder than a vacuum cleaner, So like, let me find something else.
I wouldn't even know how to approach either of those things.
Well, okay, so let's talk about zodiac as an inspiration for fiction, because This is an interesting way of looking at it for me, because you know, if I had somebody who had written a book about Zodiac, or if I interviewed, you know, Paul Holes from the Golden State killer case. If I interviewed Paul about Zodiac, which is a case that he's been active in, he would give me a play by play. He would talk about the way that what Zodiac wore according to survivors, what exactly happened,
what the settings were, and all of that stuff. It would be very methodical and it's scientific because that's that's who he is and that's what an author would would explain that too. So your point of view is a little different because you're somebody who's living in that time period, through that experience. So tell me, you know, we've talked about the symbolism that he you know, and the taunting, and he's got kind of all of the Jack the Ripper hallmarks.
I think the brutality part of it.
What are the things that you can pick out from what you remember, either the emotion or the scene kind of lover's lane, but not really, I mean, you know, what are the things that you pick out that just go man, that is exactly the setup for a good thriller minus the serial killer. I mean, what are the things around you that just kind of go, oh my gosh, this gives me the chills.
I need to write it down. Well, a guy coming out of the out of the woods, wearing a hood, carrying a knife at a lover's lane. That's the instant flip of the situation from a beautiful afternoon by Lake barry Essa to absolute terror and realizing your life, your world has either completely changed permanently or is at an end. That was part of it the killing in San Francisco.
As far as Zodiac of the cab driver you know to stop signed late at night, there are a number of police drawings of the zodiac, and the most famous ones were given by patrol officers from the San Francisco Police Department who saw him walking away from the murder scene and did not know it at the time that
that was who they were looking at. And it was only later that everybody put two and two and two together and realized that the man that these two officers who were rushing to the scene, this person they had seen strolling away, had to have been the killer. So the fact of how close they came, how calm the killer was, how it was this terrible missed chance to stop something that was just spreading poor throughout the entire region. That's kind of like, would you do the same now?
How could you set that up in a story? How could you turn that into even more suspense and drama and catharsis if you need it.
As I said, what's kind of different about writing the fictionalized angle of this is you do have to get into the emotions of the victims, and the setup has to be compelling. In any good mystery, you have to have you have to get in the heads of the victims and survivors and the killer were at the same time.
I think in order for us to care about those characters, right, you do.
Sometimes you do not necessarily need to get into the killer's head, and a lot of books don't. Famously, Thomas Harris is the Silence of the Lambs is never in Hannibal Elect's point of view, but we feel like we know him. But getting into their point of view and getting readers to care about these characters, and because they become real people to us when we write. They're characters,
but we feel like they're actual humans. You know, you can make readers interested in a story by raising their curiosity. And that's the puzzles, the cryptograms, the weird messages that the profit and unsub sense to leaves for the police to find that that becomes like the readers trying to see can we figure it out before the police do. But if you can make the characters people that readers care about, then that makes it a much richer story.
And you mentioned a Golden State killer, and I will say that I can segue a little bit toward that. It became a case that also influenced on Sub quite a bit, and a lot of that had to do with the victims and finding out a lot about them. For a reason that I never in a million years suspected when I started writing on SUB. There had been two double murders in the neighborhood where I grew up.
Wait where were you? Galada, California, oh Okay, December nineteen seventy nine and July nineteen eighty one, two couples were or slaughtered at home and the city was just baffled and unsettled. And I remember my parents mentioning it with sort of a gallows humor. Kind of like trying to calm the kids down, like, you don't need to worry about us, because you know what people are saying. These were couples who weren't married, so you know your mom
and I have been hitched for decades. Don't even worry nobody's going to come after us. Is this a Catholic thing? Again? That could be. Now, this isn't my parents trying to say, now, don't worry about us. Whoever this guy is, nobody would ever come after us. And those cases were never solved. And it was when I was writing unsub that I just by chance took a look at one of the local Santa Barbara newspapers and there was a story saying
Sheriff's office seeks information about these killings. Now this was, you know, decades later, and it said these killings have now been tied to what was then being called the original Nightstalker, East Aria rapist, Original night Stalker. And this came like a bolt of lightning, and I just could
not believe it initially. And they were saying they at that time they thought perhaps they had potential evidence that the killer might have been a construction worker who was building a strip mall near the killings at the time, and I just remember sitting there staring at it and my head just throbbing because both of those double murders were within walking distance of my parents' house. It was less than a quarter of a mile away.
And they were still around. Were they still alive?
Oh? Yeah, they were still around. I knew my brother and sister had been living at home at the time. It just threw men. And then when I went to visit my family, I was standing in the kitchen of my brother's new house out the window, and I realized that one of the crime scenes was right across the street. Oh gosh. At the time, he didn't know, and I just remember like standing there like a statue, thinking should
I say anything to him about this? The first thing that horrified me was I remembered the murders, but I could not initially remember the names of the victims. And of course now it's impossible to forget doctor Offerman and doctor Manning and Shear Domingo and Gregory Sanchez. And then to realize that there was this statewide rampage of murders that had come within it felt like a breath of my parents' house and it turns out I think it really did that it became it became, it did become
an obsession. So I did tell my brother. We ended up trying to figure out.
Who it might have been, like somebody you guys might have known. Yes, of course we did. Gosh, okay, wait, where are you in your writing career? Are you knee deep and thriller? At this point, I am.
I was, you know, I had a dozen novels out, I was working on un sub with this whole thing about the zodiac which had like stuck in the back of my mind for years. And then to find out that there was this more recent, horrifying series of events that was not distant, was not in the news, it
was not on television. It was easy to get there across the footbridge where I had, you know, played as a little kid, and up the creek where we caught tadpoles when when I was you know, when I was in grade school, and my brother and I initially were like, who is this? Could this have been somebody that we know? We've since found out that, of course, we were not the first people to think along these lines. We took a look at every place that these killings had taken
place in Golita. There had initially been an attack where the Golden skate killer would come in and he liked to tie up couples. He liked to attack couples, not initially, but he attacked couples and he would tie them up. Often he would tell the if there's a man, he would tell the man that don't make a sound, or
I will kill till your partner. He'd stack dishes on the man's back and tell him to lie still on the floor because if he heard one of the one of the dishes fall off, he would know the guy was moving and then he would he would murder the murder the woman and he would take her in and sexually assault her. And one of these attacks in Golita
up the same creek from where the others. The others were and the guy, the man who was tied up, decided to make up where he heard the assailants say saying I'm going to kill you both, and the guy said, okay, if that's if that's what you're going to do, I'm not going to lie here, and he jumped up. He was strip naked, bound with zip ties and he managed to get outside screaming for help, and his next door neighbor was an FBI agent who heard the cries for
help and came out. At this point, the attacker realized that he was he was not going to succeed, so he ran. He jumped on a bicycle and he went racing through the neighborhood in the dark of night. The FBI guy got into his car and gave chase and lost him after a couple of blocks. And that couple were the last people that the killer let survive.
Wow.
So it got to the place where my brother and I would like, let's take a walk around the neighborhood. Let's look and see where this guy could have been doing his you know, where he could have been hiding. Where did he hide the where did he hide his bicycle?
How did he escape? And he got to the place where I took a Google satellite map and I marked spots around every place where the killer had attacked, you know, having it at Bakenya and told tech and where he shot a dog on the footbridge, and where he attacked the couple on Windsor you know, on on Windsor Lane, and where the guy rode his bicycle and it became clear against all that I marked, like where my parents lived, where my brother now lives, where my best friend lived,
in around the corner from the first attack, where the one of the ushers in our wedding lived, right on the street where the bicycle escaped, from where my husband was living in college, as this guy probably got out of there. And at that point I kind of said, maybe I need to back off, because my brother and I had, well, we thought we'd figured out who it could have been. Were not the only people who thought that.
You thought it was a guy named Wayne Glasby who had gone to my high school or high school, and his family lived around the corner from us, and they were kind of the family in the neighborhood that were rough, and there were four boys. We were pretty certain the large portion of the family was involved in criminal activity, and so we thought, well, Wayne looked very much like one of the identicat drawings of the Golden State Killer.
Of course, then we found the blogs and the chat rooms and everything where we realized, oh, four hundred other people and Gilley have also come up with this theory.
It was only later after well, you know very well that the Golden State Killer was finally identified on Masses Jesseph di'angelo by jenetic genealogy, and thank god, arrested, And it really made a difference to my family to think that there wasn't any chance that this guy could ever come back, that this seemingly sunny neighborhood that had this pall fall over it now felt clear again, at least from that threat. But it was later when I listened to the podcast The Man in the Window by the
Los Angeles Times. This was after, of course, i'd read the LA magazine series by Michelle McNamara about where she came up with the name Golden State Killer and I'll be Gone in the Dark.
Did you find her blog too? Michelle McNamara's blog.
I initially found the LA Magazine articles and which were stunning and helpful and fed my relentless obsession with this case.
And after the killer was arrested and I listened to the LA Times podcast, it suggested that not only were my brother and I convinced that at one point that Wayne Clasby had been the killer and everybody else on the chat room, but so had the Santa Barbara Sheriff's office, and my brother and I realized that he could not have been the killer because he and one of his brothers were killed in a drug deal in a beach
in Mexico. Oh wow, before the final killings took place. However, the Sheriff's department closed the case at that point they thought that he had done it.
How does that shift your thinking about Zodiac and your original premise? What was the difference for you between what Zodiac was doing and what Golden State Killer was doing as far as the emotion or the mystery or the thriller aspect of it. Was a Golden State Killer turning in that direction with that kind of like up the game of the scaredness or what would it be?
It up my own terror. And one thing that I that ended up going into unsub was that Zodiac taunted the media and the police and wanted to spread general panic in the Bay Area. Golden State Killer directly taunted his victims and the survivors. Yeah. Sometimes when he had raped someone and left them alive, then he would call and leave them messages, and you know, the answering machines recorded these messages. If you know, it was this horrifying whisper if I'm going to kill you I'm going to
kill you. I'm going to kill you, and that sadism I thought was part of what defined the Golden State Killer, and I think that went into sub as well as some of the some of the actual physical evidence and stuff that I had discovered about the Golden State Killer.
That you know, a map was found near one of the crime scenes which was like, look like a map of a suburban neighborhood with the word punishment written on the back of it, And so that kind of goes into unsub as well, and the whole idea that figuring out that the killer was driving into a neighborhood but then using creeks culvert storm drains to cloak himself against being found out. I used that and sub as well.
So that was a bit of catharsis, I think to try to say, Okay, at least when I wrote that book, we can have Caitlin try to try to figure this out, and she's going to unmask this guy in the end, even if at the time nobody knew who the Golden State Killer was.
Does so the aspect of sexual assault inside your home, right, I mean, you're vulnerable when you're taking some private time and making out in the woods, but in your own home, like in Golden State, and there's a sexual assault component. Did that make you think differently about the motivations of your killer and also just the motivations of Zodiac versus Joseph DiAngelo.
It did, and that's an excellent point to unpack. I deliberately decided that the killer in un the Profit was not committing sexual assaults. There is such an aspect of the novel that does feature the trying to decipher cryptic messages and the symbolism that part of me thought that sexual assault is so cruel so in face even a different way, that I did not want to do anything that might seem to be gratuitously playing on that for
entertainment in the novel. But definitely to Angelo, yeah, use that as an absolute means of trying to degrade and gain power over his victims, which as of course extremely disturbing.
You know, one of the things that Paul talks about when we talk about motivation of killers, he talks about the sexual as sought aspect of some of these serial killers. And people will say it's about control, it's not about sex, and he says, no, it's about sex. Too, it's both, And so that makes me think about You've got these two similar killers that you're sort of, you know, drawing really as emotion out of more than notes. You know, it's like, what are the things that will terrify you
and you know, make your heart race? So I think about that, like the difference between Zodiac and Golden State killers sometimes, and it's different ways of evoking terror in people. Have you handled in any of your books sexual assaults since you have very strong female characters.
I have in the second on sub novel, Into the Black Nowhere, the killer in that story is drawn from Ted Bundy. There's nothing explicit in the in either the victims or the killer's point of view of those assaults in that book, but it adds to the weight. It adds to the weight that some families feel sometimes, I think, especially if the victim had a male partner, husband, a father who felt like this was an invasion of even a different, more personal, more visceral level that they might
wanted to have tried to protect protector from. It's so ugly that somehow sexual assault feel writing about that feels uglier than writing about murder. Yeah, it is.
It's harder and I think in a way too.
You know, my first book was about a serial killer named John Reginald Christy, and he sexually assaulted women. You know, he would kind of drug them but with gas with carbon monoxide from the top of his stove, and then they would black out. And when I wrote that book, which is a nonfiction book, I thought, how do I
do this without triggering people? And so I ended up having to do it from the victims, wanting to do it based on trials, you know, his confessions and all kinds of stuff in their families from the victim's point of view, and for me, it was simply like, they sit down, they think they're getting this treatment to you know, this like a vic vapor rub type treatment where they would breathe it in and it would help their bronchitis, and then you know, it knocks them out and so
the last thing they know, the victims know, is they black out and then they wake up and he's planting plants and stuff above them, and then you know at that point they're dead. And I just skip over all the details because I don't think you have to tread over those details in order for people to understand the credible horror that the victims must have gone through. And for me, the idea of re traumatizing anybody I think
is so difficult. Is that when you're dealing, like you, with these true crime cases that have that sort of aspect, That's what I was thinking about. You know, that's an added layer a threat and terror exactly.
So I have chosen deliberately to to avoid that, certainly in the in the in the novel that Drew from Drew from Bundy, and even in my most recent novel, shadow Heart, which is also in the series that that killer is drawn from Samuel Little, who drew sketches of of his victims, and I, yeah, didn't go into any detail about any assaults that the the fictional killer had had committed, just because that's not what the story's about.
And I think I wish in a lot of ways people would would do that more.
I had a writer email me after he read my book, the first book, and he a mail writer, and he said, I need your advice. I'm writing a non fiction book that I think is really important. In it it talks about sexual assault and I'm a man and I don't know how to handle this, you know, I mean, how do I And it was not fiction, you know, I mean he he just didn't actually know.
What to include. He was scared to death.
And I've had several male writers say that too, how do I do this? And I think the solution for some of my friends, like Brian Burrows one of them, is you just have a gazillion women read it and just say you know, this is what this is, what to include or not to include. But you know, if we get back to the kind of inspiration, does your profit get away?
Yes? And now if I tell you anymore, I'll give away a twist. No, don't do that.
But you know, the idea of then carrying somebody or the image or somebody or the spirit of a killer through a series or maybe even another book.
I wonder how that could be handled.
I mean with that, is that something that you have experienced where you're where you need to then develop a serial killer or a really bad character where I think you know a lot of people are more comfortable developing a good character, but like, what do you do if you have to have a bad character that go through several books, like Hannibal Lecter goes through several books.
It's fun come on with developing. No developing villains is fun. A thriller is only as strong as the antagonist. Courses of antagonism make the protagonists rise to meet the occasion. So, and if you're going to have an effective antagonist, they need to have some kind of human you know, charismatic features that that they're not just incredibly repulsive. I mean they have to have some kind of strength, intellect, charm,
some kind of cunning, a sense of humor. Remember that, you know your villain has They've got their own problems. They've got they yeah, they've got pets to feed, they've got you know, they've got to pick up the eye cleaning and you know, take mom to the doctor or whatever it is. So you try to keep them human.
And I've never had a character. I mean, there are characters that carry over, but I've kept them mysterious because that's part of the continuing storyline in the series is you know, what's what is still going on and you know mystery caps readers coming back. I agree.
So I read a quote from an author, a novelist, who said, any good novelist, really really good novelist, has really bad relationships because you have to find characters from somewhere, and he said, I can't even tell you how many people are mad at me because they read my books and clearly see my characteristics popping up in your damn books. How do you well, I mean, I guess with an unknown serial killer, that's one thing.
But how do you develop care characters?
I mean they have to be from some people you know, and then of course you're specific with Ted Bundy.
You know, how do you know when to draw a line on stuff like that? I've actually found that when I've drawn characteristics from real life, a lot of times people don't recognize themselves. Okay, So if that's what you're thinking about when you're writing fiction, I wouldn't I wouldn't
stress over it too much. You never want to drop someone you know wholesale into into a book and then have something terrible happen to them or make them just completely annoying, because number one, that cramps your creativity if you're trying to trying to duplicate them from real life
into the story. And second, it misleads you as the writer from trying to develop the best course of action for the characters in the story versus what you're really picky bitch next door neighbor would do when the frisbee comes over the fence for the third time, and you know you're not gonna make them into a into a super villain, it'll be boring. But I've actually never had any I mean, and you can find so many people just you can. You can find people on a city bus.
You watch someone who gets on. You can just see the way they walk, the way they look around, the way they carry themselves, what they're saying and conversation.
Note to listeners, be careful what you say, because there could be a thriller writer sitting next to you on the bus, turning you into a character.
Ab Absolutely, I've only ever had someone decide they were a character in my novels and they weren't. Oh and gotten gotten gotten a message like, boy, this sounds like someone I know, Hey, you know where'd you think you got off talking about me like this?
And I'm like, did you tell them? I have other narcissistic people in my life.
I tried to make it clear that it was not them at all, and that actually that was a villain based on based on someone I loosely pay on someone I knew, and I was horrified that this other person thought that it was it was them. H I could, but I couldn't say. I couldn't like point them to the to like a name and say, no, it wasn't you. It was this other, this other person. But I tried to convince them that that it had it was totally coincidental.
So, you know, I find that the not the best, but sort of really compelling good true crime stories are the ones that that novelist or mystery thriller writers dig into because it's got to be a really good story for for you guys to use it as any kind of inspiration. So you know, with Megan Abbott, I had no idea about the Ponzi scheme.
That was fascinating. I mean she really and she was into it.
She knew all the details and and you know, like like what you said, she kind of detoured, of course off, which is what you're supposed to do.
I'm wondering.
I know that you've kind of dug into BTK, Dennis Raider, You've dug into Ted Bundy, and you know, those guys are sort of to me, they're sort of singular.
There are these outliers.
Part of it is the taunting, and of course everybody says Ted Bundy's charm and intelligence and all of that. Are there other people who you haven't written about where you sort of made a mental note like do you have a sticky somewhere that's just like, hey, think about these people or this kind of case next.
They're always cases coming up. I actually don't have someone in my mind right now because I think maybe I just wanted to cleanse myself a little.
Bit about a woman we've got there are women killers out there? Or is that less interesting?
No, it's fascinating. And actually one of my book events in Austin, my cousin just hands shot up during Q and A and he's like, so are you ever going to have a woman be the villain? Saye read my next book? So again I can't. I can't give away everything.
And I think about that because do you write from the killer's point of view also or is that part of it at all?
Occasionally sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. But in the unsett series, because it's in third person point of view and has multiple points of view already, I have gone into the killer's point of view a number of times deliberately so and that always helps me get to know them a little bit better.
Yeah, I was trying to think about that. I don't know if there are a lot of men who write from a woman's point of view. I definitely think there are. I mean, I don't know, Maybe I'm wrong, but I would think it's more women who write from a men's point of view. And then I thought, how do you get into the head of a serial killer and what they're thinking?
Because you know, one of the things I.
Think that makes such great characters, like with Patricia Cornwell and Scarpetta, is being able to actually kind of be there and find parallels. I don't know how you find parallel with a character that's a serial killer.
Well, this is the right what you know question? Right? Yes, there you go. Any of us who've written written fiction, none of us have committed murder, I certainly hope, but we all find ways to write about it. I think if you dig deep into human nature, sometimes it's tough to try to put yourself into the headspace of someone who sees the world from a twisted point of view.
But that's what you've got to do. If you're going to write from the from the villain's perspective, You remember that everybody has a reason for doing what they what they do, and even the villains in your books are convinced that they are justified. Yeah, they've come up with
some preposterous, monstrous reason to convince themselves of that. But in their own mind, they are doing what they need to and that it is it's the right course of action, and they are the stars of their own you know, their own mental show, and the heroes of their own lives. So remembering that as you as you write, you can kind of try to try to see your way into understanding how someone could be convinced of the righteousness of something that the rest of us want to throw them in prison for.
You know, one of the criticisms of true crime, one of my criticisms is the idea that there are a lot of fans, consumers and content creators who glorify the killers, you know, and so they come off looking like I mean, some good examples that some of the shows that you can see on the streamers where you know, they come off looking a certain way and there's like a sex appeal, which I think is always weird. How do you know
what that line is? When you're writing fiction when you can literally make this person, this killer, look any way that you want, how do you know that you're not putting out this image that you know being a killer is cool or you're a criminal mastermind or something like that. Like, is there a responsibility at all with fiction writers?
I put the responsibility on myself. Yeah, And I think having somebody else read it to make sure that if you've tried to create a charismatic, plausible villain that readers turn away from that they will want to follow at least to see what happens, that you're not making that
person evil. That person's evil seem sparkly and fun. You just have to You just have to watch yourself because if you find yourself falling in love with your villain, since they're all drawn from our own experience and unconscious, I think you need to interrogate yourself pretty deeply about why you find it delightful at some level and back away from it pretty sharply.
I interviewed the author of Victorian Psycho, who really, I mean, that book really is so violent, it's really kind of unreal, and you really do kind of get into the head of the killer because it's her point of view and all of that, And so I think about that gone girl where you're sort of read especially use women, where you're reading and the killer is a woman or the deceiver as a woman, and then you're kind of going, well.
This is interesting.
I mean, I'm not repulsed by this person, but I'm repulsed by basically every male killer or so I wonder if there's some like reverse sexism that I'm experiencing here.
It's fiction, You're permitted to enjoy it, Okay.
I have wondered about that, you know, I mean the glorifying the killer part. I definitely have. I've actually talked to some nonfiction folks and I've said, you know, is there a lesson learned from your book? Or what's the big takeaway or what are you hoping people learn kind of an educational standpoint. A few of them up said, I don't really care about that. So I wonder if there when, what is the point? What's the emotion you're
trying to get at? I know, fear blah blah, fear, you're writing thriller, But is there anything that it's like a female heroine or family connection or anything like that.
Well, certainly, and on set. That's that's those are the two big things, the female heroine, family connection and the idea that this chaos has has risen up again, and Caitlin takes it on her own shoulders to try to be the one who unmasks it and stops it. So it's a sense of compassion, it's a sense of responsibility that she feels to try to try to put the
world to rights. And that's part of the ongoing theme of the series is that she's convinced herself that it's on her to take the world on her shoulders and put it right, and even though intellectually she knows that that's not the way the world works, she's going to try to do it as much as she can. And well, I think for mystery crime thriller, it's I mean, I've had people ask me like, well, do you just love violence? Are you just trying to glorify violence? That why you
write all this stuff? And I say, I hope not. And the thing about certainly American and most European and British crime thrillers is that we write from a place where we have a justice system that we hope is
trying its best to protect us. And put things to write, and the crime and thriller genre generally comes from a place of believing that the concept of justice is real, and that when your world falls apart, when some kind of spirit of evil is manifested and creates chaos and tears the world apart, that it's okay, it's right, it's good for others to stand up and try to stitch the world back together, to put a stop to it, and that it is possible, as imperfect and irregular as
that might be. So, I think crime thrillers are often hopeful in that sense, that because we can put the world to rights, at least at least partly in a story, where often in the real world we can't count on that.
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the audio versions of my books The Sinners All Bow, The Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and Don't Forget. There are twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already. This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Mrosi. Our Associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This
episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold More and if you know of a historical crime that could use some attention from the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at info at tenfoldmore wicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked Words