INTRODUCTION

A week before Christmas 1982, I got a phone call from Pat Piscitelli, an attorney in my home state of Massachusetts. He had gotten my name from a mutual friend. Piscitelli had been the lawyer for Anne Capute, a nurse who, in 1980, had been accused of deliberately overdosing a patient with morphine, and had been tried for first-degree murder. The case had gotten reams of local publicity and a fair amount of national notice, so attorney Piscitelli was confident that someone would publish a book about it. He wanted me to write that book.

At the time I was something less than the perfect person to write a true crime book. I had written books for children, books for writers, and a romance. I had also published about a thousand shorter pieces—articles, columns and stories. I had written about roller skating, glass painting, music making and igloo building, but not a word about criminals, police, courts, trials, lawyers, prisons, convicts, violence or bloodshed.

So I did the only sensible thing—I agreed to write the book. I reasoned that nobody has experience at anything until he does it for the first time. And, more to the point, I've always felt that a good writer can write well about anything that excites him. And I had gotten excited when Piscitelli told me about the Capute case. I saw that it had many of the elements of a compelling novel. There was a sympathetic central character in Anne, the lowly LPN who was being crucified by the hospital and the legal establishment. There was a knight in shining armor, in Piscitelli, the well-known lawyer who embraced the case even though Anne couldn't possibly pay his fee. There was formidable opposition in the cool and competent nursing supervisor who accused Anne; and in the cunning and ambitious district attorney who prosecuted her. There was domestic strife because Anne's husband was less supportive than she would have liked, and Anne's teenaged daughters were emotionally wounded in the crossfire of publicity about their mother, "the murderer." There were side stories, like the friend who shot himself dead in Anne's house during the trial while Anne's daughter slept in another room. And there was a happy ending, because Anne was acquitted of the charges.

Okay, so I had never written a true crime before. It didn't matter. I recognized a good story when I saw one.

So I wrote the book, Fatal Dosage, and it was published by Bantam Books in 1985. Later, I sold the movie rights to a producer named Jack Farren, and in October 1988, I was able to gather with fifty friends and, for the first time, watch something I'd written come to life on the screen. My book had become the CBS television movie, Fatal Judgment, starring Patty Duke and Tom Conti. Without any special training in true crime writing I had become a true crime writer.

I hadn't switched careers. And I hadn't abandoned the other kinds of writing that I love. Since Fatal Dosage I have written more children's books, more books for writers, a sports book, and more magazine articles.

But I have also written three more true crime books, and I'll give you a quick rundown on them, as well as my current true crime project, now, because I'll be referring to them often in this book.

Finder: The True Story of a Private Investigator (with Marilyn Greene, Crown hardcover, 1988; Pocket Books softcover, 1990) is the true story of Marilyn Greene of Schenectady, New York, a private eye who specializes in missing persons cases. In fact, she is the nation's leading finder of missing persons. I wrote this book about her career and her life in the first person, from Marilyn's point of view. Ninety percent of my research for the book was interviews with Marilyn Greene.

Across the Border: The True Story of the Satanic Cult Killings in Matamoros, Mexico (Pocket Books softcover, 1989) begins with the disappearance of Mark Kilroy. Mark was a college student on spring break in Brownsville, Texas. He went to Matamoros, Mexico, across the border, where he was kidnapped, ritually murdered, and mutilated by a satanic drug cult led by Adolfo Constanzo. When Mark's body was discovered, so were the bodies of twelve other victims. My book covers the investigation.

Without Mercy: The True Story of the First Woman From South Florida to Be Sentenced to the Electric Chair (Pocket, 1990) is the story of Dee Casteel. Dee, an alcoholic who was regarded by some as "the nicest person you could ever want to meet," worked as a waitress at a south Florida pancake house. She helped arrange for the murder of the restaurant's owner and his mother. For this, she and three men were sentenced to die in the electric chair.

The book I am currently working on under contract to Pocket Books is tentatively titled Deadly Secrets. It is a story about a well-liked and respected Florida man who tried several times to have his wife killed, and ended up killing the hit man he had hired. Beyond that, this man was leading a bizarre double life which included affairs, buying counterfeit money, destroying cars for insurance money, an obsession with guns, torturing people on film, and videotaping the murder of one of his employees.

Redbook bought first serial rights to Finder, and The Star bought second serial rights. Warner Brothers bought an option on dramatic rights. Pocket Books bought reprint rights. Across the Border had a first printing of three hundred thousand copies. Without Mercy has been published in both hardcover and paperback, as Deadly Secrets will be. And Without Mercy has also been optioned for a movie.

True crime, as you can see, has been good to me. It has given me more money than any other kind of writing. It has given me the chance to do the kind of writing I want—stories about interesting people in dramatic situations. And it has raised my name in the publishing industry so that I can more easily sell the other books I write.

And one other thing. Recently, I was prattling on to my wife, Gail, about my lifelong fantasy of being a private detective. "I always wanted to be the guy who comes into a strange town and snoops around," I said. "You know, like in the movies, find some waitress who 'knows something' and ask her questions, then talk to a cabdriver and drop in on the local police detective. Put all the clues together, then leave town and go on to the next case."

My wife looked at me for a moment, and smiled. "Gary," she said, "that is what you do."

Of course! Gail, as usual, was right. Writing true crime books had not just brought many of my writing dreams to life. It had also made my private-detective fantasies come true, and I didn't even have to get shot at. (At least, not yet.) Maybe I hadn't simply stumbled into the true crime writing field, after all. Maybe, wily detective that I am, I had known all along just what I was doing. In any case, deciding to write the story of Anne Capute was the smartest thing I've ever done in my writing career.

But this book is not about my career; it's about yours. You've picked up this book, and since it is unlikely that you mistakenly thought it was a book on how to smelt copper or the like, you must at least suspect that you are capable of writing readable true crime stories and that writing true crimes is right for you. Well, it is if you are interested in writing both fiction and nonfiction, because you'll need the doggedness of a journalist and the talent of a novelist. It is, if you are fascinated by people who do the unexpected, places that produce the unlikely, and conflicts that pull like a magnet on all who come near. It is, if you can tell the truth even when the truth is not as interesting or as exciting as you had hoped it would be.

But if writing true crimes is not for you, it would be nice to find out now, so that you can donate this book to the public library and go bowling. Writing true crime is not for you if you are intimidated by authority, if you can't stand the company of lawyers, or if you cannot see the humanity in even the most violent and remorseless of criminals. It is not for you if you are bored by asking the same questions of several people, if you are horrified by the idea of reading twenty volumes of trial transcript, or if you get claustrophobic in prisons. And it is especially not for you if you are extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who have suffered great pain. Make no mistake, when you write true crimes you are going to meet people who have suffered something awful.

Okay, so now that we've gotten that straightened out, let's move forward.