Tuesday, December 24, 2024
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Researching and Writing True Crime

In December 2018, on the Law and Crime Network, I came across a video of a man named Brian Winchester giving testimony during a trial in Tallahassee. I knew nothing about the case or why he was testifying, but what he had to say was utterly gripping. For the first time, he was confessing to murdering his best friend, Mike Williams, 18 years earlier, to marry Mike’s wife, Denise, with whom he’d been having a long-standing affair. His testimony was extraordinary—yes, there was plenty of horrifying detail, but his guilt and anguish were palpable. 

(4 Ethical Rules for Writing True Crime.)

Immediately, I began a deep dive into the details of the case, and was riveted by its characters, tangents, and secrets: A righteous Baptist couple involved in a sordid sexual affair. A man who apparently drowned while duck hunting, whose body never surfaced, and who was believed to have been eaten by alligators. His ex-wife, who became a police informant. His devoted elderly mother, who never stopped looking for her son.

It’s well-known that true crime is more popular than ever these days, and there are hundreds of books, websites, and podcasts devoted to describing and exploring criminal cases, both modern and historical. Most of these focus on murders that are lurid, unusual, or attention-grabbing. I’ve been interested in true crime my whole life; I’ve written two books in the genre, An Unexplained Death (Holt, 2018) and Couple Found Slain (Holt, 2021), as well as a book about the reading group I ran for several years in a men’s prison, The Maximum-Security Book Club (HarperCollins, 2017).

My most recent book, Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida (on sale July 23), had an unusual genesis. For a long time, I’d been searching for a true crime podcast that focused exclusively on what I find most interesting about criminal cases, which is live, first-person forensic testimony, without any narration, judgements, commentary, or product endorsements. Unable to find a podcast that featured this kind of material, I created my own, Forensic Transmissions, in which I curate a selection of audio files, mostly from murder trials. 

As a psychoanalyst, I’m especially interested in the complex psychological states of people who commit murder. For this reason, Forensic Transmissions features only dialogues where there’s tension between the questioner and the person being questioned–where personal experiences and memories are at stake–which means there’s no testimony from law enforcement, forensic technicians, expert witnesses, or those presenting circumstantial evidence. The events unfold in real time, but the recordings are archival, which, I believe, gives them a paradoxical sense of loss.

I found these recordings on the internet, mostly in the archives of Court TV and the Law and Crime network. To find the kind of audio appropriate for the podcast, I must sieve through a lot of material. Sometimes, during this process, I come across a case that is so compelling and fascinating that I find myself unable to resist digging further. In one case, a lot further.

Check out Mikita Brottman’s Guilty Creatures here:

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At the time of discovering the Winchester confession, I hadn’t been planning to start on another true crime book—in fact, I was working on a novel—but I knew immediately this was a case I wanted to write about. I wanted to explore not only what happened to Mike Williams, and how, but the setting of the crime (a small, churchgoing community), and its psychological complexity. There were so many questions I wanted to explore. How did a couple live together for 16 years knowing they’d committed a terrible murder? How did that secret impact their relationship? Did their friends and family suspect what they’d done? Could a person be in such denial that they could truly no longer believe they’d committed a dreadful crime?

Something else struck me: The case was an almost play-for-play re-enactment of the 1944 crime movie Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder, and based on the novel by James M. Cain. It reminded me of Cain’s other noir novels too, like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Mildred Pierce, as well as Raymond Chandler’s detective fiction. There were even echoes of classic dramas like Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the Oresteia, by the Greek playwright Aeschylus. Could I incorporate these resonances into my re-telling of the case? It seemed like a tall order.

First, I had to undertake the feet-on-the-ground detective work: traveling to Tallahassee, scoping out the crime scene, interviewing people involved (mostly off the record). There were Freedom of Information Act requests to file, and police documents to get hold of, which wasn’t always easy. But this was just the groundwork. The tough part came when I sat down to write.

The most difficult part of writing the book was taking real-life events and building a (hopefully inconspicuous) structure and scaffolding around them. Once I’d done this, I could frame and organize the story, forging a timeline that was easy for readers to follow, while also holding back certain events to enhance the suspense. 

It took me a long time to find the right tone—I wanted to be faithful to the voices of those involved. I also wanted to incorporate some background research without making things too dull and stuffy. I hoped to include echoes of the noir writing of Cain and Chandler. I had to keep things pacy without being lurid, exploitative, or sensational. 


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Finally, I wanted readers to stay absorbed in the story while also understanding that the case evokes wider human dilemmas: the weight of psychological burdens, how repression affects relationships, and what it feels like to live for 16 years with murder on the soul.

When a real-life story seems tailor-made for a book, you might think that book might be easy to construct, but it was much more difficult than I anticipated. The events went back to 2001, and the story was tangled and convoluted. Plus, this wasn’t a whodunnit—the identity of the perpetrators was obvious from the start. I wanted to get inside the heads of Brian and Denise. Most true crime writing simplifies things, in my opinion, making people into evildoers versus sympathetic, innocent victims. But I believe any one of us could, under the right circumstances, commit a terrible crime.

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