Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 388: Agency, Empathy, and the Ethics of Writing True Crime with Kim H. Cross
1.2k Plays1 year ago
"I try to minimize harm and maximize truth," says Kim H. Cross, author of In Light of All Darkness: Inside the Polly Klaas Kidnapping and the Search for America's Child (Grand Central Publishing).
In this episode we touch on:
- Giving people agency
- The ethics of writing true crime
- Being a human first and a journalist second,
- And the importance of setting up writing retreats for yourself
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Sponsor: Liquid IV, promo code cnf
Social: @creativenonfictionpodcast on IG and Threads
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Sponsors
00:00:00
Speaker
AC and Ever's episode is sponsored by Liquid IV and I gotta say it's a delicious way to rehydrate and fuel those endurance activities or if you just want to zhuzh up your boring old water and some tasty stuff. Non-GMO free from gluten, dairy, and soy. There's also a sugar-free version. I really recommend the White Peach. Surprise me! Get 20% off when you go to liquidiv.com and use the promo code
00:00:26
Speaker
CNF at checkout. That's 20% off anything you order when you shop better hydration today using the promo code CNF at liquidiv.com. This episode is also sponsored by the word panic. Noun, a sudden overwhelming fear with or without cause that produces hysterical or irrational behavior and that often spreads quickly through a group of persons or animals.
00:00:56
Speaker
or writers. In all of this, I try to be a human first and a journalist second.
Introduction of Guest: Kim Kross
00:01:10
Speaker
Oh, how's it going, CNF? Or did CNF pod that creative non-fiction podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about telling true stories? I'm Brendan O'Mara. Ken H. Cross. The H stands for Hellraiser. That's not true. I don't know what the H stands for. It's back on the podcast to talk about her new book, In the Light of All Darkness, Inside the Polyclass Kidnapping, and The Search for America's Child. It is published by Grand Central Publishing.
00:01:38
Speaker
Kim does not identify as a true crime writer. It's not really her jam. Not really a sub-genre of journalism that she ever wants to do again.
Writing about the Polyclass Kidnapping
00:01:48
Speaker
But, as Kim says, the story found her and she set out to write the book of record on this poly-class kidnapping from the early 1990s.
00:01:57
Speaker
So in this episode, we talk about how she navigated having a family member at the heart of the investigation, her father-in-law, minimizing harm and maximizing truth, the ethics of writing true crime, and being a human first and a journalist second, as well as the importance of setting up writing retreats for yourself, how valuable they were for her, among other things. You know, there's always other things. If you head over to brendadomare.com, you can read show notes to this episode and sign up for my
00:02:26
Speaker
Rage against the algorithm newsletter. A curated list, I know. I know that's basic, but whatevs. An essay by your resident crank, that's me. Books, stuff to make you happy. It goes up to 11. Literally, the list is 11 items long. The essay portion for next month's rager is about how and why I finally deleted my Twitter account. Wow, riveting stuff. First of the month, no spam. As far as I can tell, you can't beat it.
00:02:55
Speaker
Also, consider heading to patreon.com slash CNF pod. Sure, I'm asking for some money, but what you get is more than the satisfaction of helping ye olde podcasts. You get access to the community of other CNF and writers. I've been starting these threads with a little video, and then you kind of talk amongst yourself. I jump into, it's kind of fun. Don't lurk. By all means, contribute to the conversation, maybe exchange contact info. Make a friend, patreon.com slash
00:03:24
Speaker
CNF pod. And always, there are free ways to support the show, and that's like leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or ratings on Spotify. They go a long way towards validating the enterprise for the wayward CNF-er. As you know, I have no name recognition, so to see a podcast with a bunch of ratings, people are more likely to give it a shot. Certainly not because of my name.
00:03:50
Speaker
as we established. No one knows who the hell I am. Shout out to Athletic Brewing, the best damn non-alcoholic beer out there. Not a paid plug, but I am a brand ambassador, and I love to celebrate this amazing product. So if you go to athleticbrewing.com, use the promo code BRENDANO20 at checkout. You get a nice little discount on your first order.
00:04:14
Speaker
Okay, there is a parting shot this week about the fetishization, I guess that's how you could say that word, of morning routines. My shame for once being obsessed with them and why we shouldn't give a shit about them at all. But for now, I hope you dig this. Let's call it the hardback edition, episode 388 with Kim Kross.
Family Connections and Ethical Challenges
00:04:48
Speaker
Yes. You know, I've always believed and found that my most urgent stories choose me and not the other way around. It's true of what stands in a storm and the Stullhouse and some of my features, but this one definitely chose me because I've never been a true crime consumer and I've never felt particularly drawn to it as a writer. I had to spend, you know, a couple of weeks on the crime beat at the New Orleans Times-Picayune when I was an intern.
00:05:17
Speaker
And I wrote one murder story and I was like, nope, not for me. Like more power to you crime writers, but I'll be over here in education and levies.
00:05:30
Speaker
It was, I don't know, it was pretty intense. But this story literally chose me because of the family connection. My father-in-law is the FBI agent who oversaw the Polyclass kidnapping case. And it was, you know, he's been my father-in-law for 20 years now. And I think maybe seven years ago, after I'd finished What Stands in a Storm,
00:05:55
Speaker
My husband said, you know, as you're thinking about your next book, one story you might consider telling is the polyglot story. And I think I literally rocked back down my heels and thought like, whoa, that's not my kind of story. You know, I like telling stories about how the things that tear our world apart reveal what holds us together. And this doesn't seem to have a happy ending. And this just seems like sad and dark and just true crime. You know, I didn't feel very comfortable writing about it.
00:06:25
Speaker
Then I decided, well, I always like to know what I'm not choosing. And so I did my homework and I did a little research and I found out that there weren't, there wasn't a book of record about this case. There were two books published somewhere around 1994 before the trial and they're both filled with errors and holes.
00:06:43
Speaker
And so I thought, well, there definitely is a potential need for this book. Or I guess I'll back up and say there's a potential, this book doesn't exist already.
00:06:58
Speaker
Then I did a little more research and I started talking to other investigators who participated in the case and I realized that many of them were using it still 30 years later as a case study in their teaching. A lot of them become instructors and they train future investigators in their specialty and they were using it as a case study
00:07:17
Speaker
In their classes, and I thought it was kind of interesting that a case 30 years old was still relevant I kind of figured technology had progressed to the point where it wouldn't be but there were so many things that were twists and turns and red herrings and
00:07:32
Speaker
and false leads in this case that it turns out the whole thing is a great case study, whether you're teaching it from a case management perspective or interviewing in an interrogation class or a forensic technology class, they were all kind of teaching it. And so I thought,
00:07:51
Speaker
maybe this case ought to be documented accurately and comprehensively once and for all. And I definitely had the skills to do it because that's what I do. And I realized that because of my relationship with my father-in-law, that he could open the door to people who would never talk to another journalist. And so I felt kind of an obligation to be the chronicler of this and to get it down as a piece of important American history.
00:08:19
Speaker
Yeah, maybe give us a sense of the sense of duty that you felt to put this story down as the investigators are getting into their twilight years and the overarching impacts and legacy that this case bore out.
00:08:39
Speaker
As I dug in, I realized that there were so many investigative firsts in this case that I don't think had been documented anywhere. For example, the FBI's evidence response team was pretty brand new at this point. Before this case,
00:08:58
Speaker
when there was a crime scene that needed a forensic technician, they would send someone from the FBI lab in DC and that person would fly across country to California. And in the time it took them to get there, sometimes hours, sometimes days, trace evidence would disappear or get spoiled or get trampled and would not be useful. And so they were losing really important trace evidence in the time it took
00:09:22
Speaker
from that centralized model to get someone to the crime scene. And so there was this concept bubbling out from the ranks, where FBI agents were saying, we need to have some of these forensic procedures and tools, and we need localized teams that can get there within minutes or hours.
00:09:41
Speaker
And so this was the first case of the FBI's first ever evidence response team. And the people who came up with that concept and sort of proposed it and got buy-in from the Bureau were part of this case. And so I looked around for a history of the ERT and didn't really find one. Maybe one exists, but I didn't find it.
00:10:03
Speaker
And so it was pretty cool because I felt like I was getting down a piece of FBI history from the primary sources, the people who were involved, the people who were there and did it, and could send me memos documenting that this was the first team and when it was created. And so things like that, I thought, this is not only interesting, but kind of important history. It was also the first use of fluorescent powder, an alternate light source.
00:10:29
Speaker
It was a technology at the time so new that the FBI didn't even own an alternate light source. It's now called a forensic light source. They had borrowed one. Tony Maxwell had borrowed one from, I think, a vendor. And his wife ran a daycare in their living room. And he was teaching himself how to use it to pick up the very delicate fingerprints of children in his living room because of the daycare. And so this was the first major case on which this technology was used.
00:10:58
Speaker
was the first time that an FBI profiler was embedded and partnered with the ERT or an evidence team. So it was the first time that they paired up the behavioral science with forensic science, and they worked closely together hand in hand. I could go on. There are several other examples, but I thought, you know, this is of historical
Exploring Trauma in True Crime
00:11:21
Speaker
value.
00:11:21
Speaker
And I think there are some value to investigators who, God forbid, have to face a really, really complex investigation. And then like kind of my third thought was, you know, maybe people will also find it interesting to read because it was such a famous case. It's the kind of case that, you know, most Americans of a certain age remember it. I certainly did. I was a junior in high school in Florida when it happened and I remembered it. And so I thought, you know, this just needs to be documented.
00:11:53
Speaker
And given that your father-in-law was at the center of the case and one of the lead investigators, that provides its own set of potential journalistic quandaries. So how did you circumvent that and do an end around around that and just make sure that your blind spots were covered?
00:12:13
Speaker
That's a great question. Yeah. One of my biggest concerns was, you know, in the era of J school that I went through, you're taught, you know, don't ever write about a family member because your objectivity will be questioned. And so I think I went out of my way to really work hard to be objective and to look for blind spots and to have readers, you know, read drafts and tell me, you know, am I, I didn't want to write a puff piece for the FBI. I wanted to be fair. And I wanted to, you know, acknowledge
00:12:44
Speaker
things that didn't go right, just as equally as things that did go right, because things were learned from both of those. And I was real clear with him from the beginning. I attended one of his classes. He was teaching this in an interviewing and interrogation class. I think it was for Batty, which is the Behavioral Analysis Training Institute. And I just sat in on a class to see how he taught it. And I was interested to see that he's very clear about one of the
00:13:13
Speaker
The biggest mistakes of the case, in his words, was the way that Kate and Jillian, the 12-year-old friends of Polly who witnessed her abduction, were treated by investigators who started out by interviewing them and then in a desperate attempt to get more information, thinking that they might possibly be hiding key information or keeping it to themselves.
00:13:37
Speaker
or they subjected them to more interrogation methods that would be more appropriate for an adult suspect. And it was very traumatizing to them. And they almost lost them as witnesses and caused some lasting trauma to the girls. And so I was interested to know that he teaches this every time he teaches a class. And so I was real clear that we're going to
00:14:01
Speaker
talk about the bad stuff as well as the good stuff. And he said, absolutely. And so to his credit, he never tried to assert editorial control. He opened doors and then just kind of stepped out of the way and I ran with it. And then I, you know, once you talk to one person, then they introduce you to three more people and then it kind of spiders out from there.
00:14:22
Speaker
So I think that his, you know, his blessing was 100 percent part of why I got the access that I did. But to his credit, like he never tried to make it his book or he never tried to rewrite the narrative. In fact, when I let him read a draft, he fixed one thing. He was like, oh, this thing you said that it happened on this day. It actually happened on this other day. So I was really grateful because if it had been another individual, it might not have gone that way. So I think I was kind of lucky.
00:14:52
Speaker
Yeah, the interrogation of Jillian and Kate, you just feel for them throughout the whole thing. They are subjected to multiple interrogations, each one getting a bit more, let's just say, mature or reckless in a sense. And then even having them reenact the whole thing, it's like, oh my god, these poor 12-year-old girls are being subjected to this. And you really feel for them.
00:15:22
Speaker
And so out of that, how have things changed when it comes to interrogating child witnesses?
00:15:30
Speaker
Right. Well, you know, at the time, there was no such thing as a child and adolescent forensic interviewer. Caffees, they're called. And there really wasn't any special training for how to treat child and adolescent witnesses or victims differently from adults. And so the investigators were using the tools that they had, which was, you know, interviewing interrogation. So now, you know, since then, I forget the years in which
00:16:00
Speaker
This occurred, but there are now people who are trained specialists, and they take them into what's called soft rooms, which are kind of like living rooms. They have paintings on the wall and couches. They don't look like the interrogation room with the hard chair and the bad lighting that you see in a lot of films. They treat them more gently. I don't know. I haven't watched
00:16:24
Speaker
a CAFI work, but as I understand it, they would not have subjected them to the same kind of interrogation, and they definitely wouldn't have polygraphed a kid today. And they probably would not have done the reenactment. So I think a lot has been learned since then. But it's really important to acknowledge that Kate and Jillian were treated this way, and it was really traumatic, caused lasting trauma. But it also produced, I think, some changes in the way things are done.
00:16:53
Speaker
And I think that part of the story hadn't been told, and I think it was important for them that it was told here and acknowledged. And maybe you can help people understand when you're trying to make contact with people close to a case like this, so a Jillian arcade or someone very close to at the heart of it,
00:17:17
Speaker
and when you want to try to approach them to get them to see if they'll participate in the story and how you make that outreach and have that dialogue, whether they want to participate or whether they don't want to.
00:17:36
Speaker
Right. Thanks for asking that. It's one of the scariest moments, I think, for me because I was so worried that by reaching out, I would stir up past trauma and make them relive some of the worst days of their lives.
00:17:55
Speaker
and I didn't want to do that but the alternative is that you don't ask and then you know they're surprised by it coming out or they might have had something to say and they feel like they haven't been heard and so like one of my guiding principles throughout this whole journey was how do I maximize truth and minimize harm and so I started kind of this kind of outreach
00:18:20
Speaker
with what stands in a storm, and it seemed to work really well. So I did it again here. And when there's someone who's gone through significant trauma and probably has been exploited or abused by the media or has had a bad experience with the media, I always assume that, you know, I'm going to be perceived as an unwanted intrusion. So I try to be as minimally intrusive as I can. And I try to find
00:18:45
Speaker
First, some intermediary who can vet me first and get to know me first and then decide if they are comfortable connecting me with the primary source. Or at least comfortable forwarding a message from me to the primary source because
00:19:04
Speaker
I feel like even knowing that a journalist knows your email address or your phone number or your mailing address feels kind of uncomfortable. So I try to reach out to this through another party who can say, yes, I've talked to this person. I've talked to Kim. I've checked her out. I feel comfortable connecting you. But then it's probably easier for them to say no to this person that would be to me. And I want to make it easy for them to say whatever they want to say.
00:19:32
Speaker
And so with some people, I reached out this way and then I didn't hear back. So for example, with Kate and Jillian, I reached out through a third party and said, can you please forward my letter to them? And my letter usually says like, hi, this is who I am. This is what I want to do. This is why I want to do this.
00:19:48
Speaker
I really want to tell the story and the legacy of it and show the positive changes that resulted from this case. And I realize that this may be extremely painful to you and you may want nothing to do with me, but I wanted to give you the choice. And if you want, we can have a preliminary meeting that's completely off the record, either phone call, a Zoom meeting, in person, whatever you prefer.
00:20:12
Speaker
And it can be no expectations, totally off the record, or you just get to meet me and ask me anything you want, like grill me. And I will be completely transparent. And then I'll give you some time to vet me even more. If you want to talk to other people who have trusted me to tell the story of their trauma, I can put you in touch with them. You can have a private conversation with them. Do whatever you need to make an informed decision. And if you tell me that you don't want to talk to me,
00:20:41
Speaker
I will not pressure you. I won't bother you again. And so this is what I did pretty much to everyone. And for some people, I never heard back. For some people, they said, I'm not interested. And then some people said, yeah, I would like to talk to you first. And other people were invested right away. And I guess what was in
00:21:01
Speaker
The most important thing I learned from that is never to assume. Because some people who I thought, oh, your story's never been heard, I think that you'll appreciate finally being heard after 30 years. My assumption was wrong. And for other people who I thought, oh my gosh, you're going to be upset with me for even reaching out. You're going to be angry and want me to go to away immediately, I also was wrong. And so it's just a scary moment because you fear
00:21:28
Speaker
not only rejection, but you just don't want to cause harm. So I just try to be really gentle and respectful and treat people the way I would want to be treated. And I think that giving them agency is just the most important part is like, do you want to be involved in this? And to what extent do you want to be? And if they wanted to talk on background and not do interviews, but help me fact check, then that's what they could do. If they wanted to
00:21:56
Speaker
I don't know, first hear me out, then that's what we did. So it was different for probably, you know, most of the people that I reached out to that way. In terms of background and on the record, those those are things that that are, I think, sometimes confusing. And can you as a journalist use information in it like in the book, if it's background information, like non attributable to to someone? How do you navigate that?
00:22:26
Speaker
Great question. So off the record means technically you can't use the information at all. And so like when I say the first meeting's off the record, it's like no recording. You know, if you decide that you don't want to move forward with participating in the book, then I will not use anything from this. And if there's something I learned from it and I get it from another source,
00:22:51
Speaker
then that's okay, but I have to find another source, but I can't attribute it to you and I can't even use it. You know, it's a place where not a lot of journalists like to go. It's a dangerous place. With Kate, Kate did not want to be interviewed and I'm trying to, I want to really respect her privacy here because she talked to me with a great deal of trust and trepidation and I'm allowed to share that, you know, she talked to me on background, which means
00:23:19
Speaker
the information you can use, but I don't want to be quoted or I don't want any of this attributed to me. But we talked a lot about nuanced things that allowed me to write with greater empathy and nuance and
00:23:34
Speaker
context. And I think there was great, great value in that because I think it made me a more sensitive storyteller to some of the things that she endured and some of the concerns she had about this type of story perpetuating, for example, missing white women syndrome. Books like this can perpetuate bad things. And so it made me, I think it really improved the book because it made me think in
00:24:00
Speaker
ways that weren't self-evident to me about what I was writing about. And for that, I was really, really grateful. I also, for her, I read to her chapters in which she appeared and let her fact check and also just know what was going out, was going into the book. And I think that that produced a good comfort level.
00:24:20
Speaker
Jillian was willing to be interviewed on the record and she felt very comfortable, different level of comfort. And so she helped, you know, she added some additional facts that weren't known.
00:24:32
Speaker
And she also helped me fact check, and she was an excellent fact checker. And so having her go through the chapters before it went out into the world, she changed very little. She'd just say, oh, this white van, it didn't belong to this person, it belonged to this other person, but felt it was very accurate. And so that gave me a lot of confidence before sending it out into the world, because it was really important for me that it was accurate and that they knew what was coming.
00:25:00
Speaker
And also the missing white girl syndrome too is part of the, you know, part of the sort of ethic of the story as well. I had a story before I had even heard of what that was. There was this young woman, Morgan Dana Harrington, who was abducted from a Metallica concert in 2009. And I was following that closely and I ended up writing a story and trying to pitch it to the Washington Post.
00:25:26
Speaker
And it was the editor I got in touch with. She actually liked it, but she's like, you know, it's just there will be so much backlash, you know, because, you know, because she's white, she's blonde and everything. And it was the first time I had been encountered with that. And I understand it now, but at the time I was like, oh, that's that's kind of a bummer.
00:25:47
Speaker
But but I get it because the media focus can be so you know you give all this attention to you know missing pretty white girls.
00:25:58
Speaker
Yeah, it really was evident when I was looking at other kidnappings and I realized, oh my gosh, the household names, they're all white. Most of them are middle class and attractive and a great majority are pretty young girls. And that bothered me.
00:26:17
Speaker
two people who really brought this to my attention and brought to my attention the case of another 12-year-old girl who was kidnapped and murdered in Petaluma. Her name is Georgia Lee Moses, and I had never heard of her. And it really bothered me that in all of these hundreds of interviews I did, no one had once
00:26:33
Speaker
mentioned Georgia Lee Moses until Kate and Jillian independently told me about her. And she was a 12-year-old girl who was found slain and naked on the side of 101 a few years after Polly. And she was found before she was reported missing. So there was not a big public search because she was already dead by the time anyone realized she was missing.
00:26:58
Speaker
And but it really bothered me that I hadn't heard about her not once. And so I thought it was important to acknowledge that this inequity exists and that I really didn't want my book to be another one that just kind of perpetuates the problem.
00:27:18
Speaker
Yeah, with true crime, too, there's something of an inherent harm that comes across with doing it. And it can feel exploitative and sometimes feel a bit icky to do it. And if you're ever confronted with those feelings, how did you get beyond it to realize that there was a greater purpose in what you were doing, and not just to make something that feels like tabloid page-turner type of a story?
00:27:47
Speaker
Right. I wrestled with that a lot. The idea that a story that I write could cause someone harm deeply bothers me. And for me to even take on this story, I had to first do enough research to determine like, can the good that can come of this vastly outweigh the damage?
Emotional Impact on Investigators
00:28:08
Speaker
Again, maximize truth, minimize harm. And when I realized how
00:28:14
Speaker
what the legacy of this case was, and how many things it changed for the better, and how many lessons that it has taught and could continue teaching if it were documented. I felt like that was meaningful and that was potential enough to outweigh the risk of harm. The other thing that I thought a lot about was, you know, how can I give agency to the people whose story this is?
00:28:40
Speaker
You know, I didn't think about this as my, you know, jazz hands, my book. I was more of a story midwife to help people who had not many of whom had never told the story to anyone, even their families, to help them kind of birth and give shape to the trauma that they've been carrying around for 30 years.
00:29:01
Speaker
And I was really surprised by how many of the detectives and FBI agents cried in our interview. A lot of them had not ever processed what they had been carried around. And it showed me, though, how deeply they cared about this case and about Paulie. And when they talked about her, they wept openly and sometimes really surprised themselves.
00:29:25
Speaker
I felt like if I could help them tell their story and also what it meant to them, that maybe there could be some healing along the way. And it turns out that, you know, in some cases, surprising us both, there was more than we thought to be had. I'd like to share the story of Annie Mazzanti, who was
00:29:44
Speaker
the Petaluma detective who interviewed Jillian on the first night. And it was a gentle interview and he did a good job. He was fresh out of interviewing training and it went well. And he also worked throughout the case. He was the one who found the inked palm print that was matched with a latent print that was found on Polly's bed frame.
00:30:06
Speaker
Andy had never talked to the media. He'd never talked to his family about this. And for some reason, he decided to talk to me. I think because some of, I think Val Bello, one of his colleagues who knows me really well said, you really should talk to her. I trust her. She's going to do this the right way. And Andy processed a lot of emotions in our conversation, but it was healing for him. And he told me several times that
00:30:32
Speaker
this this opened the door to him talking with his family about it for the first time ever and at some point it spurred him to sell his house in one state and move to another and it it just I don't know it unlocked something in him that was really powerful it wasn't like that for everyone I think for some people you know woke sleeping dogs it stirred up past past hurt and for a lot of them it was it was in sort of
00:30:58
Speaker
surprising layers or it wasn't just the tragedy and the trauma of this kidnapped and murdered child. It was also the interpersonal relationships created in the pressure surrounding this case. There was a lot of drama that went on inside the investigation that I think
00:31:21
Speaker
upset people and that people are still upset about decades later. And so it was interesting the things that people had to process weren't always the things I expected.
00:31:30
Speaker
But on the whole, I think, you know, helping them kind of tell their story, I feel like it was told, you know, feel like what they had to say was heard. I think that that was, you know, of its own value separate from the book as a product that someone will consume. The process had value to it as well.
00:31:52
Speaker
And technically speaking, as you're interviewing people about very delicate subjects and their roles in a particular story, and this one in particular, and you notice that it is upsetting to people and
00:32:08
Speaker
And they're willingly going with you, but getting going, you notice maybe people are crying or it's just deeply hurtful or maybe they're shutting down. How have you learned to navigate those conversations in the way that you do singularly? I just try to listen and I try not to feel uncomfortable silences.
00:32:32
Speaker
You know, sometimes if they move me, I cry with them. I mean, it's never a fake cry. It's always real. You know, I feel what they feel. And I think that's a danger to this job is that, you know, when you're operating with real empathy, you feel other people's pain and you can take it on and carry it around yourself. I think all the journalistic skills in the world do not trump just human empathy and caring about someone's welfare.
00:33:00
Speaker
And I care about the people that I write about, you know, a lot of them were in our lives forever, you know, the people, the characters and what stands in the storm I went to their weddings and their birth announcements and I've held their babies and, you know, I think that when you share something, this, I don't know if this emotional magnitude you're kind of
00:33:19
Speaker
It opens the door to a bond. And so I think, I don't know, you could have, I could rattle off all the skills in the world, but nothing trumps just caring on a very real level about the people that you're dealing with and connecting with them human to human. And I, you know, in all of this, I.
00:33:38
Speaker
I try to be a human first and a journalist second. And if I feel like, you know, I'm harming someone, then I try to withdraw or give them an out and be like, you know, whatever I have to gain for the story is not worth the cost, you know, if it's hurting you. And if you want to disengage, then you can disengage and I won't bother you. I won't contact you. And if you want to reach out to me when you're ready, you can, but I will respect your boundaries. I think that's the other thing is just,
00:34:07
Speaker
giving people the agency to set boundaries and then respecting them and giving them the time and space that they need. And if they're never ready, they're never ready and that's okay. Like I just don't ever try to feel entitled to anything. And I try to fact check every assumption along the way because so often they're wrong.
00:34:28
Speaker
just by nature of the the industry like journalists just have a a bad name of being maybe callous or insensitive or just being like that that 60 minutes mike wallace thing well here's the documents like you said it right here and like confronting people and like that's the image
00:34:43
Speaker
And so it can be it can be hard to sort of get beyond that sort of that belligerent facade of like the aggressive journalist. But I think people in all like sort of our wing of the journalism umbrella academy, I think we tend to be a bit more, I don't know, softer, if that makes any sense.
00:35:04
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I think everyone's different. I think that it's good that there are bulldogs out there. I'm not one. I'm tenacious, but not in a bulldog way. I'm tenacious in an earnest way. Sometimes to a fault, probably. But we need bulldogs out there to hold accountable
00:35:26
Speaker
politicians and agencies and people who might have something invested in promoting mistruths. But for the normal human being who's been affected by a story, the people that I'm dealing with in my stories,
00:35:44
Speaker
they're people, and they're trying to tell their truth. And I guess I'll share that one of the interesting things that I had to navigate was when people's recollections of facts did not line up. I had a preponderance of documents that were generated in 1993, and whenever possible, I went back to those to corroborate information, because I think
00:36:10
Speaker
If something's documented close to the time it happened, it's more likely to be accurate than something that's remembered 30 years later. I learned that memory is a wildly fluctuating thing that can be affected by
00:36:28
Speaker
by suggestions, by even the wrong question can lead someone into a memory that isn't totally accurate but feels true to them. And so I had to do a lot of triangulating of the truth when it came to things that were remembered that weren't documented but were remembered slightly differently between different sources. And sometimes that meant circling back to the source and saying, well,
00:36:51
Speaker
I believe you're telling me your truth when you told me this. However, these other people remember it slightly differently. What do you think is going on here? Sometimes we didn't all land on a place that was as precise as I would like to be. I tried to address that in the footnotes to honor that. Here's what this person said, here's what this person said, and I don't try to be the judge of who's right and wrong, but here are what the documents say.
00:37:21
Speaker
reader, you can come to your own conclusion based on this evidence that I can give to you. So it's really interesting to deal with that. Yeah. Did you seek counsel from other writers of crime and just how they handle maybe the reporting and the writing and follow ups and stuff of that nature?
00:37:41
Speaker
I did. One friend I'd like to give a shout out to is Kate Miles, Katherine Miles, who wrote Trailed. She and I have never actually met, but we've talked on the phone a few times because our careers have had a funny parallel where we both wrote about storms in our first book. I think I blurbed her book Superstorm. I think it was about Superstorm Sandy. At some point, I reached out to Katherine because
00:38:08
Speaker
She had written this book about a true crime, a murder of two women on the, I think it was on the Appalachia Trail in Skyline Park.
Navigating Emotional Challenges in Writing
00:38:21
Speaker
And I reached out to her and I said, Kate, I don't,
00:38:26
Speaker
I know we don't know each other that well but I feel like I need to talk to someone because this is really heavy and I'm going through some stuff and I want to know if like you went through this too and how I can deal with it because it was just it took me to really dark places where it was affecting my mental and physical health.
00:38:45
Speaker
And so she was so kind and reached out and kind of talked me through and told me how she dealt with things and helped me prepare for just kind of the weirdness that surrounds a true crime book launch. I was really scared about just strange people coming out of the woodwork and like, can you help me with this case things? And I just didn't know what to expect. And she was really helpful. In general, I leaned on my community of writers
00:39:11
Speaker
pretty heavily. You know, I did a lot of this writing on retreat alone at a cabin in the mountains and spent, you know, weeks on end by myself. And I tried to talk to someone different every night. And so, you know, friends who are writers kind of helped me, helped me through the process and helped me think through a lot of the agonizing decisions about, okay, I know this, but does it need to go in?
00:39:35
Speaker
you have this dilemma, how do I approach it? This person says one thing, this person says another, how could I handle it? And I think without them, it would have been a lot harder to do this. How did being alone help or hinder the writing of this book?
00:39:55
Speaker
Um, I think for all of my books, I, you know, whenever I have a really big story, I find that it's, it's really hard to do the just the cognitive processing that you need to do with such a vast amount of research, unless you have uninterrupted chunks of time by yourself.
00:40:12
Speaker
and I get interrupted a lot at home by my wonderful family. So I have to go away and really just kind of like live in it for days on end to process it all and to make all of the links to link the different parts together to get in such a way that produces a book. So it's pretty key and I have some
00:40:35
Speaker
really awesome friends who donate a place for me to go and write because it would be pretty expensive for me to get a hotel room for as much time as I need. But I found that in my writing life, one of the biggest
00:40:52
Speaker
gifts that's ever been given to me or that I've allowed myself to have is the writing retreat, which allows you to focus on just nothing but eating, sleeping, writing, and then a little exercise to really get your head around it. And I think that's the only way my books get written, to be honest.
00:41:09
Speaker
You're very adamant about not making the publication of this recent book about you at all. But there is, when you take on something that's this heavy, there is something of a cost that some writers and reporters take on when they take a story that is of this nature. And just for you, what has been the cost for you?
Health Impacts of Writing
00:41:38
Speaker
Well, so as you know, I'm doing this podcast interview from the hospital. This is like my third day in the hospital. I came in with chest pains and shortness of breath and some flu-like symptoms. I went to urgent care and urgent care sent me to the emergency room. In the emergency room, people freaked out and thought I was having a heart attack or something.
00:42:07
Speaker
And I think in reality what's happened is I have a virus, but I also have mega stress from this book and this launch. And I've been watching my blood pressure escalate steadily over the past really year, but the past six months especially, to hypertension levels, where my nurse friends are like, Kim, you need to get on blood pressure medication at me.
00:42:29
Speaker
I'm like, but I don't want to. I'm healthy. I'm a mountain biker. Like, you know, I eat pretty well. And they're like, this is, you know, we don't want you to have a stroke or a heart attack. Like, this is really serious. And so finally, when I started feeling, you know, pretty, pretty bad, I came and they, my doctor
00:42:46
Speaker
is about to release me, but he was like, you know, you really might seek out a therapist and some tools to manage your stress. And I thought I was managing it pretty well, but it definitely has, I think that the work, the nature of this work is that it, you know, I think there's such a thing as sympathetic trauma or secondary PTSD, where you, when you really do feel empathy, when you're talking with someone about something they've been through, you take it on. You know, I, if I'm,
00:43:16
Speaker
If I want to make the reader feel something, I have to feel it twice over. If I'm carrying that around for a year, it seeps into your body. My body does not feel normal right now. I think that I'm going to have to do some aggressive work to heal from this book. But I guess I would just say that no one should take this work on,
00:43:42
Speaker
with any idea that it doesn't come at a cost. And if the book can go out there and do some good, then it's worth it. But man, I hope this will be my first and last true crime book. Please, if you're out there wanting to pitch me a story, please make it about fishing. I need to go write some fishing stories. Because I feel like a little bit forever changed by this book. And I think that's OK. But yeah.
00:44:12
Speaker
I hope it's worth it. Yeah, I think Truman Capote was pretty marred by doing in cold blood. And I didn't have maybe the coping skills to deal with it. I think it affected him greatly. And I know a former editor boss of mine, she was kind of a bulldog type and she was as a reporter in Louisiana.
00:44:38
Speaker
She was close with someone who was on death row and she insisted on watching the execution because she she really thought it was like I you know I got to do this you know it's what you tough reporters do and she regrets doing it because it it kind of fucked her up like she was like I should not have done that I should have swallowed my pride and not done that and I I
00:45:02
Speaker
So I think when you fly close to the sun of true crime stories, I think people can discredit or discount how it does affect the writer and the reporter. Not to discredit the trauma at the center of it and the people at the center of it. What we experience is nothing compared to what the families went through. Exactly. So I don't even sometimes feel guilty talking about the effect it's had on me because it's nothing compared to what they went through.
00:45:32
Speaker
Yeah, but well, I don't want to say it's nothing. It's it is minuscule compared to what they went through, but it's also not nothing. And I think people need to understand it's not nothing. And that it's the cost of what we do.
Stories and Trauma Healing
00:45:46
Speaker
But I do think coming back to, you know, the
00:45:50
Speaker
potentially exploitative nature of true crime. I don't think all true crime stories are the same. I do think that there seems to be a movement or an acknowledgement that stories that are very perpetrator focused and that treat the victim as a commodity are potentially re-traumatizing and damaging. And stories that focus on who the victim was or the investigators or the people who are trying to help
00:46:19
Speaker
are inherently a little bit different. And I do think that stories in general are empathy machines that can help someone go through something and process it and come out the other side with meaning. And the person who goes through that might have had experience with the crime or maybe not, but I do think that processing of trauma and the finding
00:46:49
Speaker
meaning and good in it without being in a Pollyanna-ish way. It doesn't have to dismiss or devalue or minimize the trauma. But seeing that, sometimes beautiful things come from our brokenness.
00:47:05
Speaker
and traumatic events tend to forge stronger people in communities. I think that that's a message that we can't hear or say too often, because we all go through trauma in our lives. And was it Hemingway who said that the world eventually breaks us all, but some of us grow stronger at the broken places? I do think there's a truth in that. And that's the bigger truth that can be found in these stories and that can actually help us process and heal from them.
00:47:35
Speaker
So I think, again, processing is necessary to healing. And without processing, I think we can get stuck in the trauma. So my hope is that stories like this, excuse me, can help people out there who are still feeling the heaviness of this thing that Polly went through and Petaluma went through, that it can be part of making sense of the senseless thing and moving forward with a little more hope.
00:48:04
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, Kim, as always, it's so great to always have these conversations with you. And you handled this story with aplomb. And I wish you the best of luck with it, Kim. Thanks, Brendan. Thanks. You always ask really good questions. And thanks for being thoughtful and sensitive. And yeah, thanks for putting your work out there into the world. Beautiful. That was good timing.
00:48:34
Speaker
Oh, we did it. Somehow, some way, the show came out again. Don't know. I honestly don't know how it happens. Another pod in the books. I have a conversation with my book editor in about 45 minutes from now, at the time of this recording.
00:48:53
Speaker
You know, but by the time you hear it, I will have already had the conversation. I will either feel full of piss and vinegar as I have six months to go, or a looming sense of panic and dread. Hopefully it's the former. Fuck, it better be the former.
00:49:10
Speaker
I came across a cool article in Lit Hub about Ursula Le Guin's routine and such, and there's kind of a pretty cool video, a documentary-et. It'll be linked up in next month's Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter where you can sign up for that at BrendanOmero.com.
00:49:31
Speaker
And it brought up all my feelings of shame around how I used to fetishize morning routines. Like not like literally fetishize, but you can catch my drift. That'd be fucking weird. You get someone who's like, I drink 16 ounces of water right when I wake up. And then someone in the comments is like,
00:49:50
Speaker
Well, what are you drinking, man? And it's those people who are the worst, because they're the ones looking for the capital A answers, the skeleton key, the hack, to get them to the promised land.
00:50:05
Speaker
Yeah, if I drink the same water as so-and-so, and then I'm gonna realize my dreams, oh, hold on, if I use the same guitar pick as Kirk Hammett, then I'm gonna be able to melt the faces off the crowd. Stephen's King's Pencil, the same thing. In that article I mentioned, which will be linked up in next month's Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter, where you can sign up for it at BrendanOmero.com.
Advice on Writing Routines
00:50:33
Speaker
Le Guin's son wrote, and I typed this up so it's probably going to typos and I'm probably going to stumble all over the place, he writes, questions about process and routine are unavoidable for writers. While it seems cheerless to withhold answers, I suspect many writers don't enjoy these questions, correct?
00:50:53
Speaker
Ursula certainly didn't. She felt that too much focus on process was distracting for aspiring writers, and that her answers might sustain the distraction, correct? Eating the same breakfast or using the same pen as Ursula will not help you write like Ursula, but the frequency and fervency with which such details are pursued indicates that many believe otherwise. True.
00:51:17
Speaker
In any case, one should not want to write like Ursula, one should want to write like oneself, which means developing one's own routine and process.
00:51:29
Speaker
And perhaps it's through listening to other routines that we can add to cart and develop our own. I'd never thought that maybe I should do that. Oh, that's kind of cool that that person does that. Do I need to meditate, make the coffee? But wait, is coffee good for you, or is it spiking the anxiety I'm trying to quell by meditating? Should I exercise, go for a walk, eat, or fast?
00:51:56
Speaker
And then there's the snooze bar shame. There's that thing. Fact is, this is such a solitary act. You know, writing or whatever it is. You're primarily writer. So writing is primarily solitary act that maybe our infatuation comes from trying to seek some degree of validation. Like, am I doing this wrong? Am I doing this correctly? You know, if Andre Dubuque does it that way, I'm like, oh, okay, cool. I do that too. And now I don't feel like such a putz.
00:52:27
Speaker
But I think you know the answer, that there is no right or wrong answer. Fact is, trying to find this perfect routine or mimicking a successful writer's routine, all it's doing is putting mounds of pressure on you. That's also a way of hiding.
00:52:42
Speaker
and also a way of casting the blame if their routine doesn't work for you and then you didn't get the work done because that was a crappy routine or some shit like that you know it's like voice you need to find it on your own metabolize all those other influences which I guess is kind of what you can do with other people's morning routine is kind of like
00:53:01
Speaker
create a Frankenstein monster of whatever routine. If you like so-and-so and such-and-such, yeah, you put it all together. You know, if all you have is one hour in a Sunday morning, then you make it count somehow. You know, you get really, put a little stone wall around it.
00:53:20
Speaker
I can speak to this because, yeah, I don't know, in the ballpark of like eight or ten years ago, I was very much obsessed with successful people's routines and how they might be able to unlock something inside me or unlock the possibility of something greater. That if I just did that, then the goals
00:53:38
Speaker
would be realized. You know, if I adopt this bro's routine, then maybe I'll thrive, and then I'll be interviewed on podcasts, and someone will ask me about my morning routine, and I'll tell them that I must start my day with 48 upside-down push-ups and eat a salad and a sauna, then take a cold plunge while gurgling pureed sardines. Mason Curry's lovely little book, Daily Rituals, is a book about routines and rituals that primarily writers adopt. I think it's all writers.
00:54:08
Speaker
And it's cool, and I dig it in a way that you might dig seeing sea otters doing backflips at the zoo. It's all very cute and nice. And I think that we all have, we all harbor some curiosity about how the masters and our heroes go about the work. It's just natural. Someone asked me the other day what my process was, process.
00:54:34
Speaker
And I understand that writing is hard and kind of foreign to them and they were genuinely curious. And my answer is always unsatisfactory and always changing. Like for now with this book that I'm writing and this particular deadline in this month, you know, I write for about one hour usually.
00:54:55
Speaker
between 8.30 and 10 a.m. I'm usually able to cobble together, squeeze about 500 to 1,000 words in this time, citing as I write, so it's kind of a clunky process, but very important. Then the rest of the day is archival research, reading through my transcripts, making phone calls, making phone calls.
00:55:17
Speaker
making phone calls. But then again, sometimes I'm not that tired at night and maybe I'll go sneak in to the office and do a little pull out an article from my massive spreadsheet and then scribble in other hundred words or something. Right now my only job is the book, like what a gift that is.
00:55:36
Speaker
I don't have a day job at the moment, but if I had a day job, that would greatly affect when and how I do this. Now, point being, nothing I add will probably be helpful to you. You merely need to tend your garden, man. Tend to the seasonality of your garden, fertilize when appropriate, and drink a lot of water. Soda stream, charged tap water. So stay wild, see you in effort. If you can't do, interview. See ya.
00:56:20
Speaker
you