Patricia Cornwell: Scarpetta

I’ve interviewed quite a few authors who are inspired by real people or real crimes. And then they write these fantastic novels. Patricia Cornwell’s iconic character, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, has a legion of fans because of how clever she is as a medical examiner, how she solves a mystery. Cornwell was working with Virginia’s first female chief ME Dr. Marcella Fierro, and was an invaluable source to a young writer. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Scarpetta had other thoughts in store. She said, you don't
even know what you don't know. If a fictional character
could talk, that is what she would say to me.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
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,

(00:51):
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unpublished details behind their stories. I've interviewed quite a few
authors who are inspired by real people or real crimes,

(01:12):
and then they write these fantastic novels. Patricia Cornwell's iconic character,
doctor k Scarpetta, has a legion of fans because of
how clever she is as a medical examiner, how she
solves the mystery. Cornwell was working with Virginia's first female me,
doctor Marcella Fierro, and she was an invaluable source to

(01:33):
a young writer.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
I got into Scarpetta's world and into post mortem in
a way that's probably different than a lot of people
who sort of fictionalize a true crime story. Truman Capodi
Band the best example of that, where you don't know
what you read. In Cold Blood, it's very hard to
know what's true and what isn't actually true because it's
that kind of fictionalized real case. I wasn't looking to

(02:01):
do that with those crimes that were committed in Richmond,
what work we'll call the South Side strangling crimes, murders
that began in nineteen eighty seven. I'd written three books
by then, all three of them rejected. Scarpetta was a
minor character. I'd been told that the thing that's best
about these books that you're trying to write is this
woman medical examiner. And I'm curious what you really see

(02:22):
in the morgue, because what you're writing about is more
like a cozy a little bit. You know, they're plots,
and you know their people, the Garden Club, and somebody's
lying and there's somebody cheated the will this kind of thing. Meanwhile,
I have a twenty page autopsy stuck in the middle
of all that because I'm working at the Morgue and
I just didn't know what I was doing. But this person,

(02:45):
this editor, said, try with the Scarpettit character. I would
write a story about her and show the kind of
stuff that you see every day. Meanwhile, about the same time,
these serial murders began in Richmond, and it was the
most one, most horrendous things that I ever remember going through,
even though they didn't personally impact me. There was one

(03:06):
person I think I did meet. I'll get to that.
But as this was going on and the city was electrified,
people were terrified.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
You know.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
It was a woman neurosurgeon who was in her residency.
She was the second victim. The first one had worked
for a magazine. And then you had Susan HELLMSS murdered
like about a month or so later in the same
kind of neighborhood. And then there's another victim. I mean,
and these are people who are in their own homes,
minding their own business. But one girl, Diane Cho, her

(03:38):
parents were downstairs watching TV when this guy came in
through her bedroom. Window and raped and murdered her in
her own bedroom and then left and the parents didn't
even know it until they got up the next morning
and her door was locked.

Speaker 1 (03:50):
I don't know why I'm surprised by when things like
that happened in apartment buildings. I guess because I think
you're surrounded by people. It's really risky. It's not an
easy way to get in and get out. And so
what about this. I think it was four female victims
and maybe one male at some point, But four female victims.
Is that what you remember from Timothy Spencer?

Speaker 2 (04:08):
There were no male victims with Timothy Spencer that I'm
aware of. He started out in Northern Virginia as a
serial rapist, and the reason he got caught he was
half He was living in a halfway house in Richmond,
and he was sneaking out of his room. He was
in there for he'd been I think had gone to
prison for burglary or something. But he was a serial

(04:28):
rapist and his mo was recognized by a detective up
there in Northern Virginia when these crimes started in Richmond.
He said, what really got him is I guess it
was after the first three Timothy Spencer went home because
his mother lived up in Northern Virginia, and I think
why he was there he murdered a woman lawyer or something.
I don't remember the sequence of all of this, but

(04:49):
the crimes were Northern Virginia and then Richmond. Everybody was
so frightened. Nobody had a clue who was doing this,
and they figured it was somebody that you wouldn't have suspect,
like maybe it's the person you're sitting next to at work,
or maybe it's in the medical examiner's office. We started
getting spooke to like, could it be the guy that

(05:10):
comes in and services the microscopes? Is it somebody who
seems to be targeting professional women? And maybe in the
medical community. I don't know, but there are all these theories.
That's when I bought my first handgun. That's when I
learned how to shoot.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
And how close were you? Where were you when you
were working for the medical examiner? And tell me what
you did again before we took about where this was
in your proximity.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Well, my job was I was in charge of their
computer system and I did all their programming and their
statistical retrievals. I learned how to do that. Because I
started working there the research. I would say, is there
anything I can do to make myself useful? And the
first thing they asked me to do was to be
the editor of a technical bulletin that they published. So

(05:52):
I started doing technical writing while I'm doing research. Then
one day the chief medical examiner came to me and
he said, if you want to do something really useful
for us, He said, go in that room back there
and look at what they put on the counter that
we're supposed to learn how to use. This was their
first computer, you know, with the daisy wheel printer and
the continuous paper and the dial up modem kind of thing.

Speaker 3 (06:15):
I didn't.

Speaker 2 (06:15):
I've dropped computer science after three days in college, so
I'm not the best person to ask to do this,
but I do anything just to have my foot in
the door. Long story short, I worked with somebody to
learn how to do all this, and that became my
job because I ended up being there six years. I mean,
I thought I was going to be there a few
months and write a great novel and that would be it.
But Scarpetta had other thoughts. In the stores, she said,

(06:37):
you don't even know what you don't know if a
fictional character could talk, that is what she would say
to me. You don't even know what you don't know,
my dare, stay here a few more years and then
maybe you'll be ready. So i'd been there, let's see,
three years when the crimes, the serial murders began, and
three books that had been rejected, and I thought, okay,

(06:58):
I'll give it one more shot. I tried what that
editor said, and I thought to myself, if scar Pettit
were going through this right now, if this were her
city and these crimes were happening, what would she do?

Speaker 3 (07:10):
And that's how it started.

Speaker 2 (07:12):
It wasn't me deciding to investigate the crimes so that
I could write a book based on them. I was
already going out to the crimes. I was already out
in the cars with the detectives. I would was out
with them every weekend because I was also a volunteer
police officer. Oh my gosh, well, I wanted to learn
what Marcel that. The people at the Morgue wouldn't let
me watch Autops season unless I had some legitimacy, so

(07:32):
they said, go become a volunteer cop. So I did,
and you know, I had fancy little uniform, my little whistle.

Speaker 3 (07:38):
I was very proud of myself.

Speaker 1 (07:40):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
And the first time I rode, I put on my
uniform and I was all ready to go. And this
sergeant of the Detective Division was going to take me
out on his shift that night, and so I was
so proud of myself. I peered at his office in
my uniform and he looked at me and he said, so, Patricia,
where do you live in the city And I said, no, sir,

(08:00):
I lived just right outside of it in Henryko County.
He said, oh good. He said, well, let's go get
in my car so I can drive you home, so
you can change your clothes. He said, I'm a detective
and people don't ride around in uniform and detective cars
plus the number one. So I'd been doing all this
stuff for several years anyway, And when the South Side
strangling cases started, I was two of the main detectives

(08:22):
who were working the case. I was riding with them
every weekend and we would ride past the houses that
are now empty with the lights out, where Susan Hallims
had lived or one of the other victims, and we
would stop and park on the curb and we would
just look out the window and try to imagine who
did this, and what do these people have in common?

(08:44):
Why did he pick them geographically? What's going on here?
And all of this is sort of what you start
seeing scarpettit do in post mortem. And so it was
really about her put in a situation like that, much
more than it was about the real cases, although those
real cases touched me in a very deep and personal way.

(09:05):
For one thing, I think it was about a year
or so before the cases began, when Marcela Fieriro, the
deputy chief, when she would go to court or do
labs at the medical school and things like that. You know,
if it was convenient, I would follow her so I
could learn. I'd shadow her anywhere that I could, And
so on this one occasion, we went over to the

(09:27):
Medical College of Virginia and she was doing a wet
lab where she would have organs that are fixed and
formal in and you're sectioning them and looking for diseases.
And this was a brain cutting, so it was the
neuropathology lab. And I'm in there with all these surgeons
and the medical examiner, and I feel very out of place.
I'm taking notes, I'm this failed author who's written three

(09:47):
books nobody wants. And I'm not even a doctor and
I couldn't do chemistry, so what the hell am I
doing here? And there was this lady, a woman doctor,
standing over away from everybody else, and I can still
see her. She was in this white lab coat, all
buttoned up, long red hair, and she looked at me,
and somehow she knew I was uncomfortable, and she gave
me the biggest.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
Warmst smile. That was Susan Hellams.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
Oh wow, which victim was she? The second one?

Speaker 2 (10:14):
Yes, that was the neurosurgeon, Susan Helens, and she smiled
at me. And then not even a year later, I'm
seeing her house and the photographs of the detectives showed
me of what they did to her, of what that
guy did to her. So it's not about, oh, this
is a great story to tell. This is about something
that became organic. And some of the details in post

(10:35):
Mortem very closely mirror what really happened, but a lot
of it's very different. Certainly, the killer's nothing like the
killer in real life was.

Speaker 1 (10:42):
And one of your characters in post Mortem was a physician, right,
but not the same kind of physician.

Speaker 2 (10:49):
Yes, Laurie Peterson was a surgeon that was very much
the word I would use is is inspired by not copying,
but inspired by people who think you shouldn't do that.
But you know what I say, I don't think her
name should ever be forgotten. Susan Hallam's name should never
be forgotten. And there are other people whose names I

(11:09):
still remember, whose autopsies I saw. I did not see hers.
But there are people who that I can remember their
faces to this day, and I remember their names, and
I remember what was done to them, and I still
talk about it. And when my memoir comes out in May,
you'll read the names of some of these people, because
I don't think they should be forgotten. One early case

(11:29):
I saw. The woman was my same age. She'd be
bound in all these different colored pairs of pantyhose and
been kept alive all night by the sky that broke
into replace someone she didn't know, and it was murdered
in the morning. And I think your life should not
have stopped at age twenty seven or whatever. And I
will make sure people remember you if I can. And

(11:51):
so I kind of look at it that way. Don't
sweep this under the rug, and the south Side strangling cases.
I know that they were horrible, and some people did
get mad at me. When the book came out, it
got banned in Richmond by a certain bookstore. I got
uninvited from anything i'd been invited to, like women's clubs.

Speaker 3 (12:09):
You know that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
Wow, this one local bookstore, this independent bookstore, called me up.
I'm sitting at my desk at the Morgue and it's
this bookstore on the phone. I'm oh, my god, he's
going to ask me to do a signing. I was
so excited, and he said, I just wanted to let
you know personally that I will not be carrying your book,
that I am banning it from my store because I
think it's too violent and it's too close to what

(12:32):
happened here in Richmond. It created a whole lot of
attention for the book that wasn't even there to begin with.
And I found out later that that might be the
reason that person did it, be honest with you, for
the publicity for his own store.

Speaker 3 (12:45):
Oh, that is kind of how that all began.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
I've always been very much influenced by what's real. That's
just it's part of what I do. If I because
if I don't feel something, I have to feel a
little bit of.

Speaker 3 (12:59):
You know, I've got to feel that.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
That's why I go out and do the research I do,
and that's just to remind myself this is not just
something where you're weaving a pretty tale. You are trying
to also embody the truth about what happens out there
and what somebody likes. Scarpett's going to do about.

Speaker 1 (13:15):
It well, And I think using things as other authors
have told me as a jumping off point is for me.
I don't know how else you can do it. I'm
sure there are people Stephen King who can pull things out,
but I really think that that true life is so
much stranger than fiction, and it doesn't mean to me,
it doesn't mean you're copying. I interviewed Megan Abbott just
a couple of months ago, and she had her book

(13:37):
El Dorado come out, which has gotten great reviews. She
read about the case of a woman who was the
head of a pyramid scheme in Connecticut who was murdered
and they could not figure out if it was her
estranged husband or somebody in this old woman scheme, and
Meghan took the story and turned it into a story
set in Michigan about three sisters and two of whom

(13:59):
are involved in the pyramid scheme and how that hole works.
So it wasn't, you know, stealing information from that case.
I just don't think it even occurred to her how
that would work with a mystery and a thriller. And
it's a great book. So I don't know anybody who
doesn't pull either real people into it as inspiration or something.

(14:21):
I don't know how you can avoid that.

Speaker 3 (14:23):
All of us are little, itty bitty, two legged.

Speaker 2 (14:25):
Artificial intelligence computers, and everything that we put together for
our stories or our music or our movies comes from
something we've experienced in our database, which is exactly what
AI does. It pulls out, It pulls from everything that
already exists. We're not I dare say that nobody makes

(14:46):
up anything from whole cloth.

Speaker 3 (14:48):
There's no such thing that we are.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
We may not remember what gave us an idea, but
I think ideas come from other places, and we get
sparked by something and it inspired tires us to dig deeper,
and then next thing you know, we're weaving a tail
that might not have happened had this other thing not happened.

Speaker 3 (15:07):
But at the end, the story has nothing to do
with it.

Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah, And when you drilled down to it, to me,
the importance of this series that I know you said,
began with three failed books and then turned into your
career of more than one hundred million copies sold of
all of your books, I think is what I read
you know as a very very strong female character. Is
it strictly based on doctor Fierro or who was the

(15:32):
first female medical examiner.

Speaker 2 (15:35):
I mean, I give her all the credit because she's
the first medical examiner I ever met. There were only
a handful of women back in the day in the eighties.
She was like one of the first five women in
the country to be a medical examiner. I mean, Scarpetta
would not exist had I not met Marcella. I really
don't think so. But and I made her Italian, as
in Marcella's Italian. But I actually made Scarpetta Italian because

(15:57):
the name was either to me going to be Spanish
or Italian. And my former husband used to tell me
these crazy stories about a landlady he had in graduate
school and her last name was Scarpetta, and I thought
it was the coolest name ever. So I said, I'm
going to make that the character's name. Now what do
I do? Make Italian or Spanish?

Speaker 1 (16:16):
Why?

Speaker 2 (16:16):
I like Italian food, so I thought I'll make her Italian.
So that's how that happened. And it just so happens
that Marcella is about as Italian as they get. But
Scarpetta Marcella is. She's a very different person than Scarpetta.
And I don't know anybody likes Scarpetta.

Speaker 3 (16:33):
I really do not. She's a combination of probably a
lot of people.

Speaker 1 (16:40):
Why don't you describe this series for people who haven't
read it before? So you start with post Wartem and
it's about a medical examiner who solves these cases. And
for the record, anybody listening, the ending to post Wartem
is drastically different, Patrusa's right, than the ending to the
South Side strangler case. And it's very different. So tell

(17:02):
me about the series and just how it went, because
I will say, Patrishaw, I don't know if this was
this was My memory is when I talked to you
last time, I asked you, probably post recording, are you
still gonna write? And you thought you might be done
with novels? And don't you have one coming out at
some point another Scarpetta.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
Whenever, whenever I say I might be done, do not
listen to me.

Speaker 1 (17:22):
That's what's exactly what she said.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
I have one that just came out last October. I've
got another one coming out in six weeks, and my
memoirs coming out in May.

Speaker 3 (17:29):
So that's what happened.

Speaker 2 (17:30):
That's what happens when I quit writing and then I
wake up and I go, what the hell am I
supposed to do with myself?

Speaker 3 (17:35):
But Scarpetta, Doctor K.

Speaker 2 (17:38):
Scarpetta is a woman chief medical examiner who also has
her law degree. And the way the series begins with
post Mortem, which, by the ways, thirty five years ago
that came out. She's just moved to Richmond and she's
been hired as the first woman chief of Virginia. And
it's an all boys band, and she's got her work
cut out for her. And on top of that, I'm

(17:58):
having a lot of anti agonistic relationships because the men,
the male cops in particular, they don't want her showing
up at all the crime scenes. Before she appeared in town,
the drunk chief who she followed would never show up
at anything, so the cops had free run of what
they wanted to do. And now there's a new sheriff
in town, which is her so lo and behold, these

(18:21):
serial murders have started. This is her maiden voyage, you know,
of arriving in Richmond. And you add to that she's divorced.
She has a ten year old niece who's this genius
named Lucy who comes to spend the summer with her.
And then she gets to know this homicide detective named
Pete Marino, and then Benton Wesley is the FBI profiler,
and those characters will become the ensemble that you will

(18:43):
see from then on really in the books, and it's
always something terrible's happened, and she goes storming in to
gather her evidence and look at the body and do
the autopsies and go to the forensic labs, and somehow
she always finds something that puts a different spin on things,
and in the process she gets way too involved in

(19:04):
the case, and of course she has to put herself
in harms way or it's just not any fun.

Speaker 3 (19:09):
And that doesn't happen in real life much either.

Speaker 1 (19:11):
Just so you know, I know, they're usually stuck in
the lab, right and you have her out and about
with all of these other folks from different divisions, and
she's talking to suspects and the whole thing right.

Speaker 2 (19:21):
Well, you know, the funny thing is medical examiners, if
they do more that the boundaries aren't as clear. I mean,
you've probably seen it some of these shows. You'll see
a medical examiner on camera talking about what happened during
a shooting when it's stuff that he really shouldn't be
testifying too. It's not his area of expertise. But to say, yeah,
I think the guy was like this and he pointed
it that way and was leaning. And you're not a
firearms examiner. But these days people talk about everything I've

(19:45):
done the same thing. You know, you put me on
a show and talk about a real case as if
as if I'm the greatest expert. Well, no, I'm probably not.
But the boundaries are not as clear. When I was
starting my series, the boundaries were very clear. A medical
examiner test to fight in court, and they went to
some of them went to the crime scene and they
did the autopsy. Most medical examiners don't even deal with

(20:07):
forensic labs because the labs aren't in their same building.
Virginia has a bizarre system and that the forensic labs
and the medical examiner's offices are all in the same building,
so I got to see everything from the anatomical division
where they're getting bodies cremating stuff, to the autopsy suite,
to all the labs, to all the forensic labs upstairs.

(20:30):
So I could follow a case from beginning to end.
And that was what the biggest difference, because the truth is,
there's only so much you can say about an autopsy.
It's the forensic science that throws it in all the
mysteries because even if you find out that this person's
DNA was left at something, that doesn't mean they did it.
Now you gotta find out why it was left there.

(20:51):
Is there another reason that could have been there? And
so on and on. It goes with all the ways
that you can put spin on science and turn it
on its head and inside out, upside down and have
it tell you the truth and make it lie the
next minute because it's implying something that's not accurate even
if the science is correct. So those are the balls
that I juggle, mostly because I can do more with

(21:12):
them than just the why incision and what the organs
look like, and you know, now and then there's some
really cool surprise. But what I'm fascinated by with crime
is really truly what people bring into the scene and
take away those things that you don't think that you've done.
If you think of the case in Idaho that's just
been all over the news with the guy, that's an

(21:34):
example of somebody people think they've planned everything just right,
and they do one thing, and now you've got real
trouble on your hands. As long as someone's smart enough
to find it. You know, that's a low card's principle
is exactly right. You always leave something behind.

Speaker 1 (21:50):
You always do. And when I wrote my book about
a forensic investigator, the nonfiction book in the nineteen twenties,
he's solved a partially by doing some profiling based on
the way that the kidnapper had written a ransom note.
And he said, I don't know who this guy is,
but he was a expert baker because of the way

(22:11):
that he was writing with loops. And the guy was
ultimately the kidnapper had been somebody who was a master baker,
somebody had trained as a baker. And you know, my
guy said, just because you are a killer or a kidnapper,
doesn't mean you stop being a baker. You can't stop
those habits and so fascinating. Now, what tell me these days?

(22:33):
Would k Scarpett of the way she was in post
mortem and the premise of her as a character or
not the crimes or anything. Would that work now? You
would really have to change some stuff like kind of
where women are now and maybe in the medical field
or what do you think?

Speaker 3 (22:46):
No, I think it would work today.

Speaker 2 (22:48):
I think the biggest difference is though I was on
a wide open frontier where nobody else was walking around,
And I mean even P. D. James would not write
about autopsies because she just didn't want to get into it.
And so you know, she wrote about a lot of
hospital stuff, but nobody put their hands in it that way,
and for good reason.

Speaker 3 (23:08):
I don't know how you could if you don't experience it.
I just don't.

Speaker 2 (23:12):
So I think the difference is that there's so much
fiction out there now that deals with everything there it
would not be as original as it was.

Speaker 1 (23:22):
What about Kay just as a person do you think
resonated with readers? And I'm is it both male or
in female or do you skew one way or the other?

Speaker 2 (23:32):
I think more women read thrillers than men do anyway,
So I think that she very much appeals to women,
but a lot of men like her a lot too,
because she I mean, she's just logical. She's not Miss Marble,
you know, some of these men that have to be logical,
because she'd out smart all of them. I do think
it would work today, and I think that she's I
think she was really ahead of her time way back

(23:54):
when I first wrote about her, because there really there
were weren't many women medical examiners. Most people didn't know
much about forensic science, and that was I think one
of the reasons that the books were very, very strong
during the nineteen nineties is because that series dominated the
field and there wasn't any competition for it.

Speaker 3 (24:13):
But that's changed with CSI.

Speaker 2 (24:15):
Things changed dramatically where now it's all over TV. Whether
it's accurate or not, who cares, But it's all over
TV and everybody's writing forensic stuff. I mean, that's what happens.
You know, people follow the trend. And now here's the
interesting thing. I feel like we're now more in an
anti science trend. I feel like we've gone back to

(24:38):
the days of more of the cozy sort of crime story.
And that's true also of what you see on TV.

Speaker 1 (24:45):
You know, I remember reading Agatha Christie talking about her characters,
because you brought up Miss Marple, and Agatha Christie's saying
she loves her protagonists. The main person figuring out the
crime to be someone who is often dismissed. Oh sure,
So who's this kind of in the corner, the little
old lady. Nobody thinks she can do anything, and you know,

(25:06):
and there she is, just taking all sorts of notes
in her head and then solving, you know, like a
Jessica Fletcher. So case Scarpetta is not that kind of
a character, right, So she's kind of front and center.
Have you thought about exploring that kind of a character,
the one who sneaks up on you.

Speaker 2 (25:19):
I don't know that there's any way in the world
that I could get away from telling a crime story
and using the kinds of things that I know that
you would look for. To go back to the days
of like a Nancy Drew That technically primitive, but you're
going to use your deductive abilities and you know, just
watching what the neighbors are doing. That kind of thing

(25:40):
that would have to be a very different kind of
story because I would have to be emptying my box
of all its crayons. It'd be hard for me to
do that because I would be I would almost feel
like I'm cheating, because I would have somebody doing something
and I would know that there would be evidence that
would tell you whether that was true or not. But
what I am trying to do because you have to
learn to a I mean, I've been out there for

(26:02):
thirty five years, been published with crime fiction for thirty
five years, and you can't keep doing things the same way,
and the moral is not the same, and I'm not
the same. So one of the I do watch what
other people are doing. And one of the things that
is very obvious that that people very much need.

Speaker 3 (26:20):
Relationships more than ever.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
I think people feel more isolated and more lonely, and
so I think that ensemble is more important than ever
make sure, and I'm trying to focus on that a
little bit more in my current work, the relationships. And
interestingly enough, you know, the Scarpetit TV show, which of
course I've gotten to see already, won't be out till
next spring. But when I watch the way characters are

(26:46):
developed in a television show because things are so much
more interpersonal because that's what everybody wants.

Speaker 3 (26:52):
It gives me some good ideas.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
About that I need to loosen up and be a
little bit more that way myself and my work because
that's what people to see.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
And that is Nicole Kidman right in the scarpetal role,
and then Jamie Lee Curtis also. You have a nice
cast in that series.

Speaker 3 (27:07):
It's a great cast. Bobby Canavalli is playing Marino.

Speaker 2 (27:11):
It's going to be fun. People shouldn't expect it to
be exactly like what I've written. It's different. It should
be something in addition to what I've written. And you
will see the bones of what I've written, and you'll
see echoes in the DNA of a lot of it.
But you'll also see a lot of things that are different.
And that's sort of fun because there's stories that are
developed that I would not have developed because that's not

(27:32):
the point of view I'm telling my story from.

Speaker 1 (27:38):
Let's go back and wrap up the South Side Strangler story.
So when we go back to these women and how
it's terrified, you know this area and you're working in
the morgue, are you getting any kind of insights there
that the normal person picking up the Washington Post wouldn't
be getting. Is there a lot of chatter happening.

Speaker 2 (28:00):
The kind of insights that I got about the South
Side strangling cases while I was working at the medical
examiner's office was how incredibly stressed people were. Marcella was
the medical examiner on the case, and I remember, first
of all, she would not let anybody look at anything.
They would call her out when the body was found,

(28:21):
like at one or two in the morning. She would
go to the scene. She'd go straight to the morgue
and do the autopsy right there so that nobody saw
it and except the cops. She had tape wrapped around
the file and locked in her credenza in her office
so that nobody could look at those cases, because she
knew it was going to just be the biggest circus

(28:41):
ever and so and I was there during all that.
I did not go to any scenes with her. I
did not see the autopsies. I did not look at
the cases. But I did see photographs because I was
riding with the police every weekend and they would show
me their crime scene pictures, and so I knew a
lot that was going on. But in terms of knowing
things that ended up in the book in my novel

(29:03):
that might have been so we say classified information.

Speaker 1 (29:06):
No, no, but you were able, I'm assuming, because of
that specific case to kind of glean what what it
would have been like in this situation where you have,
you know, a medical examiner who's under pressure to help
police figure out, you know, what the next step is.
And I'm sure there's just this energy and now it
sounds like maybe there was a fear of leaks happening.

(29:28):
Did that ever happen in medical examiner's offices that you
know of?

Speaker 2 (29:31):
Oh yeah, there's always been the fear of it. I mean,
back in those days, it was a lot harder to
have leaks because technology was so there were no cell phones,
none of that stuff, so you had to you'd have
to literally steal something and make a photocopy or whatever.
Unlike today. Now leaks are a real problem because people
You've seen it all the time where autopsy pictures end

(29:53):
up on the internet because somebody took pictures with their
phone and have you know, and they're all over the place.
So there's always a thread of that and they're always
very careful, you know, they're mindful of it. Anybody is,
whether it's a police department or a medical examiner's office.
But you know, I knew when I worked there. I
got ideas about things, but they were like a classification

(30:15):
of something. You know, a rape strangling case or a
motor vehicle accident or this or that or this. When
you've seen a lot of them, you know what the
hallmarks of them are. It's not that you're copying the
exact details from a specific case. For example, I have
that Lori Peterson was a musician and her fingers were broken,

(30:36):
And as far as I know, nobody in the posts
in the South Side strangling cases had their fingers broken
that I know of. My killer in the book was
very sadistic. Now Timothy Spenser was sadistic, but I don't recall.
I don't know that he did stuff like that. I
don't think he spent that much time to do that
sort of thing. And by the way, I literally ran
into him one time. Not only did I meet one

(30:58):
of his victims, I met him.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
How did that happen?

Speaker 2 (31:01):
I went to court with Marcella when she was testifying
in the sentencing face of the trial, and I was backstage,
so to speak, and we all know that I have
a notoriously bad sense of direction, and I needed to
go to the lady's room. And she said, well, you
go out here and turn here, and blah blah. This
is an old, icky courthouse, nothing, no signage. I walk
out and I do my little turn, and I open

(31:22):
this door and I walk in and clearly it's not
a bathroom. It's a room, and there's a desk in it,
and Timothy Spencer is standing there with his back to me,
leaning on the desk with his hands like thinking. I
had on a white shirt, dark gray pants, and brown belt,
and I thought, that's a nice looking guy, and I
better get out of here. He wasn't even shackled. I

(31:44):
turned around and shut the door and went back to
the witness room.

Speaker 1 (31:49):
When I've been talking to you about sort of being
able to pick up on the vibe, I definitely don't
mean as in picking up details about this specific case.
I mean for this series that's been How many books
have you published in the Scarpetta series.

Speaker 3 (32:02):
I think I'm working on the thirtieth one. Now you
think I think I have to count, I'm not sure.

Speaker 1 (32:07):
I mean, so you know your experience with how many
years were you with the medical examiner or total in
this world do you think?

Speaker 2 (32:14):
Well, I don't know about total, but I was an
employee there for six years, okay, And then of course
I've continued. I don't do as much of it now,
especially since COVID going into morgues and all that is
not as it's never been easy, but it's certainly harder now,
you know. I did six years of that, and then
would continue to go now and then for just a
refresher course, because I used to say, when you walk

(32:38):
in a big morgue might have eight tables, and let's
say there's a body on every table, and this is
your morning roundup, and you walk in. This is what
they do in Baltimore, for example, and their big office there,
and the doctors go table to table and they tell
everybody at staff meeting this gentleman. You know, he's bloblin.

(32:58):
He do this, and he died in jail or whatever.
So you go from body to body to body, and
hear there anybody little story about why they're here. And
I always get reminded, these are real people who have
real families, and none of them, with rare exception, none
of them ever thought they were going to end up here.
And I try to pay attention so that I can

(33:20):
honor the reality of all this by telling a story
that doesn't in any way trivialize what I know should
not be trivialized, and also does not get things wrong
that you really don't need to get wrong. It's a
balancing act because MY biggest struggle has always been is
this a good thing or a bad thing I'm doing?
What do you mean I'm writing about really true, awful things?

Speaker 3 (33:44):
And is this a.

Speaker 2 (33:45):
Good thing to be putting in people's minds or a
bad thing? But then I tell myself if it didn't
really happen, if it didn't really happen, then that would
be a different story. But it does happen, and you
know that. To this day, I still have people will
come up to me at a book signing or an
event and they'll say, ever since I read post Mortem,
I've always locked my windows. Yeah, and I go, and

(34:08):
you should and you should. Everybody should lock their windows,
even if you're on an upper story. People can be
resourceful to get in, and especially if you don't have
an alarm system or a dog.

Speaker 1 (34:20):
I teach a very large True Crud podcast course at
UT and I always say at the very beginning, how
many of you put your hands up if as soon
as you get into a hotel or an AIRBNBU look
under the bed, in the closet, behind the shower curtain,
and you know about half of them do? I don't.
I don't know what's wrong with me, but there I should.
I don't. I just don't even think that anything's gonna happen.

(34:42):
I don't.

Speaker 2 (34:43):
I have to admit I don't usually search my hotel room.
Usually I'm more worried about other things when I walk
into a hotel room, like do I need to get
out my crime light and see whether I should be
sleeping on the sheets or not?

Speaker 1 (34:53):
Oh, I just don't do it.

Speaker 3 (34:56):
No, don't do it, don't do it.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
I'll bring that light.

Speaker 2 (35:00):
I like that you're asking these questions, and it's a
really important thing to think about, because we're inspired by
everything in life, including what happens in our own lives
and our own families, and so what that means as
writers is that we must always try to demonstrate some
sense of responsibility about what's okay to say and what's
not okay to say.

Speaker 3 (35:18):
I mean it really is.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
I mean it's Truman Capodi if you mean that he
learned that lesson the hard way. When you're writing books
where you're telling all about your friends and everybody hates
you and doesn't want you at lunch anymore, you're never
going to make everybody happy. But if you feel that
there's a story that you need to tell, you how
to find a way to tell it. And I struggled
with post mortem because I wasn't sure whether should I

(35:41):
walk into that water or not.

Speaker 1 (35:43):
When you came to the medical Examiner's office when you're
applying for jobs and you said you just wanted your
foot in the door. What happened before with you? Did
Little Patricia say I want to be Agatha Christie growing up?
I mean, how did you end up at this place?

Speaker 2 (35:56):
I never read a murder mystery when I was growing up,
and I did not want to be a I wrote
all the time. I wrote my first novel in college.
It wasn't really a novel. It was actually more autobiographical.
But I mean I spent when I wasn't in school
in classes, I was at my typewriter working on a
three hundred page book. I've never stopped. Then I went

(36:17):
to the Charlotte Deserver and I became a police reporter.
That's how I got into all this was crime reporting.
I was married at the time, and my husband wanted
to move to Richmond to go to seminary, so I
had to find some I couldn't state the newspaper. I
did the biography of Billy Graham's wife. That was my
first project, and that was published by Harpurn wrote in
nineteen eighty three. Then I thought, what am I going

(36:39):
to do with myself? And I said, there's only two
things I know right now. I'm interested in crime because
of the Charlotte Observer, and I like writing books. I
think i'd like to write books, so maybe I could
put the two together somehow. And the only thing I
didn't really know much about was what the medical examiner does.
And I got somebody to get me an appointment to
meet Marcella at the Emmy's office in Richmond, and that's

(37:02):
how it all started. In the I think it was
the spring of eighty four, and at first I was
just going there to do interviews with her, and then
I was working on my crime novel, my first one
that nobody wanted but I spent more and more and
more time there, and then with the police, and then
I started doing the technical writing, and then they got
the computer and one thing went from there, and then

(37:23):
I was a full time job. You know, when I
wrote Post Mortem and that was rejected. That was four
books in a row. So for all those people out
there that think, you know, make it the first time,
that means you're not good enough.

Speaker 3 (37:34):
It's not true.

Speaker 1 (37:35):
What is it about this character in this series that
just keeps going on and on? Is there another series
that has lasted thirty books?

Speaker 2 (37:46):
I don't know, but I had to quit talking about
her age because she would have she'd probably be Methusela
by now. I just I never even say what her
age is. She's kind of hanging like late fifties. But
we all know that that if you do the math,
we know that's not possible. But I just remember it
is fiction, and I declare my rights of a fiction
writer when it comes to lying about people's age. Lucy's

(38:10):
another one. Lucy's not a kid anymore.

Speaker 1 (38:12):
She's ten, right, she was ten, she was.

Speaker 2 (38:14):
We won't talk about how old she really would be now,
Like maybe it's time to move out of your aunt's
a guest house, you ninny, But I don't get into
any of that.

Speaker 3 (38:22):
I just let it be an impression.

Speaker 2 (38:24):
And the reason I think that I can still get
mileage out of Scarpetta is, first of all, she's really smart,
So anything new that comes down the pike, it's not
out of the realm of possibility that she's going to
understand it. And that she works with big agencies that
would be dealing with such problems, whether it's drones or
holograms or artificial intelligence, whatever it might be.

Speaker 3 (38:45):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (38:46):
I just think that people relate to her as a character,
and I think they like her as a person.

Speaker 1 (38:51):
That's the most important thing.

Speaker 3 (38:52):
You know.

Speaker 2 (38:52):
She'd be a nice neighbor, especially if she invited you
over to eat.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
But she's complicated, right, What are some of the complicated
things that make her well round?

Speaker 2 (39:00):
Because there's nothing more boring than a perfect person. Well,
she doesn't. A lot of stuff bothers her more than
she lets on. So she tends to cry in the
shower because she doesn't want people to see how upset
she is. She won't watch violence movies. In fact, she
can't hardly look at them. And I won't tell you,
well that where I got that idea from, because it's

(39:21):
the apple didn't fall far from the tree. Because I
can't watch them either.

Speaker 1 (39:24):
You can't either. What's your threshold? Where do you stop?
Can you watch like a date on a NBC or
can you watch a spooky thing?

Speaker 2 (39:30):
I can't take anything more violent than the Sopranos, and
even then I got to look away sometimes.

Speaker 1 (39:35):
Yeah, yeah, I won't.

Speaker 2 (39:37):
Watch anything glory while eating. The minute I see blood,
my food is not so because it's real to me,
it's not fake. And so she's got a lot of
quirky stuff. People might be surprised at how upset she
gets by certain things. She can be as composed as
anybody you'd ever meet, but if she sees somebody being cruel,
you better watch out.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
Over thirty books, she has to evolve, right, how do
you figure out how your character evolves? So she's not
the same old Kay that we met, you know, thirty
five years ago.

Speaker 2 (40:09):
No, she's had to get become a little more limber
and live in the same world that we do and
go along with those things that are just part of
our everyday life today.

Speaker 3 (40:21):
So she's just had to adapt do.

Speaker 1 (40:23):
You get tired of her. You have to be tired
for someone. No, is this your character crush Scarpetta.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
No, it's not a character crush. But I don't get
tired of her because I feel comfortable. I never know
where something's going. I mean, it's the character surprised me.
I feel like writers say this a lot. I'm sure
that you would say the same thing that. Sometimes you're
not sure if you just said that or they did.
I get tired of myself, That's who I get tired of.

(40:48):
I don't get tired of Scarpetta.

Speaker 1 (40:51):
Well, you were saying, you know, like I said, you
really were saying, I'm done. I don't think I'm going
to do this book anymore. I'm going to go fly
my helicopter and that'll be it. And now and then
when I was prepping for this, I said, oh, she's
got a book that's coming out, and just have one
come out. So do you see an end?

Speaker 3 (41:07):
Well?

Speaker 1 (41:08):
Are you? I mean I hate to phrase it like this,
but are you going to vanish before Casecarpetta vanishes?

Speaker 2 (41:15):
For you?

Speaker 1 (41:15):
Have you thought about how you'll end this?

Speaker 2 (41:17):
I don't think about it. Sometimes it enters my head.
It'd be nice not to have to do this because
it's unbelievable. You know that it's an unbelievable amount of work.
I mean, you can work eight hours an entire day,
hardly move out of your chair, and you go, I'm
not much.

Speaker 3 (41:34):
Farther than I was this morning.

Speaker 2 (41:36):
Because you're trying to figure something out and you get
stuck in places. I mean, we all have it happen.
It's a lot to figure out. It's an engineering process,
for one thing, because you're building something, and so it
seems like it'd be nice to be able to just
go out and have fun and not have to worry
about deadlines and all that. But I still feel I
feel a need to do it. I want, you know,

(41:57):
I don't. I can't tell you how I feel a
year from now, but right now I want to keep
trying to do this. If I ever get tired of
it and it doesn't seem to come to me anymore,
I know I will stop.

Speaker 1 (42:07):
And this is different from here. What about the other series?
Do you do you use anything that you learned, just
you know, from the process of how do how they
investigate a crime in the Medical Examiner's Office, on any
of the other books that you have a couple of
other series too. Well.

Speaker 2 (42:23):
I mean when you if you learned a lot about
policing and forensic science and forensic medicine and just crime
busting in general and all facets of it, then you
can apply all that to so many different things. I'll
give you a good example, because of all I'd learned
from the labs, you know, knowing about things like the
scanning electron microscope and X rays that where you can

(42:47):
you can put a tiny little sample, you know, in
this little column where it's bombarded with elect you know, electrons,
and it can tell you it can magnify something a
million times and show you stuff that you just wouldn't believe. Well,
that is not so different than what some of these
telescopes do that are set into outer space. They're using

(43:08):
radio waves and other things to they can tell you
when you're looking at an asteroid if they're scanning it
with one of their telescopes. And remind you that not
all telescopes use light. They're not all visual. Some of
them are using radio waves and you're talking about radar
all these kinds of things. You can actually tell what
an asteroid is made out of. You can look at
a nebula and say that the gases are made out

(43:29):
of Formaldrahyde, which is a true story. So we're doing
the same things in outer space that we're doing in
the lab with any bitty little things that we're putting
in a microscope that can magnify stuff millions of times.
So once you begin to get an idea of how
things work, you can start applying them to different situations
and understanding it better. And so yes, I've always been

(43:50):
using all of my little tricks and all of my books.

Speaker 1 (43:53):
There are and I wonder if this is true for
you too. There are things that are disclosed about either
serial killer or victims or real crimes that have come
out that surprised me to a point where it makes
me rethink either doing I've just wrapped up a mystery,
my first mystery novel, and thinking about either doing fiction

(44:13):
or nonfiction. And to me, what shifted my idea about
serial killers and criminals in some way is when the
Golden State Killer happened. You know, my co host on
one of my other shows, Paul Holes, was highly involved
with it, and I realized, you know, he had said
the reason that Joseph Dangelo had stopped was because he

(44:35):
got old, too old to hop in and out of windows.
He just was there. I'm sure he was doing other
stuff of some kind. I had no idea, but he
was not doing what he had been doing when he
was younger. And it just never occurred to me that
these guys would age out. And it was just like
life circumstances. You know, serial killers get married, they have kids,
they changed jobs, things happen, and so that really, I

(44:56):
don't know why, that just made me maybe humanize them
a little bit for me and made me think of
them a little bit differently. Are there any crimes like
a John Binney or anything that's happened that just kind
of really made you flip a switch with the Scarpetta character,
or at least something that she would have tackled where
you kind of went, whoa, this is a different way
of looking at this.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
You may have heard of the Colonial parkwik killings. Oh yeah,
and that was going on too when I was working
at the Medical Examiner's office, and of course that's never
been solved. And to me, I mean, that case drove
me crazy, because it still does, because you go, how
does somebody grab couples? What is the psychological dynamic that
you're able to control two people that way, that.

Speaker 3 (45:37):
You're you know.

Speaker 2 (45:38):
The theories are that somebody was parading as a cop
and was pulling the car over because they'd find a
driver's license on the seat, and then the girl and
the boy or the young man and the young woman
are gone. But I think there were like five cases
of this in Virginia and then they just stopped. And
the question has always been what happened? Where did this
person go? And it was really creepy because this was

(46:01):
all in the area of Camp Perry, which is the
CIA training facility, you know, near Williamsburg, and there as
a lot of military bases around there, and you start
wondering as somebody doing some kind of weird trophy hunting
going out and hunting humans.

Speaker 3 (46:14):
But that case is you.

Speaker 2 (46:15):
Can google it. It's never been solved. And I got
some people got mad at me for that one too,
because that was the inspiration for all that remains, where
I wanted to see what Scarpetta would do with couples
that vanish and then you find the skeletal remains in
the woods and there's almost no evidence left. You know,
what can you tell from those remains.

Speaker 3 (46:36):
How's she going to figure this out and put a
stop to it.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
So I don't know that caused me to think differently,
but I guess sometimes I've asked, I've gotten her to
solve something that nobody else can.

Speaker 1 (46:46):
You know, couples killings, lovers lanes killings, those kinds of things,
I mean have gone on throughout history. If you look
at like the Texark Cana, the moonlight, well even the
sun of Sam Yes, son of Sam Well, I mean
Textar Cana was I think nineteen forty six, And it's
always those kinds of circumstances, the same kind of circumstances,
And I think that's just a category that a lot

(47:06):
of people would use. You know, what is the psychology
behind that? I think that's fascinating. And I would have
to say, I mean, unless you are copying names and
copying really really specific circumstances, I'm not sure how you
can have a copyright on how somebody can say, well,
there's a you know, if you write about couple of killers,
it has to be attached to the Colonial Parkway just

(47:27):
because you were in Virginia at the time.

Speaker 2 (47:29):
Well you know, listen, well, you're going to write any story,
especially if you're going to do it a true crime story,
you have to give yourself permission just to tell the
truth and not be thinking about what everybody else is
going to say about it, because the truth of the
matter is most people don't want anybody knowing anything about
the bad stuff that happens to them and a lot,
but we ask society we kind of need to know

(47:51):
these things. I mean, this is part of educating ourselves
so that you realize that this is not don't be
a Pollyanna. You don't want to live in fear and
think that any minute you know, someone's going to break
into your house and kill you. But don't make it
easy for them to do it either. Don't make it
easy because there are people out there who will do
terrible things. And I can never get away from all
the real cases that I know about people doing their

(48:13):
innocent thing on a certain day but left the front
door open with just a screen doorshut because of the way
they're spreading. And then you have to escape convicts that
do a home invasion and all of them are dead,
you know. And that's a real case from Virginia. And
so I'm glad I know the truth about the way
things work. But I can understand why be a lot
easier not to know any of it.

Speaker 1 (48:33):
But why do you think people read that series when
you know you're saying it is I've thought about that,
you say to yourself, I thought about that. I am
I bringing them just the dregs of society and the
awful things that happen, and you know, autopsy reports and everything.
Why do people keep reading, maybe not even just your series,
but in general, what do you think readers get out

(48:55):
of mystery thriller suspense?

Speaker 2 (48:57):
I think it's all this all blo down to one thing.
Human beings are driven by their survival instinct, and that's
why all of our feelings really truly are the result
of our survival instinct. Love, hate, jealousy, pride. It all
has to do with our trying to, in our very

(49:18):
frail forms, trying to live on this planet. So anything
that could threaten that, we're interested. What's the first thing
you look at in the aquarium. I bet it's the
shark tank. We want to look at the thing that
scares us because we don't want we really and it's
a weird thing that we want to put ourselves through.
It in an imagined way. And maybe it's because there's

(49:41):
this part of us that think if I know what
it looks like better, if I know more about it,
it won't get me.

Speaker 3 (49:47):
If I look at that shark enough and I watch.

Speaker 2 (49:49):
The way he moves, I'll bet I'll find a way
that he won't bite me.

Speaker 3 (49:52):
Not me, he'll like me.

Speaker 2 (49:54):
That's what you say to the psychopath right before he
strangles you to death. Now they don't care, they're not
moved by your charms, And.

Speaker 3 (50:03):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (50:04):
I just want to know the world I live in
so I can navigate it. Next time you go shopping,
when you're walking to the grocery store and you're walking
through the parking lot, look at every single car you
go pass, and tell me to look at it through
the eyes of a predator. And look at the information
you gather because of bumper stickers, where people hang from
the rear view mirrors, what's on their car seat people.

(50:24):
I'll never forget. I was in the criminal you know,
the forensic unit of Bellevue. I was walking through with
a forensic psychiatrist and these guys in cages, right, and
one of them yells out to me, love your shoes.
He noticed that I was wearing Prada. These people are
they're they're like sharks with their radar. And so you

(50:44):
learn that you are advertising things about yourself and make
sure that you're sending the message you want to send.
Because people they picked their victims for a reason, they're
reading them.

Speaker 1 (50:54):
Well. You know, this case, the Timothy Spencer case that
we sort of started with, was groundbreaking, right because he
was called ultimately through DNA. And wasn't this you said,
the first case.

Speaker 2 (51:05):
It was the first case that DNA was used to
link serial murders.

Speaker 1 (51:09):
And it exonerated somebody who had been wrongfully convicted.

Speaker 2 (51:13):
I think that's right up in northern Virginia.

Speaker 1 (51:15):
And it's just the funny how things have changed, you know. Now,
I wonder what your biggest challenge is, because you're having
to keep up with the times. What do you have
to what do you have to have k learn? Is
it AI or is it like an authorroom lab that
does genealogy or what would be the big frontier for her?

Speaker 2 (51:32):
Probably going almost the other way. My challenge, My challenge
is is to have a scenario where you don't have
so much technology answering all the questions all up front,
like cameras and sensors and phones.

Speaker 3 (51:47):
That you go, how am I going to tell the story?
Where's the mystery? Anymore?

Speaker 1 (51:51):
So?

Speaker 2 (51:52):
And that's where we are with technology. But yet is
it really solving crimes? Not necessarily because the bad guys
learn how to use all this.

Speaker 3 (51:59):
Do you know?

Speaker 2 (52:00):
Now you can on the internet you can order a
Faraday bag.

Speaker 3 (52:03):
Now. A Faraday bag is.

Speaker 2 (52:05):
A little aluminum like an envelope, and it's literally called
a Faraday cage because if you put your phone in it,
it blocks out all Wi Fi signals, so that if
you're committing a crime and you have your phone in
the Faraday bag, then the police cannot pick they can't
pick up your signal.

Speaker 3 (52:22):
And that's not even true.

Speaker 2 (52:23):
If you turn your phone off, you turn your phone off,
it's still emitting a signal, but you put it in
a Faraday cage. If you go into a top secret
room to look at top secret information, when they take
your phone from you, they lock it in a metal
locker and that blocks all Wi Fi signals and so
nobody can hack into your phone. So I have to

(52:44):
try to find ways that something can happen somewhere or
maybe there's not a technology that's right off the bat
going to tell you what it was, because these days
it might even be a satellite that sees it. So
that's the challenge today. It's not finding technology, it's getting
rid of.

Speaker 1 (52:59):
It because it'll solve the whole thing, because you'll have
an eight page book and then that'll be it.

Speaker 3 (53:05):
That's exactly right. You know.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
The thing is the more sensitive some of these sciences
get in some ways, the more problematic, Like DNA testing
is so sensitive now you can do one sell. Yeah,
so you could sneeze walking through a room and somebody
places you at that crime scene even though you were
there a week ago and you just had a cold
mm hm and you and so now you've got to
figure out, okay, this we have this, this and this

(53:29):
DNA identifications, but what does that even mean when it
can identify so much with so little.

Speaker 1 (53:36):
You know, with you were talking about the Idaho for case.
You know, if you if you read what a lot
of people the chatter before Ryan Holberger, you know, pleaded guilty,
The chatter was there's not enough DNA on the On
the sheath, Paul my co host his company authorom who
he works for they were the ones who did the
DNA and there was enough DNA to conclusively link it

(53:58):
to Ryan Holberger. So you know, when there are people
on the internet who who feel very strongly and have
a really big voice about what they think, who they
think is innocent and isn't, and then they kind of
throw out facts that they don't know enough yet. I mean,
they don't even know the Pole didn't even tell me
that the company was working on it.

Speaker 2 (54:16):
Well, that case right there, I mean, that's a horrible
what a horrific case, And that once again that gave
me some inspiration for my new book, Sharp Force, because
the victims are killed in their own beds by somebody
who gets in the house. Only in this in the
case of my book, the places aren't easily accessible. But
these things that happen out there, I just think there

(54:39):
are cases where I go. I love to have Scar
Pettit take care of that case because if anybody is
going to find what matters, she will.

Speaker 3 (54:45):
She won't miss something.

Speaker 2 (54:47):
One thing that's interesting about the case in Idaho. I'm
reminded of what this forensic forensic profile or loose lessons
you're at, John Jay, I don't know if you know
who he is. He's a forensic psychologist and he's an
expert in serial crime all that.

Speaker 3 (55:00):
He told me something once.

Speaker 2 (55:01):
We're talking about cases where somebody goes into a place
and kills multiple people but doesn't kill everybody. Yeah, trying
to understand why, and he told me something I've never forgotten.
He said, when these people go into their mode to
do this, it's like this unbelievable compulsion. And then he
calls the compulsive killings. But then they run out of

(55:24):
steam and sometimes there may be one person left and
the impulse, the compulsion is spent, and they're not They're done.
And I think that's what happened in that house, because
he ran into one of these people and.

Speaker 3 (55:36):
He let her go.

Speaker 1 (55:37):
I had wondered if he had a vision of how
it was going to go. He seemed to go to
specific floors, like the top floor first, and then came down.
And then this was not in his game plan, running
right into another roommate, and you know, he walked past
and that was it. I don't know if you can
explain that either. I do know. I've interviewed Catherine ramsl
and you know, who actually worked with Colberger when he

(55:59):
was I think he was an assistant of hers, and
she's a forensic psychologist, and she said when she was
interviewing Dennis Raider BTK, he would complain constantly on when
one of his plans would not work perfectly. And it's
not even just the guy comes home and it gets
sworded and he had to leave. It was like he

(56:21):
really did have a clear, as gross as it sounds,
a very clear vision. And when then something goes you know,
it's a fantasy. And when something goes wrong, you just
are frozen and you don't know what to do. So
I always thought that that was interesting.

Speaker 2 (56:34):
I'll never forget that when lou was talking about that
and a connection with a different sort of case, and
I thought that might explain why with the Idaho situation,
you know, there's another person, but the person's out of
gas and probably at that point the overwhelming implus is
to flee.

Speaker 1 (56:50):
Yeah, yeah, and then get zoppy and leaves behind that.
Sheaf Oh, that's so great.

Speaker 3 (56:55):
That that person did that. That's the best.

Speaker 1 (56:58):
One more question, do you have you ever had Ka
go off on vacation or is she always? Is she
always in Virginia? I mean, you know, Agatha Christie likes
to send people away in all different directions so that
they can experience something different. Has Kay ever done anything
outside of Virginia.

Speaker 3 (57:14):
Yes, I've had.

Speaker 2 (57:15):
I've had some settings in other places like the UK,
and I had her a scene set in Poland at
one time.

Speaker 3 (57:21):
I mean, I you know, I've done some other things.

Speaker 2 (57:24):
But darn it, Agatha, I mean, I would you know,
to get on the cruise ship with Benton and Scarpetta,
the whole crowd, and then, oh dear, everybody gets poisoned
at dinner, and that would be what would happen on
her vacation, and then she's got to figure out who
did it, and it's not a vacation anymore. So I
don't know that it's possible for her to have a vacation.
If somebody dies.

Speaker 1 (57:45):
Oh well, I'm fascinated, you know. Agatha Christie had also
said there's nothing better than trapping somebody on vacation on
a ship or with a blizzard, because you know, people
talk to each other, talk to total strangers in a
completely different way when they're on vacation. When you're going
to ship a cruise ship and you're never gonna see
him again, but you're spending enough time around them where

(58:07):
you're getting bored and going, Okay, I'll tell you about you,
you know. And that so I had wondered if she
had ever been trapped before, or had disclosed something more
than she should have, or how you evolve these relationships
that she has.

Speaker 2 (58:20):
I mean, she's had some harrowing experiences. In fact, all
the times. If we really made a list, I'm all
the people she's killed, all the time, she's almost been killed,
some people who were killed but then aren't dead anymore.
We'd have quite a list with all these books in
all these years. But you know, I'd never say never.
But the one technical thing or engineering wise, why it

(58:44):
would be very hard for me to tell a story
like that, it's because Agatha Christie's not telling her stories
from the first person point of view. If you put
Miss Marple on a cruise ship and everything is from
her perspective, that makes it a whole lot harder to
have that puzzle. And see, my thing is, I've tried
to get away from the first person point of view,

(59:05):
but it doesn't work. If it's really not scarpettit carrying
the torch. I mean, I've done it before, and the
readers like it better when it's her, but it limits
some of what I can do for that very recent
you think about it. It's I remember one time, after
I'd done ten books, I said, I feel like I'm
banging into the sides of her skull because I can't

(59:25):
get out of her own head. I can't do I
can't go to Marino's house, I can't go to Lucy's house,
not unless she's there. And I actually got kind of
mad at her. The next book was third person point
of view, and my sales went down because people didn't
like it as much because.

Speaker 1 (59:40):
They want to be in her head. They want to
be deceived along with her, and then they want her
to get smart and figure it out using her own
way of doing it. And that's pretty cool. But I agree,
I mean first person and third person. I started my
book in third person and it just was not working
at all. I couldn't do it. I just couldn't get it,
and so I'd rather be lost in the main person's

(01:00:00):
brain then a third person that knows everything, and then
I have to figure out, well, how do you how
do you keep things from people?

Speaker 2 (01:00:08):
Because you know what happens is if you're not careful,
you start lying to the reader by you deliberately lead
them astray with something. And I don't really think you're
I don't know. I don't feel comfortable with that. I
want to tell a story that it's true, and you
either figure it out or you don't figure it out.
And even if you do figure it out before it ends,

(01:00:29):
it doesn't matter because you're dying to see what's going
to happen, you know what I mean. Let's be honest,
we go through the we live this life in the
first person point of view. I mean, if you're working
a homicide or I am, we only know what we're experiencing.
We're not in five places at one time, even if
we're zooming, not really, And so that's just what works
for me too, and I just go stick with it.

Speaker 1 (01:00:50):
Yeah, And I think it's okay for Scarpetta to be
lied to, it's probably not okay for the reader to
be lied to accept you know, I mean, I know
it works for some people. I just couldn't figure it out,
and I just though I'd rather be stuck in my characters.

Speaker 3 (01:01:04):
I think I'm just not clever enough.

Speaker 1 (01:01:05):
No, I know you are. I just think. I think
it's more of a challenge, and maybe you like that
kind of a challenge, you know. I mean, it's very
good character development living in her head, I think, and
she becomes that person that I'm sure people have depended
on when they are sad or or happy or whatever.
They take it on vacation and it's a comfort character.
And my lord, you've been around so long. They can

(01:01:26):
go back and they probably don't even remember post warnings.

Speaker 2 (01:01:29):
I don't either, and I don't. I've had to get
I had to get a retired NASA scientist friend of
mine to go through my books and create data sheets
because I can't possibly and I have files so that
I can have people do searches, because imagine what when
you're trying to remember what color somebody's eyes are, and

(01:01:50):
you're saying, if I tell you they're blue, what if
I said, ten books go they're brown? You got to
It's a lot, and it's not possible to keep all
that in your head.

Speaker 1 (01:01:58):
You know, people keep track of all that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:00):
I know they do, and they'll tell you if you
make it wrong. But what I would say to people,
the nice thing is, yes, it's a lot of books,
but they don't have to read them in order, and
you can read them. I mean, I write them as standalone.
It's fun to read all of them, but you don't
have to. And if you go back and read a
lot one a long time ago, let me know what
it says and who did it, because I've probably forgotten.

Speaker 1 (01:02:20):
When this series comes out next year, you know, with
Nicole Kidman in the main role, will it change k
in your head when you inevitably write the next twelve
books with her, because now you really do have, you know,
a K up on the screen.

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
I think seeing all of these actors playing the roles
is going to have its impact on me. I mean
I've already seen you know, the series. I mean I've
seen the first eight episodes so and I'm writing a
book at the same time, so I do know. I
will tell you this, I'll never see Dorothy the same.
I cannot see Dorothy without Jamie Lee Curtis being all

(01:02:57):
over my head in a really good way.

Speaker 3 (01:02:59):
Because it's a great role that she's fantastic.

Speaker 2 (01:03:02):
And yeah, sometimes I see Nicole or I hear her voice,
but mostly, you know, when I'm doing my thing, I'm
not really thinking about any of that. It's just I'm
in that world and Scarpetta is who she is, and
maybe she'll learn a few tricks from Nicole, maybe she'll
get Toddler.

Speaker 1 (01:03:30):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Sinner's All About 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.

(01:03:50):
This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer
is Alexis M. Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.
This episode 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

(01:04:12):
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 Tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also
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