Every city's crime is unique. It has a personality of its own shaped over time by both nature and nurture, by the geography and the politics. We read about and watch shows on New York City, Chicago, LA, Miami, but my hometown isn't like those places.
I've lived in Austin, Texas my whole life, and it's almost a cliche now to opine on how much it's changed. But some things about this city are just as they were, trapped in amber, unable to change, stuck. They couldn't move forward in this fast-moving city, and so they got left behind. People, neighborhoods, mindsets--this progressive city is not only innovative in its technology, but in its many ways to sweep things under the rug. No time to stop and fix, keep pushing, growing, advancing.
In the late 1880s, Austin found itself in the throes of serial killings. The one responsible was never found. But he had multiple horrific murders under his belt before the town began to panic. How did he manage that? How did he get away with it for so long? The answer is tragically simple: color of his early victims' skin. It wasn't until a white woman was murdered that the town's most powerful flew into a fearful fervor, and I'd bet you can guess who they began scapegoating first.
And even then, back in the 1880s, Austin was already billing itself nationally as a progressive city.
When the highway systems went in in the early '60s, Interstate Highway 35 formalized the dividing line between White Austin and Black Austin, neighborhoods that had been established during the transparent racism of the eighteen hundreds and reinforced through various laws and lesser roadways in the time since. The result was that "west of 35" and "east of 35" were spoken in different tones of voice, even up through the 1980s, when I was born.
Where I was born was east of 35, the forgotten side of the interstate. We sold that house in 1994 for $55,000, and when I look up the value online now, it's listed at $560,000.
Some things have changed in Austin, sure, but not enough. The housing prices have increased tenfold, but are the folks who lived there in 1994 all making ten times the income? Do they have ten times the opportunity? Or has progress left them behind, pushed them out to farther and farther reaches of the city?
Gentrification is nothing new. Inequality is nothing new. But the evolution of it—and the groups affected—vary from place to place, and it's in that specific history where we find the bitter aftertaste that is each city's crime.
West of 35, the soil is easy enough to plant in. There's caliche rock about 6 inches down, though. You get used to accounting for it, that healthful soil just above the hard, impenetrable shelf. With access the right tools, you can grow quite the garden. Meanwhile, the soil east of 35 is a dense clay, fertile for its own kind of plants. The trick is to learn what can and can't thrive on each side.
I've lived north, south, east, and west in this city, and I've seen how things grow here. I know the tensions. We're a future-focused city in a traditional state. We're a population of wonderfully naive idealists with a drug trafficking highway flaying us down the middle. We're crusaders for green energy who are backed by oil money.
And that leaves a certain impression. Austin's not like anywhere else, and neither is its crime. My mysteries are love letters as much as they are grievances. I write about this city that shaped me, that filled me up with contradictions, that showed me the flaws of both sides, that taught me "You still aren't over it yet?" isn't part of a proper apology for wrongdoing.
There's a lifetime of this tension inside me, and now I get to share it through the Dana Capone series.
Help! I'm Running Out of True Crime
"I think I'm running out of True Crime shows," I said at the dinner table the other night.
"Sure looked like it," my husband said.
Earlier, as I was prepping the coconut shrimp and pineapple rice, I'd searched Netflix for something soothing to enjoy. You know, a crime show. But Netflix was just showing me one after another that I'd already seen. So I'd gone with Bikram, the story of the yoga guru who took America by storm and—shocker—turned out to be a sexual predator and a con man.
It wasn't a bad documentary, but it was a little already done. If you're a True Crime fan, which I would wager you are since you're reading my stuff, you understand what I mean.
I could go into my theory on why I think so many people like me turn to the macabre to decompress after a long day, but I think the obsession has already been pretty excellently explored in the HBO miniseries I'll Be Gone in the Dark.
And I could wax philosophical about how serial killers, who I'm obviously fascinated with and have been for most of my life, rose to prominence for a very good reason during the civil rights movements for racial and gender equality... but that cultural subtext is laid out pretty plainly in Skip Hollandsworth's The Midnight Assassin and John E. Douglas's Mindhunter, among a slew of other books.
Anyway, I was stuck watching Bikram while I made dinner. I gotta say, the smell of raw shrimp didn't exactly complement the visuals of a bunch of mostly naked people doing sweaty yoga.
I think I got into true crime in my preteens. Let's blame all those Goosebumps books for it, but I honestly don't know what sparked it. All I know is that whenever I caught a snippet of 20/20 or Dateline while I station surfed (we didn't have the channel with the schedule of shows back then; we still had to refer to the newspaper for a listing), I would stop immediately if I saw anything relating to a missing person or a brutal murder. Unsolved Mysteries and Rescue 911 were also go-tos.
I'm sure the pop of moral superiority was part of the appeal at first. "I would never get myself murdered like that," or "What an evil person! Lock him up and throw away the key!" Those sentiments feel great, especially when you're in the throes of puberty and very little makes sense anymore.
But then you get older and realize things are complicated, and not only is that okay, it's actually more interesting! Woohoo! And so a True Crime girl became a True Crime woman.
Like I said, though, I'm running out of options. I'm sure there are more amazing documentaries and books that I haven't found yet, but I don't know what they are.
So: If you have a recommendation, a True Crime book or show that I absolutely must watch, I beg of you: leave a comment and tell me! If I haven't seen it, I'll be in your debt, and if I have seen it, we can geek out about it together.
Police Work is Not Like the Movies
Police work in real life isn't like in the movies.
But if it were, those movies wouldn't make much at the box office.
My husband works in law enforcement, no matter how much I try to convince him to find a job with better hours where he won't be made the scapegoat and poster child for all of society's ills. But he loves it too much, and I'm always forced to concede that with his deep emotional intelligence and compassion for humanity, he's exactly the kind of person everyone deserves to have arrive on scene during the worst moment of their life.
For the most part, though, police work is boring. And incongruous. And open-ended. None of those are great for a movie. Hitting tab to go from form field to form field on a report isn't sexy. Bringing the same person in on criminal mischief charges for the 300th time isn't glamorous. And delivering a death notification to a ten-year-old boy about his mother isn't a potent plot point, it's a complete emotional shitshow for everyone involved and begs for therapy afterward.
From what I can tell, being a cop is a game of hurry-up-and-wait. It's an odd mix of boring and routine and close encounters with unforgettable sadness and evil. Law enforcement officers encounter more trauma each week on the job than most of us do in our entire lifetime. People can't help but be shaped by that.
These are some of the concerns floating around in my little skull as I write the Dana Capone series. I want to do the job of law enforcement justice because the people doing it deserve that. But I also don't want to bore the everliving fuck out of my readers.
What you can rely on when you read the series, though, is that there's some truth to it. When Detective Capone bucks standard procedure, everyone knows it. The detectives and sergeants and patrol officers will remain complex, and the issues among the ranks won't be watered down. Shit will get real. My husband will be holding me to that.
But I'll show you the exciting parts of it. We'll skip the paperwork... unless there's a clue in the paperwork. Because as unsexy as that is, sometimes that's where the biggest moments of revelation happen—alone at the substation at 3am, filling out forms. You'll get to see all sides of policing in this series, because there are so many sides to show, and no, not all of them are pretty to look at. But tell me a profession where all sides of it are easy on the eyes. Every industry is complex like that, but not every career allows you to save lives, to be a source of comfort for strangers in their dark moments, and to get evil off the streets.
That's what draws me to it, and I suspect that's what draws you to it, as well. Complexity is riveting, especially in the battle of good and evil.
If you want to see what it’s like against the backdrop of Austin, Texas, check out my Dana Capone series. Start with the free prequel, Legacy Killers, or jump straight into book 1, Killer Delivery.
If I Go Missing...
Are you prepared to be abducted?
I am. I don’t want to be, obviously, but if it happens, I’m about as well-positioned for it as possible. I have an “If I Go Missing” sheet for my husband with all my relevant passwords on it. He can log in and track my phone. Also, he’s a cop, so that’s a huge advantage. Police spouse goes missing, and you have an entire department dropping what they’re doing to look. Not everyone has that, which is extremely unfortunate.
For them. Not for me. I’ll be fine, like I said.
I was watching some true crime the other night, as I’m wont to do, and it occurred to me that the disaster wouldn’t be if I went missing and turned up dead. It would be if my husband died under mysterious circumstances.
Y’all, I would be so screwed.
As a crime writer, my browser history alone is enough to convince any jury that I’m guilty. God forbid he die by one of the methods I’ve googled. There’s no scenario that follows in which I would not be absolutely fucked.
And then there’s the part of every documentary where they interview people who knew the victim and the suspected killer. This, too, would spell catastrophe for me. My husband, Jack, is the kind of person everybody loves. I visit his extended family, and it’s clear he was always their favorite. “He’s such a sweet boy…” Wistful. Always said wistfully.
I’ve gone on a patrol ride-out with him, and even the criminals warm to him before long, and not just prior to their arrest, but after as well. He’s had people thank him for what he does while he’s carting them off to jail. They feel privileged to have gotten him as their arresting officer.
It’s bullshit, really. I don’t know how he pulls it off. Not even the most adept film crew would be able to find someone to spill the tea on him because his reputation is spotless. He’s even on good terms with all his exes. It’s freakish.
Meanwhile, you got me. Boy, oh boy, would people come crawling out of the woodwork to talk shit. I don’t mean to be this way, but there’s just something about me that attracts it. I’ve tried at various points in my life to be “nice” and all it’s amounted to was a bunch of people taking advantage of me, not recognizing my generosity or effort, and then talking shit about me anyway. So, I stopped trying. I’m still generous. I still act with integrity. I’m still honest. But I’m not nice in the way most people mean it when they talk about women. I’m not a doormat. That works well for me now, because it means I have boundaries, a life that suits me well, and no dead-weight relationships. But it won’t look so good if my sweet husband goes missing…
”Oh, Claire? Yeah, she really thought she was all that in high school. Got straight A’s and acted like she was too good for everyone. But on the weekends, she would party—not many people know this. She would chug vodka straight from the bottle.”
I couldn’t deny any of that, either. It’s true. It all happened. But it wasn’t a pattern of behavior. I chugged vodka from a bottle once. A lot of it. I had no idea how strong it was. Live and learn. Haven’t enjoyed vodka since.
But then add this salt to the wound:
“She was such a rule follower, so we were all shocked when she was caught drinking at school with a few other kids.”
Yes, that happened, too. But again, it wasn’t a pattern of behavior. It was just the chaos of being 17, having been taught no emotional coping mechanisms, and being a perfectionist. I’ve since addressed all those issues.
“She’s the kind of person who pushes herself until she snaps.”
Oh no. Now I’m looking super guilty, huh? All it’d take would be for one person to come along and say, “She always had a jealous streak, and I know she hated all the nights Jack was away at work,” and then suddenly we have a whole story about motive coming together.
Yet again, yes, those things are true about me. I can get a bit jealous. It’s just an instinct. But after a decade with my husband, he’s earned my trust and it’s not an issue. Do I hate his work schedule? Yes, but only because I want to spend more time with him. These are tensions within me, and we all exist with variations of these. They don’t have to be a motive for murder.
And then the show would drop the clincher: an interview with my parents. Hey! They’ll obviously be on my side, right? They’ll defend their daughter’s reputation!
You haven’t met my parents.
When Jack went to ask for their blessing to propose to me, they sat him down for an hour and a half, warning him that I was stubborn and would always get my way. Oh, and they were worried about my drinking problem.
With allies like these…
I feel the need to speak on my behalf at this point. I don’t have a drinking problem. I’ve made a few poor decisions with alcohol in my 3+ decades on this earth, but I’ve never been dependent on it—emotionally or chemically—and I haven’t had time to drink in excess since I graduated college over a decade ago into one of the bleakest job markets in modern history. I’ve had to scrounge and hustle for my money. The only job I’ve had with benefits was a teaching job where I made $37k working 70 hours a week. There’s not time to drink if you’re a Millennial and your parents don’t pay your bills. So, I get hangovers after two bourbons now. I couldn’t keep up a tolerance if I wanted to.
And all of that is to say, it wouldn’t matter what the reality is.
A few data points from my teens and early twenties and a few ugly interviews from people who want to contribute to the drama of it all would be enough for everyone watching to fall into the misogynistic trap of believing I was just another evil woman who snapped and killed a good, honest man. Never mind that such a thing is extremely rare; the rarity of it makes it prime fodder for true crime shows. And for those whose only connection to crime is through those shows, they end up with a skewed idea of the frequency of the anomalous content and begin to think the things that would be considered shocking and unusual in the complete data set of homicide are actually quite commonplace.
It’s an easy bias to fall into. If you watch/listen to/read as much true crime as I do, you end up with a wealth of data points. You start to believe those data points are themselves a random sampling of the broader pool of criminal data, and therefore representative of it. But that’s not the case. The smaller data set—the one we’re shown in our entertainment—has been handpicked precisely because it is such an oddity among the greater data. Our “normal” is actually derived from the abnormal.
And because of that, if my husband went missing, I would be under suspicion. He interacts with homicidal psychopaths on a regular basis in his line of work, is the one to put a stop to their preferred activities, but I would be the person wearing the scarlet letter G for guilty.
That’s how bias works, though. We think we’re getting a full picture when we’re not. If the full picture is even presented to us (which it rarely is), we ignore most of it and pick out the bits that confirm our worldview.
Never has this harmed us more, I think, than during a pandemic when our data set is limited not only by what stories the news covers (15 articles about one topic will always make it seem more threatening than 2 articles on another topic, regardless of the content of each), but through our social media silos.
We tend to be friends with people who share our views, and that in itself chops away plenty of data points. But then the algorithms come in and serve us more people we with similar views until our feeds consist of thousands of accounts that parrot our beliefs, and we start to think, “Wow, the whole world agrees with me!”
Then comes that dissenting voice. It slips through somehow. Bad news for them. Because now they appear to be such an anomaly among the data that they can be completely dismissed, eliminated if necessary.
As we build our cases against people, is it even possible to stop and reconsider? If you want me to be guilty of homicide, why would you ignore the interviews with so-called friends and family that imply I was a loose canon with a drinking problem, that everything nice I ever did, all my work toward making this world a better place, was merely a mask I wore to distract from the real me? And why would I or anyone else ignore that for you?
If it’s possible to pause in our condemnation and reconsider, to flip the script so that kindness was the true version of the person and those angry moments and errors in judgement were only the result of an underdeveloped brain, a lack of emotional vocabulary, and a build-up of societal expectations for perfection, then maybe I could make it out of a true crime doc cleanly.
But I have no reason to believe this happens on anything resembling a regular basis.
We’d rather watch the shows and pile on without critically thinking. We’d rather not question our own cultural biases that cause us to view some people as guiltier from the get-go.
I know we’re like this, because I’m like this, too. Unless I pause and reflect.
Unfortunately, I don’t do that nearly enough. Instead, I pretend the film crew or podcast host or writer has presented me with the full set of facts, that nothing crucial has been left on the cutting room floor for the sake of time constraints, and then, based on my own comforting biases, I string together a constellation of condemnation, declare my suspicions to whoever will listen… and then move on with my life.
That’s all fine and good, until it’s me in that documentary. Or until it’s you.
And then we’re fucked.
Fascinated by the Unusual
It’s well-known Feeney family lore that I had strange viewing tastes as a child. Yes, I watched the typical Nickelodeon shows like kids my age, but I had other must-watch shows whenever I could catch them.
I was obsessed with World’s Strongest Man competitions, for instance. Despite being a bit of a tomboy (that’s what people were obligated to call girls who didn’t adhere to strict and arbitrary gender norms (i.e. didn’t like pink and did like sports)), the idea of a string-bean eight-year-old staring transfixed at the living embodiment of steroids as they lugged the Atlas stone around is something you’re allowed to chuckle at. It was an odd fascination.
Guinness World Records Primetime was another show I loved, despite the host, Cris Collinsworth (yes, the same one who routinely ruins NFL games with his obnoxious color commentary).
By the time Ripley’s Believe It or Not! was revived in 2000, I was in my teens but no less excited to watch Dean Cain show me freakish stuff without the proper cultural context.
(Side note: Does anyone else feel the need to say, “Is that Dean Cain?” every time he shows up somewhere. It’s always a surprise to me.)
Dateline was another show I would absorb into my developing brain whenever my parents weren’t around to put a stop to it. Murder, missing women, killer women, or just serial killers in general didn’t freak me out as much as intrigue me. Aware even then that this was not normal, I kept it to myself.
I didn’t get hooked on ghost hunting shows until later. All we really had in the nineties was the occasional local news segment or 20/20 story about the topic—all of which I soaked up—until Discovery Channel and Travel Channel got into the game.
At that point, I went in hard for Ghost Adventures. I think I’ve seen every episode up through season 19. (Too many demons now; it’s obnoxious.)
There’s a theme across all these preferences of mine from an early age, and no, it’s not an expression of sociopathy on my part. But I do love reading about the subject.
The theme is the fringe, the strange, the socially unacceptable. The freakish. Things, in short, that Ripley himself might not believe.
I like alarming things, not because I wish to participate in them, but because I wish to understand them. I’ve never been able to step away from an unsolved puzzle. (Hence why Unsolved Mysteries is also on my list of favorites. Just hearing the theme music on the recent reboot filled me with nostalgic joy. I have a special dance for it, which my husband just loves, but not as much as he loves me singing along while I do it.)
When something seems beyond belief (Beyond Belief was another fantastic show), my mind latches onto it until I can make sense of it. I need to know how to file it away. Resolution is required before I can move on.
Things have changed since those early days, though. I’ve learned a truth or two.
The strong men were on steroids.
Guinness World Records are often rigged and don’t usually mean anything.
Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is a racist shitshow that presents anything that’s not Western as “Other” in an attempt to justify pillaging and territorial occupation.
And ghost shows are fake.
In short, I’ve grown cynical. But I frequently remind people: “I’m cynical, but I’m not wrong.”
So, as all those external sources of intrigue fall away, there’s been one that hasn’t: crime.
Outside of imminent threat, what makes someone take another life? What beliefs do men hold that make them so much more likely to kill than women? How does society impact that grim decision? How do so many people claim, “He would never do that!” when, oh yes, he would and he did?
These are the puzzles that still hold my attention. The puzzles of society and humanity, of sociology and psychology, of trauma and victimization.
It’s convenient, then, that I’m married to someone in law enforcement. This wasn’t intentional. I’m not a badge bunny. In fact, I never would’ve intentionally fallen in love with a cop. I’m a fiction writer, for fuck’s sake! I have a liberal arts degree! When we met, he was an unemployed hipster, and that was way more my style. Then he sprang it on me that he wanted to apply to the Austin Police Department. Yikes. But fine. I was in love, and the job came with health benefits and a salary.
Turns out, we’re a good fit for his career choice. He has deep empathy and compassion for everyone, and I … don’t always. He de-escalates the situations and then comes home and can tell me all about them without it getting to me.
Those stories are daily puzzles for me to chew on. I try to build formulas to explain it—emotions, environment, cognitive ability, time of day, substances, cultural beliefs, personal beliefs, social history, and trauma are all variables to include.
I don’t know why I need to know the answers to all these puzzles. But if the puzzles stopped, it would be hard to keep going each day. We crave solutions to life’s mysteries while knowing that continuing to have questions is as essential to humanity as clean air or fresh water. We gobble it up, hoping that we reach an end, that we find the very last piece to the puzzle… the one that will make the rest of our lives passionless and not worth living.
Is that why I write about serial killers? I don’t know. Yet.