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.
Decomposition is a Matter of Perspective
I thought getting away might help my focus, and that’s how I ended up alone in a hotel room on the other side of the city. I worked from the overly soft bed as much as I could, all four flimsy feather pillows stuffed behind my back as I leaned over my laptop.
These revisions on the next Dana Capone book have been giving me hell. Or maybe it’s not the revisions. Maybe it’s the state of the world. I can’t even listen to NPR anymore without rolling my eyes. They bite onto a topic and lock their jaws like a pit bull until everyone with genuine interest in helping is so goddamn sick of hearing about it, that they start rolling their eyes when it’s mentioned. ‘Nother Problem Radio. No news station is any better at this point, and most are worse.
Maybe that was what I trying to escape with my hotel stay, and maybe that’s why it was a train wreck. I couldn’t focus there any more than I could at home. I got a few hours of revisions done right off the bat, then it went downhill.
But on my second day, after a strategic OD on caffeine, I hit my rhythm at around midnight. I was in the zone. And when you’re a crime writer, the zone often includes some downright off-putting web searches.
That the FBI has not raided my home yet is either proof that they’re asleep on the job, or that they’ve already confirmed I’m a writer and have removed my name from the no-fly list. But at around one in the morning in that hotel room, as I found myself researching the smell of assorted turpentines to find if they could cover up the stench of decomposing remains, I felt like I might have crossed a line. If this doesn’t lead to my arrest, maybe nothing will.
In my research on the topic, alone in that quiet, I found myself looking at quite a few human bodies in various states of rot. Seeing that horror is the kind of mental disruption we (people in “civilized” society) don’t normally get. We go to such great lengths to never be exposed to images like that, which shine a light on the undignified reality of death. What might it do to our egos? To our sandcastles of grandiosity and purpose?
One sequence of images in particular caught my attention, and the sight was as appalling as it was pathetic. A human man, whose life was likely a Gordian knot of asinine concerns and self-importance (as everyone’s is), lying there for the internet’s gawking pleasure, frame after frame as time had its way with him. The eyes were censored to obscure his identity, which doesn’t require much scrutiny to appear a ludicrous measure. The protocol wasn’t to protect the deceased. He couldn’t care. Instead, it was obviously to reassure the living that our vanity will be preserved once Elvis has left the building.
Because I have zero control over my imagination, I found myself projecting other faces onto that rotting corpse. I imagined it was my face whose lips were pealed back like two dried apricots as a froth of maggots escaped my mouth, nose, and eyes. That will be me one day.
Ew. No it fucking will not. I made a mental note to specify in my will that I prefer to be cremated.
A parade of my loved ones marched into frame next. In the lead was my husband, the person I care about most in this world, whose absence from me in that hotel room was likely part of the reason I couldn’t focus. Flies would happily make a meal of him if given the chance.
Of course, they won’t get it. He’ll be cremated, too.
Maybe the process of rot, as irreverent as it is to our fragile egos, is the greatest gift we can give to this earth. It nourishes flies and worms. It enriches the soil. It keeps one more person from driving an SUV.
I often think about what I want to return as if reincarnation is the real deal. There’s nowhere I feel more peaceful than in the soft quiet of the woods, so being a tree might be nice. Not just any tree, obviously. It’s not a great century to be a tree, what with the logging and raging forest fires. I want to come back as a tree in an ancient forest, maybe somewhere in central Europe, or wherever isn’t a tinderbox at the time of my return. I want to grow into a giant over thousands of years, have little forest creatures call me home, commune via the wood wide web with the other trees I’ve come to know and trust over the millennia. When the wind blows and the rain pours, I want to know I have others to lean on and that others will lean on me, that we’ll all hold each other up.
But now? I’m not so sure. Bugs inside me? No, no, that’s not ideal. That’s what decomposition is, and I’m simply not a fan. I want to return to nature, but not in an icky way. Let me take my precious ego with me!
I finally shut down my computer at around 2:30 that morning, and fell asleep at 4. Various sleep aids might have been involved.
At 5:30am, through the oppressive fog of melatonin et al, it occurred to me that a woman was screaming. You might think that’s fairly clear cut and I should have jumped to attention, but unfortunately I have a history of hypnopompic hallucinations, both auditory and visual.
It’s not uncommon for me to awaken in the dead of night to the sound of someone speaking my name straight into my ear only to find that I’m entirely alone. I once spent an entire night waking up at intervals to see a woman floating in the corner of my room, screaming in agony and ordering an unknown force to get me, all while my body was paralyzed and unable to do a thing about it.
But this time, the screaming continued even after I was mostly awake. There was no ambiguity about it then. A woman was shouting incoherently in the courtyard of the hotel, right outside my room. I promptly called the cops and crawled back into bed, but sleep didn’t return after that.
I left the next morning with a migraine and vomited on the side of the highway. A fitting end to my hotel debacle. But the haunting images of the rotting man stayed with me. And you know what? In the days since, they’ve unlocked doors to living.
We will all die. It’s a concept that’s not foreign to anyone but psychologically kept at arm’s length. We fall prey to the gamified razzle-dazzle of modern society—the news cycle, skyrocketing costs of living, signals that our worth is tied up in our earning potential for richer men, the easy ways to numb our existential dread rather than confronting it.
It’s all made up. You know that, don’t you? We all do in those dark moments between fixes. We’re lumps of silly organic material with no inherent purpose or meaning. Creating one for ourselves is nice, but it’s not actually necessary to the organic world around us. We only remain warm bodies for a startlingly short amount of time. Even our hard-earned legacies will fade quickly once we’re ashes or dirt.
If you stood up and danced right where you are as you read this, it wouldn’t matter one lick. Oh, you’re waiting in line at the grocery store? Still doesn’t matter. You’re at a funeral? Especially doesn’t matter. Not in the scheme of things.
A few days after the hotel stay, I had dinner with someone who I have a long history with. Interactions with this person often leave me with migraines the next day, not to mention a lot of psychological unpacking to do. But as I sat there, listening to some of the same nonsense that usually makes my head hurt, I imagined this person as a rotting corpse. It made me sad. I don’t want them to be a rotting corpse.
A switch flipped, and I felt suddenly fortified. The conversation was easy. I felt freer to speak my mind, to contradict, but most importantly, to let things go. To not comment. To not let the words and emotional manipulations bother me. It all rolled right off. My usual need to correct the factual inaccuracies or point out the bigotry was gone. Poof! Let them be wrong. Magic. That’s all it could be. Pre-corpse magic.
I don’t mention any of this to encourage folks to be nihilistic assholes, only to point out that so much of what we believe we must do is completely pointless.
Incineration or maggots: which do you choose?
Oh, you chose fish? Clever girl.
The point is you’re free. You’re free and time is running out, and that need to maintain appearances with friends and family is pointless. That need to be right and have others know is pointless. We’re all heading toward an undignified finale, so maybe, if your life feels too heavy for you, stop attaching so much weight to things.
Let pride and envy and shame go. Have sex with someone warm (and consenting). Give that dream of yours a shot. Fail in it. Have sex with someone warm (and consenting) again. Eat chocolate with your eyes closed and moan as loudly as you want to. None of that is sin, if you even give two shits about all that. And all of it is yours for a limited time only!
I remembered all this from a man I don’t know whose eyes were censored with a silly black bar. But that doesn’t make any of it untrue.
Enjoy your body before the worms do. Why not?
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.