Real Life Crime

How many of you have ever been burglarized? Your home? Your car? You know that feeling when you open the door and know immediately that something is off/wrong?

It happened to me for the first (and hopefully ONLY) time a few months ago. The outrage, the feeling of being violated… well, let’s just say I was HUGELY, COLOSSALLY pissed and leave it at that, because I could write a novel alone on the anger I still feel.

I will say this. Writing suspense and having done research and interviewing police, detectives and private investigators may have rubbed off on me.

For example:

1.     I knew how they attempted to enter my house and couldn’t, and how they ultimately did enter.

2.     I knew a woman was involved.

3.     I knew in what part of my house they were interrupted.

4.     I’m fairly certain they were high at the time.

Granted some of that stuff was easy to determine, I’ll admit. Obviously they removed the window screen and used this little orange wooden piece to scratch it out. The window itself was scored with something sharp as if they tried to cut through it. Easy enough to figure out and also leads me to believe they were stoned enough to think they could cut or slice through double-paned glass. (Brilliant? I think not.)

But, how did I know a woman was involved? I won’t say how exactly other than size played a factor in breaking into my house. It was either a woman or teenager. When I was finally able to clean my kitchen after police left, I discovered glitter on my floor. I had cleaned house the day before (Sunday), so it wasn’t left over from anything I might’ve had in the house. No holiday cards or anything that might’ve had glitter on it. Somehow that glitter came with thieves attached.

The one thing I’m always reminded of when plotting a story is to avoid something too contrived with forced circumstances or coincidence. But I’m here to tell you that thieves make mistakes and all those little puzzle pieces to a crime can come together to nail a suspect. (Coincidence happens. That’s why it’s a word in the dictionary.) My case is one of those.

Ten days after the burglary, the police knocked on my door at 10:30 pm. Scared the crap out of me as I was working away in the front room near the front door. The police had just come from a vehicular crime scene and had property with our names on it. When I explained we had been burglarized a week before, it gave our detective more information to work with.  Now we had a name (the car owner, since the driver and passengers ran after the accident) to either potentially go with the sets of fingerprints lifted from my house or at least a beginning as far as having a suspect. (BTW- I should mention the fingerprints lifted from my home have yet to be released.)

Cut to several weeks later and I’m informed of another vehicular incident where a suspect is arrested. What did police find in his car? Our checkbooks and our 27” desktop computer among other things. Now we have an actual person! A name! Trust me, I was a very happy camper with this news…. Until I discovered he was released before they were able to determine that the stuff in his car was stolen! Now I’m pissed again. My first thought was why didn’t they call me immediately? Because they’re busy. I get it, kind of. The wheels of justice move soooo slooowwwwlllyyy. Ugh.

But wait… the story continues. Another couple of weeks, I receive ANOTHER phone call… The suspect was arrested again! For what, I don’t know and the police wouldn’t tell me, but now they have him for my burglary and the good news is he actually confessed to robbing my house.

Honestly, I think the only reason I’m able to write about this is because the man was caught.  The woman who helped him – yes, there was a female involved as I had already figured out – is still at large, but I think her karma will find her one day soon. (We have a first name so it's a start.) 

Anyway, my point to all this is that anything can happen when you’re crafting a story and need to pull the ends together to either wrap it up or lead your characters down a different path. What were the odds that the guy who burglarized my house would be arrested a second time so soon after getting out after his first arrest? What were the odds of catching him with any of my stuff or catching him at all?

Once I had his name, my daughter and I did more digging. The Internet is an amazing, scary thing.  We found him all right. And found where he’d sold our laptop computers online. I realize my jewelry is forever gone and that sticks hard with me. Unlike others, I’m not able to just turn the other cheek with this dude. I want him to pay and pay hard for everything he stole from my family and me.  Some areas are just not gray and this is one of them.

I eagerly anticipate my first court date with this fool and I can only hope I have a judge who’ll let me say a few words about the whole ordeal.

I guess the moral of this post is that (hopefully) justice is served when the pieces fall together.

May your pieces always fall together whether it be in real life or your story.

If the pen is mightier than the sword...

www.zenithgallery.com/

... what happens when the pen is the sword?

I have no insights today, only questions.

We have a common bond on this blog. We're all suspense writers of one form or another, and if you're like me, you've done research that's taken you dark places. But speaking for myself, while some of the research gave me nightmares, I've always had a clear understanding that I write fiction. I create events and people that aren't real.

While the news has been non-stop lately with horrible acts of terror and victimization, two conversations this week have resonated in unexpected ways. Two writing friends shared events that were keeping them awake at night. Men they knew, people they'd gone to lunch with, worked with, thought they knew, had snapped and lashed out. The men killed others, including their wives, and then took their own lives. In both situations, my friends were shaken—hadn't seen the potential for violence, any evidence of mental illness—and were grieving.

I write about law enforcement professionals and amateur sleuths who put themselves in harm's way to bring villains to justice. I've read your books and know your characters take similar paths. But this intrusion of real life into the fictional world has made me wonder. We complain about violent video games and their impact on the kids who play them. Are we writing novels that desensitize people to violence or murder?

What do you think? Does the experience in reading a novel evoke different emotions than the hands-on, visceral experience of a video game? Do we need to dial down the violence? Or does horror rule?

Setting Chaos Right

Admittedly, there is something strange about those who spend a great deal of their time in thinking up ways to do away with another of their fellow beings. Someone once wrote that a person who repeatedly tries to devise a way of killing another is either a psychopath or a mystery writer, and that sometimes the line between them blurs. They even use a similar line over the opening credits of the TV show CASTLE.

I resent that. I spend a great deal of time finding ways to eradicate some poor soul, but I don’t feel like a psychopath. At least, not most of the time.

So why do I do it? Why do any of us do it?

Aside from the fact I’m much too afraid of getting caught to even think of trying anything for real, I believe we do it because as writers and as readers we fans of murder have a very strict sense of honor and decency and justice.

Whether we’re plotting the demise of a nosy next door neighbor or creating a scheme to eradicate the populace of a distant planet, we are creating mayhem and chaos. Murder is against the natural order of things – it is unnatural, and the unnatural is disturbing to us. However – if we create it ourselves as writers, we control it. We know from the beginning that however bad things get, we can set it right and good will triumph again.

Now I can hear some of you muttering that there are many books where the killer is not punished, that he walks away unscathed. Yes, of course there are, but in the traditional mystery framework (even if it is set on a distant planet many eons in the future or the past) we know that the bad will be punished and order restored. Even if the law is not served, justice will be, and the two are not always the same thing. Sometimes a murder is a good thing, and to punish the killer would be unfair. As was written in Texas law until not too many years ago, there are some folks who just need killing!

By contrast, real life is messy. People are murdered and the perpetrator is never caught, and sometimes even if he is he isn’t convicted. There is no guaranteed happy/good/righteous ending, and sometimes the uncertainty of that ambiguity is unbearable. I think people turn to mysteries both as readers and as writers because they need the framework of justice guaranteed to be triumphant. I know I do.

In the worlds we create horrible things happen, yes, but right and justice prevail. The murderer is going to be stopped some way. Our senses of balance and security and rightness are restored. All is well.

Would that it could be that way in real life.

Janis Susan May / Janis Patterson