If you had a time Machine, where and when would you go? It’s a parlor game that’s been played for ages. Ancient Rome. 1920’s Paris. Italy during the Renaissance (but with penicillin). A lot of the time, one’s answer revolves around music.  People want to be there for the birth of something. Maybe you would choose New York in 1977, to sweat to the Ramones […]

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**Trigger warning—#suicideawareness****   Still here? Ok. And if you left, that’s ok too.     I’m starting a new project that is a slight departure—but just as important—as true crime.   In the spring of last year, for the first time ever—or at least in a very long time—I had serious suicide ideation. I was in a really dark place. When I was 22, I […]

A few weeks after Chase Darkness with Me came out, I received an email that blew me away. I just wrote a story about it for Vulture.     By design, writing a book is a solitary affair.   You can do your research in the city streets, conduct your interviews in crowded coffee shops, huddle with your editor in dimly lit bars. But at […]

Order here.   Want to know what it’s about? Read below!   Have you ever wanted to solve a murder? Gather the clues the police overlooked. Put together the pieces. Identify the suspect.   Journalist Billy Jensen spent fifteen years investigating unsolved murders, fighting for the families of victims. Every story he wrote had one thing in common—it didn’t have an ending. The killer was […]

Michelle McNamara was a writer first. Then she became a citizen detective. Then she merged the two and we can now finally say she is the author of a true crime classic.   After months of going through all of her documents and chapters and notes and emails, pulling and pushing and putting it all together, and then trying our best in part 3 to follow […]

  As a journalist that focuses on unsolved cases, I get many of requests to attempt and prove someone’s innocence, but I have never taken one on. But when I found Kimberly Long’s case, there was just too much there to keep it in the dark.   In July 2015, I started my first television producing/investigating and on-camera gig by digging into the story of Kimberly Long, who […]

Last August I got a call from the History Channel asking me to investigate the DB Cooper mystery and vet a suspect that a team of citizen sleuths had uncovered.   I was paired with a former FBI man, assistant director Tom Fuentes, and together we traveled up to the Pacific Northwest to interview witnesses, former and current FBI agents, scientists, and a host of other people involved with […]

When you have tattoos, people ask you what they mean. I have a Tonka truck bulldozer on my back, with my son’s name on it. It is driving up from my side and recreating the scar my son got from the heart surgery he had as a baby. On my right tricep is a quill pen, because no matter what job I am doing, I […]

Michelle McNamara was dogged. Fiercely dogged. Don’t-take-no-for-an-answer, don’t-leave-any-stone-unturned dogged.   She was a mother and a wife, but after she took her daughter to school or put her to bed, she spent seemingly every waking moment working on her book about a series of unsolved rapes and murders that took place across California in the ’70s and ’80s. Her ultimate goal? To identify the villain, […]