Like so many around the world I was immediately captivated by the unthinkable murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey during Christmas of 1996. The case was as heartbreaking as it was fascinating, and the fact that I had a daughter the same age as JonBenet at the time, who was, in fact, born just 12 days after JonBenet, only served to intensify my interest in the case, increase my empathy for the victim and her loved ones, and stoke the fire of my rage at the inhuman murderer of such beauty and innocence. The JonBenet Ramsey case, like the O.J. Simpson trial, occurred during my first foray into novel writing, and no doubt continue to impact my work to this day. Even back then, before my first novel had ever been published, part of me knew I would have to one day write about this unimaginable tragedy, the bizarre circumstances surrounding JonBenet’s death, and the subsequent clusterfuck of the investigation.
Unlike these previous cases, I was a published author when the school shooting massacre at Columbine happened. Because of this I looked at all true crime differently. In fact, I was looking at the world differently. Suddenly, I observed life and culture and world events more closely, with more engagement than ever before. Like so many others at the time, the idea of a school shooting massacre was truly shocking and unbelievable to me. But what I couldn’t know at the time, what no one knew, was the way Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold created a blueprint for the many school shootings to follow. I’m not sure when exactly I knew I was going to write about what happened at Columbine but at some point I knew I had to. I knew I had to, as in so many other cases, exorcise the demons that accompany such a destructive and inexplicable and senseless and unimaginable act.
Unlike the previous cases, the Maura Murray case and the Hae Min Lee case captured my fascination and imagination as a result of the current new media true crime boom that the advent of true crime podcasts have given birth to. It was Serial season one that introduced me to Hae Min Lee and Adnan Syed, and it was subsequent true crime podcasts and the books they were based on or gave rise to that introduce me to missing UMass nursing student Maura Murray. There are many, many fascinating elements to these cases that make them compelling and interesting, even as they are devastating and heartbreaking. And though in the case of Hae Min Lee’s murder, the prime suspect was convicted—her former high school boyfriend, Adnan Syed—in many ways I see both of these cases as open unsolveds, and in the same way that unsolved cases haunt the detectives who work them, I, as a crime writer, am haunted by the unsolved cases that I investigate in and through my fiction.
In the case of all of these cases there have been excellent true crime books written about them. What I present with this collection are other kinds of books—novels, works of fiction, that have been inspired by and include factual information from these cases. It’s a different take on the same subject, a creative approach, an artistic imagining, a literary response to the tragedy and brutality and inhumanity, an imaginative approach to these unimaginable crimes.
Books and the cases that inspired them
INNOCENT BLOOD
(The Atlanta Monster / The Atlanta Child Murders)
BLOOD WORK
(Ted Bundy)
COLD BLOOD
(Maura Murray)
BLOOD BETRAYAL
(Hae Min Lee / Adnan Syed)
BLOOD TIES
(JonBenét Ramsey)
BLOODSHED
(Columbine)
Copyright © 2015 by Michael Lister
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Also available in audiobook, paperback, and hardcover.
Book Edited by Aaron Bearden
Book Design by Tim Flanagan of Novel Design Studio
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Books by Michael Lister
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(John Jordan Novels)
Power in the Blood
Blood of the Lamb
Flesh and Blood
(Special Introduction by Margaret Coel)
The Body and the Blood
Double Exposure
Blood Sacrifice
Rivers to Blood
Burnt Offerings
Innocent Blood
(Special Introduction by Michael Connelly)
Separation Anxiety
Blood Money
Blood Moon
Thunder Beach
Blood Cries
A Certain Retribution
Blood Oath
Blood Work
Cold Blood
Blood Betrayal
Blood Shot
Blood Ties
Blood Stone
Blood Trail
(Jimmy “Soldier” Riley Novels)
The Big Goodbye
The Big Beyond
The Big Hello
The Big Bout
The Big Blast
In a Spider’s Web (short story)
The Big Book of Noir
(Merrick McKnight / Reggie Summers Novels)
Thunder Beach
A Certain Retribution
Blood Oath
Blood Shot
(Remington James Novels)
Double Exposure
(includes intro by Michael Connelly)
Separation Anxiety
Blood Shot
(Sam Michaels / Daniel Davis Novels)
Burnt Offerings
Blood Oath
Cold Blood
Blood Shot
(Love Stories)
Carrie’s Gift
(Short Story Collections)
North Florida Noir
Florida Heat Wave
Delta Blues
Another Quiet Night in Desperation
(The Meaning Series)
Meaning Every Moment
The Meaning of Life in Movies
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How to read the John Jordan Blood Series
The Blood Series
This New York Times bestselling and award-winning series features a conflicted detective—a cop with ties to Atlanta who also works as a prison chaplain in Florida. He’s a man of mercy and justice, compassion, open-mindedness. He’s also a smart, relentless detective.
The John Jordan mystery series is character-driven and realistic—thoughtful mystery thrillers involving the hero’s journey of a good man trying to be even better, as he helps others along the way.
Like John Jordan, the author, Michael Lister, was a prison chaplain with the state of Florida before leaving to write full-time.
If you’re new to the John Jordan series, you can begin with any book, but we recommend one of these 3: Power in the Blood, Innocent Blood, or Blood Oath.
Power in the Blood, the first fiction the author ever wrote, was published over 20 years ago, and though it’s recommended, the books in the John Jordan series don’t have to be read in order.
All the books in the series are novels—mystery, thrillers, whodunits—except for the 3rd book in the series, Flesh and Blood, which is a collection of short stories featuring temporal and metaphysical mysteries. If you don’t care for short stories, feel free to skip Flesh and Blood and continue with the fourth novel The Body and the Blood.
If you decided to skip the short stories and continue on with the novels, we recommend that you read the short story “A Taint in the Blood” in the book Flesh and Blood to find out what happened to Laura Matthers from Power in the Blood.
The 7th book in the series, Innocent Blood, is a prequel going back to John’s very first investigation. Tho
ugh the 7th in the series, it can be read 1st or 7th since it’s a prequel.
The 10th book in the series, Blood Cries, is the second in the “Atlanta Years” series within a series following the 7th book Innocent Blood. It can be read 2nd or 10th.
The 17th book in the seres, Blood Stone, is the 3rd book in the “Atlanta Years” series within the series following the 10th book Blood Cries. It can be read 3rd or 17th.
John Jordan is an ex-cop in books 1-10, but once again carries a gun and a badge beginning with book 11, Blood Oath.
All of the John Jordan novels are available in high quality hardback, paperback, ebook, and audio editions.
Interspersed throughout the “Blood” books there are other related books that are part of the John Jordan universe. These books are extremely important to the series and provide essential backstory for characters, connections, and locations of series regulars. Most of all they answer the questions most readers want to know. They include Double Exposure, Burnt Offerings, Separation Anxiety, Thunder Beach, and A Certain Retribution. These are “Blood Series” books without being John Jordan Mysteries.
We hope you will enjoy all the books in the John Jordan series and eagerly await each new entry. Recent releases include BLOOD STONE, BLOOD TRAIL, and BLOODSHED.
Be sure to join Michael Lister's Readers' Group for news, updates, and special deals on the John Jordan series.
Introduction by Michael Connelly
by Michael Connelly
The reading of a novel is a mysterious and sacred thing. A solely internal process, it relies totally on one’s empathy, the ability to connect with another being – the story’s protagonist. To me it’s like thumbing a ride and getting into a car with a stranger behind the wheel. Except this driver doesn’t ask where you’re headed because you are going wherever he goes. So you head off and over time you get to know the driver. You can’t help it. You learn all about him as he drives. You pick up little stories, little moments of character. And yet he won’t tell you where he’s taking you. But that’s okay because not knowing the destination is the key to a good ride. And if you are lucky the conversation and the scenery along the way is equally as interesting as the final destination.
It is a massive investment of time and creative energy to read a novel. You have to build characters in your imagination, even if they’re villains and you don’t like them. You create landscapes and emotions. It’s all very risky. Because the emotions are real even if the story isn’t. A sacred bond develops between the reader and the stranger behind the wheel.
All of that is why you are in for a great ride with this book and why the following pages hold such a treat. If you are like me you’ve already invested heavily in the driver of this car. I had been in the car with John Jordan before on several journeys. I had picked up the vibe of his past. Something dark and damaging. They say the past informs the present. Well, this man’s present seemed to be overwhelmed at times by the past. It hung out there just off the edges of each page.
Now, with this novel, Michael Lister brings the past across the margins and onto the page. Now you get to know things. Now you get to understand. It’s a bold move by an author. The man with a mysterious past is a tried and true literary archetype. It worked with John Jordan for many years. Why mess with a good thing? Well, maybe because as a creator Lister wants to push things in from the margins and examine them and not rely on familiar archetypes. It’s risky but the pay off can be high. It is here in Innocent Blood. Lister gives a unique edition to the John Jordan story. Another great ride with a very assured driver behind the wheel.
-- Michael Connelly
1
In 1980 I came face to face with the Atlanta Child Murderer.
I was twelve years old. The same age as many of his victims.
This singular experience not only forever changed me, but actually altered the course of my life.
But long before this seminal visit to the city of Atlanta as a child, long before this encounter with evil, I was obsessed with the monster who was littering the woods of the metro area with the broken bodies of little black boys.
It had begun on July 21, 1979, when Edward Hope Smith went missing.
He was last seen leaving the Greenbriar Skating Rink on Stone Street, parting ways with his girlfriend at the intersection.
His body was discovered seven days later in a wooded area in a ravine just off Niskey Lake Road by a woman looking for cans. He had been shot with a .22 in the upper back. The area, surrounded by loblolly pines, white oaks, an occasional dogwood, and creeping kudzu vines, was a popular spot for people to dump their trash.
It was said that by the time his body was discovered, a vine from a nearby tree had already wrapped itself around the boy’s lifeless neck.
My obsession had continued through the disappearance and death of Timothy Hill, a thirteen-year-old boy and friend of an earlier victim, Jo-Jo Bell. Timothy went missing on March 13, 1981, and was last seen in the area of Lawson Street and Sells Avenue. His body was found seventeen days later on March 30th––the same day Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, Jr.––by a boater in the Chattahoochee River near Cochran Road. His partially submerged body was some twenty-five feet from the bank. The cause of death was determined to be asphyxia by suffocation.
There were other victims, of course, but they weren’t children and I wasn’t nearly as obsessed with them.
Children disappearing, dying, being discarded––some seventeen so far––held my developing mind hostage, seized my attention, captured my preteen imagination like nothing before ever had. And it was only partially because of the cruel and capricious nature of the killings, the fragility and vulnerability of childhood, and the fact that my dad, the sheriff of the small Florida Panhandle town where we lived, had a friend on the task force that was so ineffectually working the case. It was mostly because of how each and every little boy looked like and reminded me of my best friend in all the world, Merrill Monroe.
My fateful confrontation with the killer took place during the final weekend in November 1980, surrounded by gaudy gold Christmas decorations and to the soundtrack of traditional Christmas carols played through cheap speakers, the thin, electronic noises of video games, the wooden pop of pinball machines, and the desultory sounds of the city Sherman had burned to the ground.
Our parents had brought us to Atlanta, on what would be our final family vacation, to stay in the Omni hotel, to ice skate and shop, to play in the arcade and ride the gigantic escalator to the carnival in the clouds, to experience the spectacle of a hotel that could hold more people than lived in our entire little town.
While Nancy, Jake, and I skated and played, Mom drank and Christmas shopped, and Dad watched TV in the room when he wasn’t meeting with his friend on the task force.
The Omni fit its name––all or of all things––for the mammoth structure seemed to my twelve-year-old self to contain all things. Whether shooting up several stories in seconds in the elevator or riding the enormous escalator to the fair or looking out the window of our room at the tiny figures ice skating below, the hotel held so very many larger-than-life and unexpected attractions, and yet retained an open and airy quality of hushed tones and lost sounds into which it seemed everything else in the world could easily fit.
Outside the hotel, fear and palpable racial tensions pulsed through the city. Inside, everyone whose job it was to cater to our comfort tried to pretend there was no world outside this one, but an uneasy anxiety coiled beneath the surface betrayed them––not unlike the one I sensed just behind the strained civility displayed by my parents.
It was during the afternoon of our second day that I saw him, the monster dressed like a man. And not just any man, a soft, slightly effeminate, light-skinned black man in a long-sleeved, large-collared silk shirt with thick wire-framed glasses and a big afro––only part of which was visible beneath a Braves baseball cap.
Nancy was teaching Jake to ice skate in the large round rink r
ight in the center of the hotel. I was in the video game arcade trying to beat my best score on Space Invaders.
I had just failed to prevent the invasion when he walked in carrying a handful of flyers.
Unhurriedly and unapologetically he scoped out the arcade.
After identifying his marks, he began approaching black kids by themselves, handing each one a flyer, asking them if they wanted to be a star.
The flyers read: CAN YOU?? Sing or Play an Instrument * If YOU Are Between “11-21” (male or female) And Would Like to Become A Professional Entertainer, “YOU” Can Apply for POSITIONS with Professional Recording Acts No experience is Necessary, Training is Provided. All Interviews Private & FREE!! *
True Crime Fiction Page 2
