JERRY BLEDSOE Says + FREE eBook giveaway!
Jerry Bledsoe's Before He Wakes is B&N's Nook First! Today he stopped by Diversion Says to talk a little about true crime writing! Plus, enter for your chance to win a FREE copy of Blood Games!
I didn’t set out to become a crime writer, and I don’t really consider myself to be one. In the millions of words I’ve turned out in 54 years of writing for newspapers, magazines and books, I’ve focused on a myriad of subjects. For many years I even was considered to be an authority on barbecue, North Carolina’s state dish.
Murder has fascinated people for as long as people have existed, in part, I suspect, because we all wonder if we’re capable of it. In the biblical view of creation, only four humans occupied the earth before murder occurred, brother slaying brother. The question that always arises is why?
Murder is the hardest form of death to accept. Disease and accident are understandable. As difficult as it may be to comprehend, even suicide, an individual choice, can be dealt with. But murder is deliberate, so unnecessary that those who lose loved ones to it are unlikely ever to fully come to terms with it.
I abhor the sensationalism of all too many murder stories. The only cases that drew me were those involving family. And my primary purpose in writing books about them was to detail how they happened and attempt to understand why. In each case, there were signs along the way that with proper intervention the murders might have been prevented.
Without question, that was true in Bitter Blood, one of the most bizarre stories in the annals of American crime, resulting in the loss of nine lives, including two innocent children, creating lasting damage and disruption to several prominent families. I was assigned to write a lengthy newspaper series about the immensely complicated case. But that didn’t tell me all I wanted to know and I kept digging. Thus the book.
Before He Wakes deals with a case as cold-blooded as family murder can get, and for some of the most specious of reasons. It originated from another newspaper series. I was intrigued by the story because the first murder took place in my home county and never would have been solved if the second hadn’t drawn attention to it. It frightened me about the competency of law enforcement in my county at the time and how it failed the family of the first dead husband.
Serial killer stories never attracted me because there is a sameness to them—psychopathic, sexually obsessed males killing strangers by violent means. The drama in those stories lies in the challenges to investigators. Female serial killers, however, are different, and rare. They kill people close to them, often family, usually by poison or some other deceptive means. Velma Barfield was a perfect example. Her first husband died from a fire she set while he slept drunk. She killed five more with arsenic, her mother, her second husband, two elderly acquaintances and a third husband-to-be. Writing Death Sentence not only gave me the opportunity to detail the reasons behind the murders but to provide a close and profound look at an execution that drew international attention, and how it affected those who had to deal with it, including the people who carried it out, Velma’s family and the families of the victims.
Blood Games, was prompted by a brief news item. A trial was to begin that day, half a state away. It involved three N.C. State University students, Dungeons and Dragons players, who had attempted to murder the parents of one of the students and succeeded with the father. I hadn’t heard about the case. I read the item, got in my car and drove four hours to the courthouse. My son was an N.C. State student and Dungeons and Dragons player. I had to know the difference between these boys and my own. It turned out to be broken families and failure to instill moral character.
I never had to go far from home to find appalling family murders worthy of writing about. North Carolina seemed to produce a disproportionate number of those, many becoming subjects of books and movies. At a talk I made at N.C. State, an audience member brought this up, wondering why it was so.
“Do you think it’s something in the water?” he asked.
Without even thinking, I said, “More likely the barbecue sauce.”