Greetings from the land of the living.

Anyone who follows my monthly blog will notice it’s nearly a week late. Sorry about that. Even as I write this, I’m coughing uncontrollably while awaiting a course of antibiotics to arrive. I was fine a week ago. Then, suddenly, I was hit and hit hard with some sort of evil bug. Despite a valiant fight, a ton of water, and more rest than I’ve had in the last two years (I may not be exaggerating by much there), it took me down. Now, it’s claimed victory by settling in my chest. A scary thing for anyone who suffers from asthma. We protect our lungs with all we have.

Perhaps it’s my weakened state that has me feeling so maudlin these days. Or perhaps I can at least pretend that’s the case. Either way, it’s more than an upper respiratory illness that has me down.

The book is coming along, but it’s been a battle so far. Truth be told, I wish I’d started it a year ago. It’s overwhelming, with so much done and still so much more ahead. Dozens of interviews. Physical archives to review (meaning more travel). A ton of research. As many as fifteen decades of newspaper articles to wade through and read. And given the subject matter for this true crime book, I’m encountering a lot of people I grew up with in those digital archives. That includes the victims, suspects, witnesses, and many members of the community. But it also includes my family. It includes me.

I’d decided a long time ago that the story is complex enough to require a certain amount of background. Not just for the victims, but for the place in which the crimes occurred. Setting that scene is as important for the reader as giving a full account of the murders and the subsequent investigation. People (readers) need to understand who they’re dealing with to comprehend why it would be nearly a half century later without one arrest. It’s complicated. And the “where” of it is probably as much a reason as anything else. There are quite a few seedy and interesting characters on all sides―including in law enforcement.

Unfortunately, it will be impossible to capture and define the entire universe of this place. Also, I might as well announce right now that there’s absolutely zero chance that this book will be finished by the end of this month. That original self-imposed deadline is officially impossible. I’m on chapter five. No joke. Five. And there, I’ve hit a wall.

The first six chapters will be a deep dive into the background of the area in which the crimes occurred. It may seem counter-intuitive or maybe even self-indulgent, but it’s necessary. The first three chapters detail the emergence of the county itself. Broad strokes―its origin and development. The next three chapters home in a bit and explain the history of the resort town in which the murders took place. And it’s here that the ghosts of my own past have taken up residency in my head. Recently, they’ve completely surrounded me.

I miss my dad. And I miss my grandmother.

Earlier this year, as those who regularly read my blog know, my father died. I won’t recount the details here because it isn’t required for you to feel that loss. I don’t expect anyone to. But it’s affected me in increasing ways over the last few months. My grandmother, Dad’s mom, died back in 2011. Not a new loss, but it sure feels that way lately.

What does this have to do with the book, you may ask? Well, everything. My family was intimately involved with the resort town in which the murders took place. My dad helped pave its streets and build its retaining walls. My grandmother made the resort everything it was in its heyday, right down to the name of the bar in which two of the main suspects spent time the night of the murders. I won’t reveal all the details here. They’ll be in the book. However, it’s exactly where I’m stuck in chapter 5 that all of this starts coming out. Coincidence?

To help fill in details, I recently opened a document my dad wrote back in 2020. I’d asked him to please write up a biography of certain family members. My grandmother had died before I could get something similar from her. We’d always planned to have us all visit and sit around a tape recorder and have her tell us about her upline family. They were an impressive bunch of well-known musicians, artists, and toy makers. Impressive, that is, in a public sort of way. Privately, many were monsters. But my daughters and I wanted it all: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Family history is a passion of ours. However, Grandma died before we were able to implement that plan. And with her, she took decades of secrets we’ll never know. All we have left is whatever I can find on newspapers.com.

Similarly, when my dad died, all I had were three or four partial biographies. I used to get annoyed with him because he seemed to veer off course when writing about our family into stories that centered on him. He was a wonderful guy, but you should see the weird biography he tried to write for me when I was crafting my own author biography. It was alllll about him. Go figure.

In any case, I pulled up the bio he wrote on Grandma the other day. In it was a healthy dose of Dad being the center of the universe. However, amazingly, there was also a fairly detailed account of my grandmother’s time in this resort town. How she got there. The intimate details of things no one else would know―or admit to knowing. Secrets and sins and ugly truths about the way she was relied upon, the way she was treated, and the way she left.

These details dispute some of the accounts others may read in those same types of newspaper archives I now rely on for background of my own family history. Disturbing corrections to the whitewashed lies that effectively erased her and her impact on the area. They may well make some who read my book out of curiosity feel pretty uncomfortable. The “some” to which I refer there includes certain descendants of a certain family. Perhaps it will anger or embarrass them. To that, I can only say, “Thank you, Dad,” as I did, audibly, when I read the biography he wrote.

In any case, I’m as in the moment as I can be right now. If I can get through this and the next chapter, I can finally get into the meat of the book according to its intent. I never wanted to be in this book. It’s not about my family. It’s certainly not about me. By the time the murders took place, I’d left that county and would never live there again. I guess that makes me sad, because I’ll always consider it my home. But the real focus of the book is about the murders. More than that, it is about the families of the victims. Once I’m done with these initial six chapters, I anticipate sailing through the rest of the thirty-nine chapters (or so). I hope so. I still have a deadline for the release date. Meeting that deadline is not an option that can be pushed back―not due to any sickness, especially not a sickness of the heart.

For now, I’m recovering and doing what I can to overcome a lung infection, a head full of memories, and a heart that aches for my lost relatives. They surround my like steel bars. I’m hoping the amount of sleep I’ve gotten over the last three days, coupled with the arriving antibiotics, will set me free.

See you next month.