IPOD
RADIO
Michelle McNamara
By Gerry Duggan
Sep 22, 2007
Michelle McNamara is a Los Angeles-based writer and founder of True Crime Diary. She explores the unsolved and forgotten murder cases that the media by and large ignores.
Gerry Duggan: What made you start the website True Crime Diary?
Michelle McNamara: You know, I think it was a case of I was always doing this research to satisfy my own curiosity. I mean, I had been for years. I just was always reading true crime, always reading stuff. And then, once I realized there was so much information online, available about these unsolved cases. That wasn’t making it to the news and stuff I would talk to Patton, my husband, about it. He was the one who suggested it, I think and it was kind of this thing where he saw me yelling at the news anchors getting it wrong or I had it first or something. He said, “Well, you should start a website.” So I kind of just did it almost as a lark at first not figuring it would become such a regular thing but that was sort of the impetus for it. I wanted to get more involved in the cases than fueling my own curiosity.
GD:
What do you think is so appealing about true crime cases?
MM:
I think everyone loves a puzzle…I think it’s two things. I think everyone loves a mystery and so that’s how people are very drawn to these stories. But, from my end, you know, I don’t really like the high profile mysteries, I’m not interested in Phil Specter. I’m not interested in Anna Nicole Smith. It’s the ones that really don’t get that much attention that interest me because I think what’s interesting about them is there’s more stuff to be unearthed that hasn’t been in the public yet and you can do it. I think it’s the fact that you can be interactive with it that is so appealing. It is that sense that you get to be part of a breaking story. The clues are unfolding and even reading about it, I love that, when I’m reading a story and it says, “Someone who hasn’t been named yet.” You just think, “Oh no, the next story is going to be.” You know, you just want to figure out what it is.
GD:
Right, right. Regarding your entry about who killed Kelly Nolan…I think you make a strong case for that Myspace profile to be looked at more carefully.
MM:
What’s interesting…I will just say I had a very interesting talk with them when I gave the information.
GD:
Law enforcement?
MM:
I will say they seemed very, very interested in it.
GD:
Right.
MM:
My sense was that they had not checked Myspace, which did not surprise me. A lot of this is, when you’re doing this sort of, my spin on it would be alternative investigation, I don’t like to call it amateur sleuthing.
GD:
Right.
MM:
They’re just not really taking advantage of the internet yet because I think they’re just used to old school ways of doing things. I put it together for them over the phone. I basically told them what I had written.
GD:
So you…pitched them?
MM:
Yeah, so I pitched them and they kept me on the phone I will say for a pretty long time.
GD:
Yeah.
MM:
I was surprised. They kept asking me more and more questions and I said, “Well, bottom line is, I’m not in Madison. I’m doing this from L.A., you know.” “All I know is you guys can figure this out too.” They did say they would call me back in the next couple days if they had any other information they wanted to ask me about. We’ll see.
GD:
I wanted to ask you too, about Michael Devlin. Was that the first tip that you generated that got law enforcement’s attention?
MM:
Yeah, that was the first one. That was a case of, because I’ve been doing this so long and reading about stuff and just kind of clues and cases piled in my mind, some people know so much about comics book or music and with me it’s just always been true crime. With that case I just immediately remembered this previous case. It was a situation where you wouldn’t have been looking for it unless you remembered this kid from five or six years ago because on the surface it didn’t look all that similar. It was a different town and it had all this stuff so that was the first one that I wrote about and then it ended up being that it was the right thing, that the guy had done both of them. Michael Devlin, he had no connection to the state of Michigan, he’s from Missouri. But, in my head, I’ve always been sort of obsessed with this boy who went missing I believe it was in 2001, Stephen Craft, because I had a personal connection to it. My parents have a house about a half an hour from where he lived and stuff and it’s just always in the back of my mind. I read this article and his brother kind of offhandedly said, “You know I don’t know how he ended up so terrible. We had this great childhood. My parents used to always take us to Lake Michigan.” And just bells went off in my head.
GD:
Yeah, wow.
MM:
I thought, “Oh my God, so I know he’s familiar with that neighborhood.” I went online. I checked his last name for property in that area. I found that his father did own this house that would be kind of near where the kid disappeared. So I kind of started to put it together and that’s when I called. It was almost a public service, I had to call the Benton Harbor Police pretty quickly because I didn’t think they would figure it out. The last I heard, through gas receipts they were able to put him in the state maybe not on the day that Stephen Craft went missing -- but very close.
GD:
They are looking harder at him as a suspect but he has not been charged?
MM:
He has not been charged in that crime but he’s in jail for other crimes. But they have come out and publicly said he’s the prime suspect.
GD:
Is there a story on the site that you’ve written that you sort of can’t get away from, one that sort of keeps you sort of up at night?
MM:
Yeah, I would say the Jenner murders keep me up at night. The story of this couple, this young Christian, camp counselors, were on this beach in Northern California and they were shot as they were on this isolated beach and they were shot in the head while they were sleeping. The reason it keeps me, well, there are several reasons, because of the history of Zodiac up there.
GD:
Right.
MM:
Some people think it would be a Zodiac related thing, but he would be seventy now, I just don’t think it’s him. I went to the crime scene last month, and there’s just no way, it’s really hard to get down there. They were killed with this big, unwieldy rifle. It seemed so specific and pointed at them and yet there is just absolutely no evidence that they had any enemies in the world. It’s such an odd crime.
GD:
Yeah.
MM:
In looking at that crime I came
across a lot of other murders, a very troubling pattern of murders -- mostly couples: a man and a woman, or a mother and a daughter who were out camping in the northwest and were shot in the head. It was just stunning.
GD:
Wow.
MM:
The LA Times did a big story and wrote “True Crime Diaries is the first to have said, I think these things are connected.” The writer and I have now talked several times and he says that police are trying to connect some of them. It seems too coincidental.
GD:
Yeah. There are, that’s another active killer up there but with different rifle models?
MM:
Well there always seems to be a rifle or a shotgun, I don’t know what it would be. That’s what’s so odd.
GD:
Right.
MM:
It seems usually very outdoorsy areas. It’s usually people who hiking or camping. I think the thing that strikes me is there’s never any clear motive. There’s no motive at all…there’s no robbery. There’s no sexual assault…it’s just cold blooded killing of people out and about. It’s very odd.
GD:
You had mentioned the Zodiac -- what you thought of the Fincher film?
MM:
I thought it was a very kind of lovingly detailed thing. It was almost, my only thing about it was, I wondered because they kind of followed the reporter and the police, the story, it almost divided my loyalty in the movie. I also kind of wanted to know why Robert Downey Jr. was so obsessed with Zodiac. I never really figured that out. It was a puzzle and I wanted to know that. But I’m always glad about it when someone makes a movie about something that is unfortunately close to my heart.
GD:
Right. Let’s talk about that. How did these puzzles, how did these crimes end up being so close to your heart?
MM:
When I was fifteen or sixteen this woman, I lived in a very low crime neighborhood by the way and this woman was killed two blocks from my house. I remember it was during the summer, she had a Walkman on and someone just came and slit her throat. It was during the day and it was a very odd crime.
GD:
To say the least...
MM:
My family still talks about how I became so obsessed with this crime and figuring it out. I visited the crime scene. I talked to people who knew her. I was going to figure this out. I think I can sort of trace my obsession back to that crime. I think that crime is when I started reading in the books about other unsolved crimes. Her crime, by the way, was never solved. It was interesting, but I went on to read, I got my MFA in creative writing and I had a bunch of different jobs but throughout it all -- those were the books I was reading and the cases I was following.
GD:
Do you have any interaction with the families of the victims that you write about?
MM:
Yeah, the first time it happened, interestingly enough, I think it was when I was writing about the people who had been killed in the northwest and I got a couple e-mails that said, “Thank you for writing about this. I feel like we’ve been forgotten.” It sort of just piqued my interest because I thought, “I wonder if I can talk to people while I’m researching and writing these stories and get their side of things.” So I did, and I started e-mailing with some people and that sort of led, what I found is that if the families already have an online component, which often they do, it makes it a lot easier.
GD:
Right.
MM:
I think I’ve only gotten one e-mail from someone that said, I think I had misspelled the woman’s middle name or something, and they were just really mad at me in general for writing about it, which is funny.
GD:
It doesn’t seem exploitative at all.
MM:
No, no, I think they were just angry in general but that’s really been the only one. Everyone else has been really gracious and very thankful and stuff.
GD:
You ever get nervous that the killers found you while checking online to see how they’re doing in the press?
MM:
Yeah, and also I mean, some people say that, “Oh don’t you worry that someone’s going to come to your door?” I think, “Well, these people are pretty unhinged but then to travel and just single out me, it would be pretty unusual.
GD:
It’s not exactly as if your address is on the website.
MM:
The most worried I’ve become is with the last thing of “Who Killed Kelly Nolan?”, I really had to worry about how much I revealed about that person because I didn’t want to get in trouble.
GD:
Right.
MM:
I was struggling because I thought, “If this turns out to be him and I didn’t write about it, I’m gong to be so mad at myself,” but, if I reveal too much and it’s not him I could get in a lot of trouble. I don’t want to do that to him so I really had to walk a really fine line there.
GD:
Do you feel like you know how to or feel equipped to bump somebody off and get away with it?
MM:
[laughs] that’s a good question. I think I could do it very, very well. Yeah, I think I could.
GD:
Yeah, not that you would. But you could, I bet.
MM:
No, I’m so non-violent because I have a temper and stuff. I have often thought, “Oh my God, could I lie that well?” I don’t think I could. When I think of some of technical aspects of these crimes, it stuns me how stupid some of these people are. Especially this Kelly Nolan one, the reason I think that it was an amateur killer is nowadays these guys aren’t realizing that when they kill these women they’re leaving them in places with their cell phones on them and with the ping technology they’re finding them right away. You can just tell that’s an amateur because someone else would figure that out.
GD:
Yeah. I feel like if you were paying close attention during 24 you might know to take the battery out of a phone.
MM:
[laughs] Yeah, exactly. It seems to be a high school or college student.
GD:
Yeah. It’s just such a creepy story too, because she was safe one minute and then met the wrong person or was reintroduced to the wrong person and was dead.
MM:
Yeah. I’ve been on State Street and Madison (in Madison) and it’s mostly college students leaving the bars at 2 AM and then to think you’re sort of in this big crowd and then the next minute you’re gone. That case was an interesting one to sort of take apart too because once I found out she had been killed where she had been found, that changed everything. I thought “Well it can’t be someone who lived in Madison because who would do that?”
GD:
Right.
MM:
Also it can’t be a coincidence this was an elderly woman’s property. You don’t risk doing something that could be a bunch of college kids living there. Really, but it seemed like it had to be someone who knew this 86 year old woman wasn’t going to wake up if I’m on her property, so then it narrows things down considerably.
GD:
Has there been anything that law enforcement has asked you to hold back from writing about?
MM:
No, I’ve been kind of surprised about how, I mean my joke about it is that I’ve been a little taken aback by, I’ve had a few people end conversations saying, “If you find out anything else -- call us,” which is a little…alarming.
GD:
[laughs]
MM:
I mean they literally said, “Oh wow, that’s interesting. Will you call us?”
GD:
“Keep up the good work!”
MM:
[laughs] Yeah, exactly. But I mean the thing to remember with most of the cases I’m writing about is I’ve gotten very good responses from law enforcement because these are cold cases, these are unsolved cases that gnaw at them. Some of them are high profile but most are just ones they kind of wish they’d closed and feel bad about it. One case in Philadelphia I thought for sure because it was going to a grand jury, I thought the cop was going to say, “I can’t talk to you at all.” He was just the chattiest Cathy and told me everything. It was really interesting. I haven’t found, I mean a few people have been “You know I don’t really feel comfortable telling you all that much.” But I’ve found most of them to be really conversational.
GD:
Thanks for talking with me. Keep up the good work!
MM:
(laughs) Oh, sure. Thank you.
Michelle McNamara is a Los Angeles-based writer and founder of True Crime Diary. She explores the unsolved and forgotten murder cases that the media by and large ignores.
Gerry Duggan: What made you start the website True Crime Diary?
Michelle McNamara: You know, I think it was a case of I was always doing this research to satisfy my own curiosity. I mean, I had been for years. I just was always reading true crime, always reading stuff. And then, once I realized there was so much information online, available about these unsolved cases. That wasn’t making it to the news and stuff I would talk to Patton, my husband, about it. He was the one who suggested it, I think and it was kind of this thing where he saw me yelling at the news anchors getting it wrong or I had it first or something. He said, “Well, you should start a website.” So I kind of just did it almost as a lark at first not figuring it would become such a regular thing but that was sort of the impetus for it. I wanted to get more involved in the cases than fueling my own curiosity.
GD:
What do you think is so appealing about true crime cases?
MM:
I think everyone loves a puzzle…I think it’s two things. I think everyone loves a mystery and so that’s how people are very drawn to these stories. But, from my end, you know, I don’t really like the high profile mysteries, I’m not interested in Phil Specter. I’m not interested in Anna Nicole Smith. It’s the ones that really don’t get that much attention that interest me because I think what’s interesting about them is there’s more stuff to be unearthed that hasn’t been in the public yet and you can do it. I think it’s the fact that you can be interactive with it that is so appealing. It is that sense that you get to be part of a breaking story. The clues are unfolding and even reading about it, I love that, when I’m reading a story and it says, “Someone who hasn’t been named yet.” You just think, “Oh no, the next story is going to be.” You know, you just want to figure out what it is.
GD:
Right, right. Regarding your entry about who killed Kelly Nolan…I think you make a strong case for that Myspace profile to be looked at more carefully.
MM:
What’s interesting…I will just say I had a very interesting talk with them when I gave the information.
GD:
Law enforcement?
MM:
I will say they seemed very, very interested in it.
GD:
Right.
MM:
My sense was that they had not checked Myspace, which did not surprise me. A lot of this is, when you’re doing this sort of, my spin on it would be alternative investigation, I don’t like to call it amateur sleuthing.
GD:
Right.
MM:
They’re just not really taking advantage of the internet yet because I think they’re just used to old school ways of doing things. I put it together for them over the phone. I basically told them what I had written.
GD:
So you…pitched them?
MM:
Yeah, so I pitched them and they kept me on the phone I will say for a pretty long time.
GD:
Yeah.
MM:
I was surprised. They kept asking me more and more questions and I said, “Well, bottom line is, I’m not in Madison. I’m doing this from L.A., you know.” “All I know is you guys can figure this out too.” They did say they would call me back in the next couple days if they had any other information they wanted to ask me about. We’ll see.
GD:
I wanted to ask you too, about Michael Devlin. Was that the first tip that you generated that got law enforcement’s attention?
MM:
Yeah, that was the first one. That was a case of, because I’ve been doing this so long and reading about stuff and just kind of clues and cases piled in my mind, some people know so much about comics book or music and with me it’s just always been true crime. With that case I just immediately remembered this previous case. It was a situation where you wouldn’t have been looking for it unless you remembered this kid from five or six years ago because on the surface it didn’t look all that similar. It was a different town and it had all this stuff so that was the first one that I wrote about and then it ended up being that it was the right thing, that the guy had done both of them. Michael Devlin, he had no connection to the state of Michigan, he’s from Missouri. But, in my head, I’ve always been sort of obsessed with this boy who went missing I believe it was in 2001, Stephen Craft, because I had a personal connection to it. My parents have a house about a half an hour from where he lived and stuff and it’s just always in the back of my mind. I read this article and his brother kind of offhandedly said, “You know I don’t know how he ended up so terrible. We had this great childhood. My parents used to always take us to Lake Michigan.” And just bells went off in my head.
GD:
Yeah, wow.
MM:
I thought, “Oh my God, so I know he’s familiar with that neighborhood.” I went online. I checked his last name for property in that area. I found that his father did own this house that would be kind of near where the kid disappeared. So I kind of started to put it together and that’s when I called. It was almost a public service, I had to call the Benton Harbor Police pretty quickly because I didn’t think they would figure it out. The last I heard, through gas receipts they were able to put him in the state maybe not on the day that Stephen Craft went missing -- but very close.
GD:
They are looking harder at him as a suspect but he has not been charged?
MM:
He has not been charged in that crime but he’s in jail for other crimes. But they have come out and publicly said he’s the prime suspect.
GD:
Is there a story on the site that you’ve written that you sort of can’t get away from, one that sort of keeps you sort of up at night?
MM:
Yeah, I would say the Jenner murders keep me up at night. The story of this couple, this young Christian, camp counselors, were on this beach in Northern California and they were shot as they were on this isolated beach and they were shot in the head while they were sleeping. The reason it keeps me, well, there are several reasons, because of the history of Zodiac up there.
GD:
Right.
MM:
Some people think it would be a Zodiac related thing, but he would be seventy now, I just don’t think it’s him. I went to the crime scene last month, and there’s just no way, it’s really hard to get down there. They were killed with this big, unwieldy rifle. It seemed so specific and pointed at them and yet there is just absolutely no evidence that they had any enemies in the world. It’s such an odd crime.
GD:
Yeah.
MM:
In looking at that crime I came
across a lot of other murders, a very troubling pattern of murders -- mostly couples: a man and a woman, or a mother and a daughter who were out camping in the northwest and were shot in the head. It was just stunning.
across a lot of other murders, a very troubling pattern of murders -- mostly couples: a man and a woman, or a mother and a daughter who were out camping in the northwest and were shot in the head. It was just stunning.
GD:
Wow.
MM:
The LA Times did a big story and wrote “True Crime Diaries is the first to have said, I think these things are connected.” The writer and I have now talked several times and he says that police are trying to connect some of them. It seems too coincidental.
GD:
Yeah. There are, that’s another active killer up there but with different rifle models?
MM:
Well there always seems to be a rifle or a shotgun, I don’t know what it would be. That’s what’s so odd.
GD:
Right.
MM:
It seems usually very outdoorsy areas. It’s usually people who hiking or camping. I think the thing that strikes me is there’s never any clear motive. There’s no motive at all…there’s no robbery. There’s no sexual assault…it’s just cold blooded killing of people out and about. It’s very odd.
GD:
You had mentioned the Zodiac -- what you thought of the Fincher film?
MM:
I thought it was a very kind of lovingly detailed thing. It was almost, my only thing about it was, I wondered because they kind of followed the reporter and the police, the story, it almost divided my loyalty in the movie. I also kind of wanted to know why Robert Downey Jr. was so obsessed with Zodiac. I never really figured that out. It was a puzzle and I wanted to know that. But I’m always glad about it when someone makes a movie about something that is unfortunately close to my heart.
GD:
Right. Let’s talk about that. How did these puzzles, how did these crimes end up being so close to your heart?
MM:
When I was fifteen or sixteen this woman, I lived in a very low crime neighborhood by the way and this woman was killed two blocks from my house. I remember it was during the summer, she had a Walkman on and someone just came and slit her throat. It was during the day and it was a very odd crime.
GD:
To say the least...
MM:
My family still talks about how I became so obsessed with this crime and figuring it out. I visited the crime scene. I talked to people who knew her. I was going to figure this out. I think I can sort of trace my obsession back to that crime. I think that crime is when I started reading in the books about other unsolved crimes. Her crime, by the way, was never solved. It was interesting, but I went on to read, I got my MFA in creative writing and I had a bunch of different jobs but throughout it all -- those were the books I was reading and the cases I was following.
GD:
Do you have any interaction with the families of the victims that you write about?
MM:
Yeah, the first time it happened, interestingly enough, I think it was when I was writing about the people who had been killed in the northwest and I got a couple e-mails that said, “Thank you for writing about this. I feel like we’ve been forgotten.” It sort of just piqued my interest because I thought, “I wonder if I can talk to people while I’m researching and writing these stories and get their side of things.” So I did, and I started e-mailing with some people and that sort of led, what I found is that if the families already have an online component, which often they do, it makes it a lot easier.
GD:
Right.
MM:
I think I’ve only gotten one e-mail from someone that said, I think I had misspelled the woman’s middle name or something, and they were just really mad at me in general for writing about it, which is funny.
GD:
It doesn’t seem exploitative at all.
MM:
No, no, I think they were just angry in general but that’s really been the only one. Everyone else has been really gracious and very thankful and stuff.
GD:
You ever get nervous that the killers found you while checking online to see how they’re doing in the press?
MM:
Yeah, and also I mean, some people say that, “Oh don’t you worry that someone’s going to come to your door?” I think, “Well, these people are pretty unhinged but then to travel and just single out me, it would be pretty unusual.
GD:
It’s not exactly as if your address is on the website.
MM:
The most worried I’ve become is with the last thing of “Who Killed Kelly Nolan?”, I really had to worry about how much I revealed about that person because I didn’t want to get in trouble.
GD:
Right.
MM:
I was struggling because I thought, “If this turns out to be him and I didn’t write about it, I’m gong to be so mad at myself,” but, if I reveal too much and it’s not him I could get in a lot of trouble. I don’t want to do that to him so I really had to walk a really fine line there.
GD:
Do you feel like you know how to or feel equipped to bump somebody off and get away with it?
MM:
[laughs] that’s a good question. I think I could do it very, very well. Yeah, I think I could.
GD:
Yeah, not that you would. But you could, I bet.
MM:
No, I’m so non-violent because I have a temper and stuff. I have often thought, “Oh my God, could I lie that well?” I don’t think I could. When I think of some of technical aspects of these crimes, it stuns me how stupid some of these people are. Especially this Kelly Nolan one, the reason I think that it was an amateur killer is nowadays these guys aren’t realizing that when they kill these women they’re leaving them in places with their cell phones on them and with the ping technology they’re finding them right away. You can just tell that’s an amateur because someone else would figure that out.
GD:
Yeah. I feel like if you were paying close attention during 24 you might know to take the battery out of a phone.
MM:
[laughs] Yeah, exactly. It seems to be a high school or college student.
GD:
Yeah. It’s just such a creepy story too, because she was safe one minute and then met the wrong person or was reintroduced to the wrong person and was dead.
MM:
Yeah. I’ve been on State Street and Madison (in Madison) and it’s mostly college students leaving the bars at 2 AM and then to think you’re sort of in this big crowd and then the next minute you’re gone. That case was an interesting one to sort of take apart too because once I found out she had been killed where she had been found, that changed everything. I thought “Well it can’t be someone who lived in Madison because who would do that?”
GD:
Right.
MM:
Also it can’t be a coincidence this was an elderly woman’s property. You don’t risk doing something that could be a bunch of college kids living there. Really, but it seemed like it had to be someone who knew this 86 year old woman wasn’t going to wake up if I’m on her property, so then it narrows things down considerably.
GD:
Has there been anything that law enforcement has asked you to hold back from writing about?
MM:
No, I’ve been kind of surprised about how, I mean my joke about it is that I’ve been a little taken aback by, I’ve had a few people end conversations saying, “If you find out anything else -- call us,” which is a little…alarming.
GD:
[laughs]
MM:
I mean they literally said, “Oh wow, that’s interesting. Will you call us?”
GD:
“Keep up the good work!”
MM:
[laughs] Yeah, exactly. But I mean the thing to remember with most of the cases I’m writing about is I’ve gotten very good responses from law enforcement because these are cold cases, these are unsolved cases that gnaw at them. Some of them are high profile but most are just ones they kind of wish they’d closed and feel bad about it. One case in Philadelphia I thought for sure because it was going to a grand jury, I thought the cop was going to say, “I can’t talk to you at all.” He was just the chattiest Cathy and told me everything. It was really interesting. I haven’t found, I mean a few people have been “You know I don’t really feel comfortable telling you all that much.” But I’ve found most of them to be really conversational.
GD:
Thanks for talking with me. Keep up the good work!
MM:
(laughs) Oh, sure. Thank you.
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