I know my blog readers expect a bit of light in their Friday morning blogs, but that’s not what this one is, so be advised. And here’s a spoiler alert.  If you happen to be one of my paperback readers who has yet to read The Girl From Devil’s Lake, I suggest you skip reading this blog post altogether. 

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve always had a vivid imagination.  When I was around four and my family was still living on a farm in South Dakota, our folks loaded my two older sisters and I into the car for a Saturday morning trip to town.  We hadn’t quite made it to the county road when I let out a blood-curdling scream. My dad jammed on the brakes hard enough to send all three of us girls sliding off the backseat onto the floorboard.  Turning around he demanded, “What in the world is the matter?”  “You forgot my Lammy,” I replied.  Of course since the lamb in question was completely invisible, it’s perfectly understandable why it would have been left behind.  I count that as my first venture into writing believable fiction.

Moving to the present day, it turns out I’m a night-owl. Bill hits the hay a good two hours before I do.  For TV viewing, he’s into HGTV and programs like The Repair Shop.  As for me?  I watch a lot of True Crime. Bill calls it “Blood and Guts.”  Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about forensics from watching those shows.  Since I write mysteries, that’s something that comes in very handy.

This week, however, we both watched a four-episode series called The 97 Victims of Samuel Little. Although it was a repeat, I had never seen it before.  However, for someone who had just written a book about a serial killer, it was shockingly familiar.

Stephen Roper, the serial killer in The Girl From Devil’s Lake, begins his murderous career at age 13. Samuel Little first realized he wanted to kill people at age seven.  He spent his early years reading True Crime magazines, studying how to commit crimes and get away with it.  My killer studied the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, focusing on the mistakes that caused bad guys to get caught.  

Little always wore gloves.  So did Stephen Roper.  Little strangled his victims.  Ditto Stephen Roper.  And because neither of them raped their victims, there was never any DNA evidence left behind—until one of his intended victims finally managed to escape. When he was arrested in that case and one of the detectives accused him of being a rapist during an interview, he was absolutely offended.  “I never raped nobody!” he declared.  

As for Stephen Roper?  When he learns that his biological father is incarcerated for murdering his second wife, Stephen goes to pay the man a visit.  As someone who has been hearing voices in his head from a very early age, Stephen wants to know if he and his father have that peculiarity in common.  When his father replies to his question with, “What do you think I am, some kind of nut case?” Roper is insulted.  As a result he walks away and never visits is father again. In the program when Samuel Little was so appalled that someone had labelled him a rapist, that really resonated with me.

From the early seventies on, Samuel Little essentially lived in cars. Accompanied by a woman somewhat older than he was, the two operated in tandem.  He would steal stuff; she would sell it.  Along the way, he chose random women, mostly sex workers, and strangled them to death.  Roper posed as a normal human being by teaching during the school year and then traveling the country targeting random children he spotted along the way.  Stranger on stranger homicides are the most difficult to solve, and in that regard, both Samuel Little’s and Stephen Roper’s criminal careers go undetected for years.

Early on Little was actually arrested, charged, and tried for a homicide that occurred in Odessa, Texas, but he was found not guilty.  However, once DNA evidence from his one escaped victim linked him to two other homicides in California, he was charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison on those.  In my book, the officers involved in Roper’s long string of unsolved crimes, remain haunted by them decades later, and the same is true for Samuel Little.  Once he was finally incarcerated in California on two consecutive life terms, the Texas Ranger involved in that earlier Odessa case came calling, and he wasn’t alone.

Two female FBI agents, a CSI specialist and a crime analyst, showed up with him.  Together they suspected that Little had been committing the same crimes all over the country for decades, and if they could somehow get him talking, maybe they could link him to other some of those other cases.  And the Texas Ranger did just that.  He didn’t make the mistake of calling Little a rapist. Instead, he simply let the man talk, and talk he did.  Turns out he remembered each homicide vividly—including where and a general idea of when they happened, and he laid out the numbers—three in Ohio, two in Arizona, one in Las Vegas, several in California.  A few of the victims had first names, but that was all. He offered intriguing details about his various crimes and crimes scenes—what the victims were wearing and details of the scenes where he’d left the bodies—that were known only known to the killer himself and to law enforcement.  The total number added up to 97.

The FBI agents went back to the drawing board.  They obtained a subscription to newspapers.com and began searching for news stories that matched up with what they’d heard. I believe the first victim they identified, a woman Little referred to as Nancy, was from Ohio.  Eventually that trio of investigators got Little extradited to Texas to face charges on other homicides he’d committed there.  While in Texas, they discovered that Little was a talented artist who, from memory, could draw portraits of his various victims that spookily resembled actual photos taken of them prior to their deaths.  

For Stephen Roper, the trinkets kept in his cigar box allowed him to revisit and remember his individual crimes. For Samuel Little, it was finally being able to tell the stories of his individual assaults.  Since he was already in prison with no chance of getting out, he was never convicted on any additional crimes, but that didn’t stop the Texas Ranger and the FBI agents.  They went back to the law enforcement agencies involved where they discovered that some of the victims, found as nothing more than skeletal remains, had been dismissed as deaths from natural causes or overdoses and never listed or investigated as victims of homicides.  

In Stephen Roper’s case, once Joanna Brady manages to get him talking, she ends up getting not only answers but also a surprising guilty plea.  I suppose that’s the difference between fiction and real life.  I need to have satisfying endings.

In Little’s case, interviews with surviving family members expressed relief that after decades of waiting and wondering, they were finally able to get answers about what really happened to their loved ones even if there was never any actual judicial reckoning with the killer. 

As I watched the program, I was filled with an eerie feeling of deja vu. I hadn’t seen the program before, but if I had, I would never have written The Girl From Devil’s Lake.  It would have felt too much like copying real cases—something I’ve always tried to avoid doing.

In this instance, my vivid imagination created such a strong connection between me and a fictional serial killer, that it came incredibly close to reality, and it’s left me wondering if having an imagination like that is a blessing or a curse.  Bill says he checks my side table all the time for possible weapons.

Close to a dozen of the portraits Samuel Little painted of victims have yet to be identified, and the FBI agents are still trying to follow up on those cases.

Maybe I should have named this blog The Heart of Darkness.