Things happen when I\u2019m off on a book tour.\u00a0 Connections get made that would never happen otherwise, most especially if I were sitting at home with my nose buried in my computer screen.\u00a0 Twice on this tour, I\u2019ve had people who have never read my books before come up to me at the end of a signing to apologize for not knowing about me previously.\u00a0 There\u2019s no need apologize for that.\u00a0 One of the reasons for being out on the road is to have the opportunity to meet new readers.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t have a standard \u201cstump speech.\u201d\u00a0 I want to make the events fun, and I want the people in the various audiences to come away knowing something about me and about my work.\u00a0 But if I\u2019m in a room where the vast majority of the people have come to previous events, I can\u2019t very well do the same old\/same old every\u00a0 time.\u00a0\u00a0 At that point, I do a quick change up on my non-existent teleprompter and do another talk altogether.<\/p>\n
That happened yesterday in Mesa.\u00a0 A woman who had been to Red Mountain Library events several times before greeted me in the parking lot, and it was nice to be welcomed by a familiar and very friendly face.\u00a0 I remembered enough about her from our previous encounters to know that she\u2019s someone who hails from Cochise County.<\/p>\n
During the pre-talk Q and A session, one of the attendees, Red, (a recent widow and someone else I remembered from previous events) asked if I had ever been involved in a real homicide investigation.\u00a0 The answer to that question is yes, and if you happen to be someone who has attended previous J.A. Jance events, you may have heard about it because it\u2019s something I often touch upon.<\/p>\n
In 1970 when my first husband and I were teaching on the reservation and living west of Three Points, Arizona, my husband hitchhiked home after school on May 22.\u00a0 He went home to meet a batch of expected company while I had to stay late to decorate for the prom.\u00a0 Over time we learned that half an hour before giving my husband a ride, the driver had forced a woman off the road at gun point, shot her, raped her in front of her two small children and left her to die.\u00a0 It turned out that she was the third victim of a serial killer who murdered people at twenty-minutes after two on the twenty-second day of the month.<\/p>\n
On our way into town that Friday evening, we were stopped at a roadblock.\u00a0 That was the first we heard about the homicide.\u00a0 At the trading post at Three Points, while my husband pumped gas and I paid the bill, I overheard a deputy saying something about two little kids and a man in a \u201cgreen car.\u201d\u00a0 Back in our car, I mentioned that detail to my husband.\u00a0 A few miles later, he said, \u201cA man in a green car.\u00a0 I wonder if that\u2019s the guy who gave me a ride home.\u201d\u00a0 We did a U-turn, returned to the trading post, and told the deputy what had happened, who we were, and where we lived.\u00a0 He wanted our phone number, but because we lived in the boonies\u2014seven miles to the nearest neighbor or telephone\u2014we had no number to give him. The next day, Jack Lyons, Pima County\u2019s chief homicide detective, turned up on our doorstep.\u00a0 He interviewed my husband from 6:30 AM until 3:30 PM, eliciting all kinds of telling details that the cops were able to use to identify the perpetrator.\u00a0 Jack soon made the connection between the case on the reservation and two other unsolved homicides, but he didn\u2019t exactly come right out and say so to us.\u00a0 He did, however, suggest that we might want to consider going somewhere else to live.\u00a0 Being young and stupid, we didn\u2019t heed his advice.\u00a0 What we did keep in mind was the fact that on the way home that day and while driving up the two mile dirt road between our house and the highway, the guy in the green car asked, \u201cDo you leave you\u2019re wife out her by herself?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWell,\u201d my husband replied, \u201cShe\u2019s got the dogs.\u201d<\/p>\n
In my late husband\u2019s defense, at the time he said those words, he had no idea he was speaking to a serial killer.<\/p>\n
During the summers, I worked in the library on a twelve month contract while my husband worked construction, usually out of town.\u00a0 So for forty or so of the next sixty days, I was on the hill by myself.\u00a0 I wore a loaded weapon and was fully prepared to defend myself.\u00a0 When Detective Lyons arrested the killer on July 20th, he admitted to having been to our house on three separate occasions in the intervening sixty days, and we had been scheduled to be July 22.<\/p>\n
Yesterday in Mesa, I told that story and explained how, years later, I met someone who\u2019s life has been permanently impacted by that killer.\u00a0 And that\u2019s one of the reasons I shy away from writing about real cases in my books\u2014real cases affect real people.<\/p>\n
In Mesa I went ahead and did the real talk then followed by the signing.\u00a0 At the very end of the signing line, who should I see but the woman who had greeted me in the parking lot.\u00a0 \u201cYou know that individual you mentioned from 1970,\u201d she said, “the one in the green car?\u00a0 He\u2019s my first cousin.\u201d<\/p>\n
Goose bumps anyone?\u00a0 It\u2019s not just the families of the victims who are affected by violent crimes.\u00a0 The innocent family members of the perpetrators also suffer.<\/p>\n
So that\u2019s story number one.\u00a0 It\u2019s time to go do a talk and a signing.\u00a0 Two a day keeps the doctor away.\u00a0 So I believe I\u2019ll save the second story, one about Second Watch, for next week\u2019s blog.\u00a0 As they used to say at the end of those old time radio dramas, stay tuned.\u00a0 See you next week, same time, same station.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Things happen when I\u2019m off on a book tour.\u00a0 Connections get made that would never happen otherwise, most especially if I were sitting at home with my nose buried in my computer screen.\u00a0 Twice on this tour, I\u2019ve had people who have never read my books before come up to me at the end of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,165],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tour-2","category-traveling"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-ph","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1567"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1568,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1567\/revisions\/1568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}