Amanda Lees - The True Crime Dictionary: The Ultimate Collection of Cold Cases, Serial Killers, and More

The True Crime Dictionary: From Alibi to Zodiac

The Ultimate Collection of Cold Cases, Serial Killers, and More

Amanda Lees

For Delilah

The crime bug bit me the day my father died although I didnt realize it until much later. I was only three at the time, so my memories are blurred, but the hints my mother dropped over the years sharpened a different kind of focus. She would refer to the secretive work he had done and to the infamous spies he knew, usually after a sherry or three. Then there were the oblique mentions of his sudden, untimely death, his glamorous first wife, and a mysterious fire that had burned down their London house. Mix in his Oxford education, murmurs of British intelligence and colonial missions lost in the mists of time, and the ramifications were obvious.

My dad was a spy, and he had probably been murdered. Or he could still be alive somewhere, a prisoner or even a defector. Almost every kid who has lost a parent thinks they might secretly be alive. Not every kid has a writers nose for a story or the tantalizing details that could not be explained away. I used to scan faces at airports and wonder if one of them was my dad. I knew in my heart that he was dead, but I still picked at that murder theory. Yes, he probably did die of peritonitis, as I was told. But then again, you never know. You never know because people are far more complex than we think and, as I have learned, capable of anything.

It is that refusal to take anything at face value that has fueled my fascination with crime and led me down many dark alleyways. Some existed only in my mind. Others were more physical. I spent my days at a Devonian convent boarding school devouring Agatha Christie, who was coincidentally born in Torquay, where my school was located. Christie loved a coincidence and I identified strongly with this woman who had developed her expertise in poisons after volunteering as a nurse during the war and assisting a hospital pharmacist.

I grew up in the Hong Kong hospital where my mother was matron, with birth, death, and everything in between providing the backdrop to my childhood. It was the same hospital where my father was apparently misdiagnosed and died. The hospital that I suspected, in my youthful imagination, of a cover-up. Like Christie, I was intrigued by the power of substances to kill or cure. The Chinese have used potent herbs for thousands of years to do just that, as have monks and nuns since the Middle Ages. It was inevitable that I would want to tap into their horticultural legacy to spice up the stories I was already writing, the shadow of Christie falling over the pages I scrawled.

Later, I soaked up John le Carr, P. D. James, and every hard-boiled hack I could find before moving on to true crime, psychological thrillers and the cool, spare prose of Scandi noir. Spurning an English degree for drama, I learned to create characters and, more importantly, to dig for what motivated them. The play I wrote and directed for my finals centered on the abduction and murder of a child from a fairground and stunned the audience into silence. I received high honors for that play, laying the foundations of my future as a writer. But first I was determined to actor, rather, act outwhat I thought was my fathers life of adventure. I plunged into it headlong with often terrifying results.

On the Baltic cruise ship where I wrote and performed murder mysteries to entertain some of the worlds richest and most ruthless people, I gazed at the palm of the ex-head of the KGB and imagined those same hands brutally torturing dissidents. Later, I knocked back rakia with Bulgarian Mafiosi and fended off a British financial fraudster who went on the run to escape prison for the millions he had embezzled.

A lowlight of my acting career was playing Catherine Eddowes, Jack the Rippers fourth victim, for a Japanese TV film directed by a man who screamed constantly for more violence. One of my closest friends was a Metropolitan Police officer; a relative was a criminal barrister. I sat in the gallery of the Old Bailey as a bunch of career criminals went down for one last botched holdup to shouts of shame from their families. I watched police tapes that no one should ever have to see.

All that time I was doing what so many of us do when we read or watch true crime and crime fiction. I was trying to make sense of it and the way it touched my world. We crime lovers are voyeurs, but we are also hackers, driven to crack the code. We want to know how and why, but we also want to know what we can do to protect ourselves. We want to help solve cold cases partly because we know it could happen to anyone. Yes, even to us. Especially to us.

That meeting with the ex-head of the KGB led, years later, to my taking on Putins regime as part of a mission to save a dying man from prison. The man was chained to his bed in a Moscow cell, accused of crimes he did not commit. I used my skills as a writer to bolster the efforts of the lawyers who eventually won his release. The experience changed the direction of my writing, as did the simultaneous death of my mother. I returned to the darkness to which I had always been drawn, to write of the unspeakable things we can do to one another.

I had experienced evil firsthand. Now I wanted to make sense of it. I drew on my acting training to find the motives that drove my characters. Motive is one of the first things an investigator looks for when tackling a crime. Sometimes that motive seems irrational to everyone but the perpetrator. Those are the random crimes that hit the headlines and send ripples of fear through us. But hearing those stories does at least alert us to the possibility that anything can happen, that to stay safe we must consider the unthinkable. And that, I believe, is both the pull and the purpose of true crime and crime fiction.

We shudder at the gory details and sigh when a body is discovered. We stare at photos of the culprit and see the flat, blank sheen of evil in their eyes. Sometimes when we look in the mirror, we think we catch a glimpse of that same sheen and we turn away. Other times, we lie awake at night and listen to the creaks and sighs, wondering if its our turn. All the while, one question throbs underneath our everyday thoughts. What if? What if someone snatched our child from the streets or a fairground? What if he really killed her? What if a dead father was alive, somewhere out there? What if it happens to me?

To control those thoughts, we seek answers in the pages of books, on our screens big and small, by listening to endless podcasts. Millions gather on forums and social media to solve cases the professionals have long consigned to a closed file. Mistakes are picked up and details pored over in a collective act of attempted closure. The unsolved is unsettling. The lazy cop or biased media create more bad apples to chew over. Crime is so compelling because it brings out the best and worst in us. It frightens us to the core while setting us free.

Every time I brush hands with danger, I feel more alive. Stupid, maybe, but true of so many people. But I dont get my thrills bungee jumping or performing hardcore parkour. The danger is not so much physical as psychological. I knew the ex-head of the KGB had long before given up espionage for more profitable pastimes. The Bulgarian Mafiosi were too busy parading their arrogance along with their bellies to worry about a lowly writer. Those police tapes I watched were just that. Tapes. Someone elses story played out for me to watch.