In May, Ron will hit the road with “ShadowMan” on a book tour in Montana, the epicenter of the grim crimes recounted in this new bestseller. (There’ll be some stops in his native Wyoming, too!) Click here to see the tour overview and keep checking back because new events are still being added. SEE INDIVIDUAL…
Read More…
You’ve been exposed to so much Hollywood crapola that I’m surprised you aren’t already on Ducky’s slab.
Read More…
The secret of my success as a writer is that I never pick a story I can screw up. “ShadowMan” struck me as such a story. To me, its power was universal stuff like a mother’s anguish, determination, and fear of the dark. I first heard about this case when I was a senior writer…
Read More…
“I’m an actor by training and a lover of words by nature,” she says. “I want to build the bridge that travels from the author’s intent, through the text, to the reader’s imagination.
Read More…
The entangled tales of a harrowing crime and the introduction of the FBI’s newest forensic tool: criminal profiling
Read More…
Satchell Paige, the great baseball pitcher and philosopher-from-left field, once said, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” I’ve never been sure what he meant. Do your best right now because somebody better is gonna catch up? Leave your past in the past and focus on the future? Or maybe he meant that…
Read More…
Today, I received word of the passing of Howard Teten, the pioneering criminal profiler who plays a front-and center role in my upcoming true crime book, “ShadowMan: An Elusive Psycho Killer and the Birth of FBI Profiling.” His death was related to Covid complications. He was 88. Yes, he was a pioneer and pioneers always…
Read More…
According to the Mayo Clinic, narcissistic personality disorder — related to sociopathy under the umbrella term Antisocial Personality Disorders — is a mental condition in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of…
Read More…
We know you have many choices for your reading pleasure … so you can pre-order Ron Franscell’s upcoming true crime at your favorite bookseller here.
Read More…
The Gabby Petito case has stirred fascination, sympathy, and a hornet’s nest of unrest about “Missing White Woman Syndrome,” an accusation that racist white media prefers stories about pretty Caucasian girls in peril, but not so much minority women in peril. There’s some truth to that perception, but it’s not always what it seems. …
Read More…
“Pain is the price we pay for memory. It’s some kind of sin to forget what hurts, as much as it is to forget what makes you smile. Suffering has its meaning, and memory has its graces.” —from ANGEL FIRE, A Novel A lifetime ago, back in 1983, I took work as an editor at…
Read More…
Just a taste of Ron Franscell’s chilling tale about a real-life nightmare … and how it changed forensic history
Read More…
They killed at least five people and damn near got away with it. Then a lucky break changed everything.
Read More…
The pulse-pounding account of the first time in history that the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit created a psychological profile to help catch a serial killer
Read More…
In the 1970s, smelly hippie guru Ira Einhorn had been a radical protester during the Vietnam War and a co-founder of Earth Day. The burly, unkempt college professor spewed New Age nonsense to lure naïve young girls to his bed. One of them was Holly Maddux.
Read More…
Elmer McCurdy was a two-bit outlaw, a wannabe desperado who overshot the Wild West and landed in the 20th century. Nobody knew his name, and nobody in the Oklahoma Territory cared much. In 1911, Elmer was 31 years old, usually drunk, and flat broke when he decided to hold up a train. His booty: $46…
Read More…
How long did you think it would take me to find a good true-crime story in my new digs, the tiny village of Placitas in northern New Mexico? Yeah, well, I never bogart a good yarn. This’ll blow your mind. In the 1960s and ’70s, Placitas was a far-out satellite in the hippie universe, man.…
Read More…
It was after 2am and the graveyard-shift nurses drifted like ghosts in the hallway, tending to the dead and dying. It wasn’t that Michael* couldn’t sleep, even with meds he refused to take. He fought sleep with every fiber of his fragile body. He had fought in a war he barely remembered. A crucifix hung…
Read More…
Lecture: 9:30am to 11am on Feb. 20Book-signing immediately afterwardCasper College (WY) Humanities FestivalMusic Building’s Wheeler HallAdmission is free Ron Franscell, who has been called one of the exciting voices in narrative nonfiction by some heavyweight authors like Ann Rule and Vincent Bugliosi, will deliver a lecture about how his particular style of crime journalism has…
Read More…
Last weekend, USA Today published a Goodreads list of the “Best True Crime Books of All Time.” There are some truly great books on the list, compiled from various Goodreads features like reviews, lists, and ratings from 90 million members. Ninety million readers can’t be wrong, can they? In this case, sort of. The meaty…
Read More…
The term “murderabilia” was coined by my friend Andy Kahan, who advocates for crime victims for Crimestoppers of Houston. But the word is actually more innocuous than Kahan’s feelings about the weird, lurid, and occasionally baffling crap that true-crime collectors covet. In recent years, for example, you could buy a serial killer Angel Resendiz’s foot…
Read More…
I recently visited a Facebook group where true-crime fans gather to chit-chat about the latest foul play. The group’s members are mostly women because, well, women are overwhelmingly the most voracious readers of true crime (some surveys have found as much as 75% of the TC market is female). There’s no question about their earnest…
Read More…
Back in the 19th century, when photography was young, post-mortem images of dead loved ones was fashionable as a way to remember the deceased. But it also became a way to calm the citizenry’s fears about outlaws, highwaymen, and brigands of all kinds when news of their deaths came. They wanted proof. The truest kind…
Read More…
There are a few moments in a book’s life that are special for authors. One is when a box of finished books arrives on the front porch. Another is when you see somebody reading your book on a plane or in a park. And then there’s the moment when you know your next book is…
Read More…