Casey Cep discusses her new book, Furious Hours, which explores the true case of an Alabama serial killer who fascinated Harper Lee.

Harper Lee has obviously captured your imagination. What keeps you and so many others fascinated? Do you have any prized possessions related to Harper Lee or her writing?
I think some great works of literature are so widely read and so deeply embedded in a culture that they become a kind of secular scripture, helping us revisit and interrogate our shared values generation after generation. That’s what happened with To Kill a Mockingbird; if anything, the questions it raises about difference and tolerance have become more urgent as our society has become more diverse. I suppose that’s why, despite all the exciting things I uncovered in the course of reporting this book, my most prized possession is still the novel itself.

What was it like for you to first read To Kill a Mockingbird, or “The Bird,” as Lee called it? How old were you? Did you have any idea then how important the book would become in your life? Did publication of Go Set a Watchmen change your attitudes at all?
I first read To Kill a Mockingbird as a kid, and like a lot of tomboys, I identified strongly with Scout. She’s adventurous and brave, but also fiercely intelligent and bookish. My father isn’t a lawyer, but I love him dearly, and although I have two sisters rather than one brother, I was moved by the way that a sibling relationship is so integral to the plot. My parents indulged my love of Mockingbird so much that they got me a pocket watch that I carried around everywhere. If you’d told me all those years ago that I’d be publishing this book, I don’t think I would have believed you; I probably wouldn’t have even believed I’d get to write any book at all, much less one about Harper Lee.

If you could spend a day with Lee, what would you have liked to do? What questions would you ask her?
It’s hard to know whether it would be most revealing to spend a day with Harper Lee in New York or Alabama, the two places she called home, but if it’s Alabama, I’d want to go to church with her in the morning and then take her fishing. She was extremely astute about the role of religion and spirituality in Southern life, and I’d love to sit through a Sunday service with her, but she also loved fishing, and so do I, so then I’d demand that we head to the river to talk about it all. If we met up in New York instead, I’d want to do what she let almost no one do: visit her apartment on the Upper East Side and pore over every single book and scrap of paper inside it.

Why do you think Lee guarded her privacy so fiercely? What might Lee have thought of your book and your research about her?
This is such a central question to any consideration of Lee’s life and work. A lot of writers love publicity and enjoy the attention to their process and persona, but Lee was not one of them. She put up with a few years of interviews and profiles after Mockingbird came out, but then she stopped answering questions about her work. Some people are just private, but in Lee’s case that privacy was almost certainly fueled by her struggles with writing, which were in turn fueled by—and fueled—her struggles with perfectionism, addiction and identity. There’s a letter of hers I quote in the book in which she says, “Harper Lee thrives, but at the expense of Nelle,” and I found that notion of a split self to be heartbreaking. I doubt that Harper Lee would have been happy to know I was looking into her life, but I hope she would be pleased by the result: a book that takes her seriously as a writer and an intellectual.

The true crime story that Lee hoped to write―about Reverend Willie Maxwell, accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in Alabama in the 1970s―is a wild, convoluted and fascinating saga. What do you think most prevented Lee from completing her book? Was it because, as she noted, “I do not have enough hard facts about the actual crimes for a book-length account”?
It’s true that some of the facts of the Maxwell case were hard to come by, even back then, but plenty of great books have been made from a lot less, so I don’t think a shortage of information was the only thing stymieing Lee. In addition to her general struggles with writing, she also felt pressure from her agent to write something pulpy, from her publisher to produce a bestseller, and from her fans to produce another wholesome novel—incompatible goals that she never found a way to square with each other, let alone with her own vision for the book. I definitely worried at the start of Furious Hours that I was a fool for thinking I could write the book that Harper Lee never could, but then I realized I was writing the book she never would: a version of the Maxwell case that included her own story.

Did she confer with Truman Capote about the Reverend Maxwell story?
Certainly In Cold Blood must have been on her mind as she researched and wrote. Might worries about comparisons between the two stories have paralyzed her? One of the great losses to literary history is that, so far, no letters between Lee and Capote have ever been found. They almost certainly exchanged them—not only as children after he left Monroeville but when she first moved to New York and in all the decades that followed—but not a single one has turned up, so we don’t know what, if anything, they said to each other about the Maxwell case or anything else. Some other letters of hers reveal how critical she was of In Cold Blood, so she probably wouldn’t have been asking Capote for reporting advice, but I do think his book helped clarify for her what kind she wanted to write: one that stuck scrupulously to the facts. And there’s no doubt that her work on The Reverend would’ve brought back memories of their time together in Kansas and that, partly thanks to that time, she knew exactly what to do when she started reporting her own true crime project.

For all who love To Kill a Mockingbird so much, it’s heartbreaking that Lee didn’t publish more. She led a busy life, it seems, and an interesting one divided between Alabama and New York City. You write that she struggled with alcohol, and she seems to have had many lonely moments as well. Can you speculate whether she was happy? Did it bother her not to publish more?
I want to say first that lonely moments are a really interesting and possibly necessary experience for a writer. Good writing comes when a writer sets herself to the task of thinking carefully and quietly and often in solitude about some idea or problem. One can have friendships across great distances and nurture relationships without being in constant contact; that feels countercultural in a hyper-connected society like ours, but I don’t think that being alone, even for considerable amounts of time, and even sometimes at a certain psychic cost, is necessarily a problem. That said, such moments can obviously become too numerous or too costly, and someone very close to Harper Lee described the years that she was working on this true crime project as “dark times.” So she definitely did have periods in her life when her deep desire to produce art made her unhappy and encouraged her most destructive habits and tendencies. But her sisters and extended family tried hard to watch over her, and she had a few close friends in New York who helped companion her through these difficult periods. It’s also clear that, in ways I think few people really understand, Lee was a genuine intellectual, and her correspondence reveals a real delight in reading and thinking—gifts she brought to a small circle of friends and family even if she never again figured out how to share them with the wider world.

There are rumors that Lee kept a diary. Thoughts?
Don’t I wish! A few people told me that she did, but whenever I asked her family or close friends about the possibility, they laughed and then sighed. Those who knew Lee well scoffed at the idea that she would ever have written down her thoughts and feelings in a way that could one day be made public, but they also noted how therapeutic such an exercise in self-examination would have been for someone otherwise so resistant to introspection. I share that feeling, but I also wish that she’d kept a diary for posterity’s sake, or written her own memoirs, since there are so many questions about her life and work for which we’d all love to know the answers.

Has anyone (or anything) else caught your fancy as much as Lee? Are you tracking down any other literary mysteries or recluses?
This is such a lovely way of asking the question of what comes next but also such a keen way of describing Furious Hours. It’s a book that, like its author, is obsessed with mystery and secrecy and the knowability or unknowability of any given person, event or idea. That said, I’m also obsessed with suspense, so I think I’ll leave the question of what comes next unanswered, although I hope it’s a story as incredible as this one!

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Furious Hours.

Author photo by Kathryn Shulz

When the Charles Manson Family murdered five people in August 1969, it was the shocking climax of America’s most chaotic decade. Now, after 20 years of meticulous research, Tom O’Neill reveals that everything we thought we knew about this tragedy is really just the tip of the iceberg.

Tom O’Neill recently sold the movie rights to Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, the strangely compelling account of his 20-year search for the truth about the horrific 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders committed by the Charles Manson Family in Los Angeles.

“My agent called me about [the movie] a week or so ago and said, ‘Tom, you have to understand. You’re the protagonist now.’”

O’Neill had long resisted becoming part of the story. He began to examine the Manson case in 1999, 30 years after the Tate-LaBianca murders, when he was hired by the now-defunct Premier magazine for an article on Manson’s connections to Hollywood. He began to find anomalies in the case presented to the jury by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi and in Bugliosi’s bestselling book about the murders and trial, Helter Skelter.

Chasing leads, O’Neill missed his deadline—by a month and then a year. He got a book contract and researched up blind alleys, down rabbit holes and deep into the weeds. He also found incredible, tantalizing information. He blew past the book deadline. The publisher eventually sued him to retrieve the advance, which he had used to continue his reporting. “I do not want to glorify myself,” O’Neill says, “but I did not take vacations or buy nice things. I lived pretty frugally.” His investigation of the case went on for 20 abstemious years, until he was well into his late 50s. He was evicted from his apartment. He got loans from his family and had to join the gig economy and drive for Uber to support his continuing investigation.

A few years ago, his agent approached Little, Brown. His agent said, “The curse of Tom also pays off in the end because he won’t believe anything until he tries to disprove it. He’ll attack from every different [angle] that he can, and if he can’t disprove it then he’ll allow it.” 

By then O’Neill had reams and reams of notes, documents and photographs and a whiteboard with spiderlike webs of connections among the principals in the murder. (Many of these are cited in his extensive and illuminating endnotes.) Someone suggested he collaborate with Dan Piepenbring, a young writer whose work with Prince on a memoir had previously gone awry. Piepenbring brought a strategy and some order. Part of the strategy was to convince O’Neill to include his long, frustrating odyssey to discover the truth within the narrative. 

O’Neill interviewed major and minor characters in the Manson story, including Manson himself. People did not react kindly to this pursuit of the facts. Terry Melcher, the only son of Doris Day and a previous tenant in the house where Sharon Tate and others were murdered, was hostile when O’Neill presented evidence that he had lied on the stand during the Manson trial. O’Neill tracked down Manson’s brilliant, bombastic, obstructionist attorney, Irving Kanarek, who was by then indigent but still a man with stories to tell. And of course there was prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi.

In the book, O’Neill recounts an incredible six-hour interview with Bugliosi at his home, with dueling tape recorders and Bugliosi’s wife dragooned into being an often-bored witness. In O’Neill’s telling, Bugliosi is a strange, testy guy. Post-Manson fame, he ran for district attorney and attorney general, and in both cases his sordid past (unknown to most general readers but uncovered in detail by O’Neill) came to light. Mention of this enraged Bugliosi, as did O’Neill’s assertions that he had mishandled the case. Backed by interviews from other prosecutors and the police, O’Neill told Bugliosi that he thought the narrative that the Manson family had committed the crimes to start a race war—the “Helter Skelter” scenario Bugliosi put forward at the trial—was bogus. At the end of the interview, Bugliosi said he would hurt O’Neill like he had never been hurt before, and he would sue him “FOR ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS!” Obsessed, Bugliosi then called O’Neill night after night. O’Neill has some of the tapes from these and other conversations and, as part of the book promotion, will make some of them available on social media.

Another line of investigation took O’Neill from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The Manson Family first formed in the city’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Manson and “his girls” were frequent visitors to the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic. The doctors there received government funding to study the effects of psychedelics and mind control. In his assiduous research, O’Neill uncovered that one of the doctors there—“Jolly” West, a CIA contractor—did a jailhouse psychological profile of Jack Ruby, who shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy.

What could this all mean? O’Neill, a cautious investigator, expresses frustration. There are so many questions. “I perhaps naively thought that I was going to answer the big question, find out what really happened, but I can at least show that things happened dramatically differently than has ever been presented before.”

O’Neill believes Manson and the Family are guilty, but he thinks so much else is in question that the Manson trial was a disaster. And the odd connections to government activity intrigue him. “I think I can show that Bugliosi suborned perjury. I think I can show that Jolly West had a critical role in what we know about Jack Ruby and his memory of what happened when he killed and why he killed Lee Harvey Oswald. And all that information was known by Richard Helms, who was the liaison between the CIA and the Warren Commission.” He also presents information that Manson and his followers were involved in other killings, but ultimately his investigations were stonewalled by the authorities.

O’Neill believes “there’s a hell of a lot of connections that Manson had with Hollywood people that have been erased. . . . I believe there were other people involved in the murders that were erased.” His biggest hope, he says, “is that the book will spur other people to pick up where I’ve left off. There’s a hell of a lot more out there.”

Billy Jensen is a former crime reporter who, after 15 years of telling people the facts, decided he needed to do something more than just report murders. He wanted to solve them. His new book, Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders, tells the gripping, twisted and heart-pounding story of his journey from journalist to cold-case investigator.

In the book, you talk about the shift that took place when you no longer wanted to write only about bad things that happened to people. Instead, you wanted to write stories that would help. Do you ever wish that you could go back to simply reporting what happened?
Absolutely not. Reporting what happened and after the fact telling the story is incredibly important, but when it comes to crime, and when it comes to what it was doing to my soul, I needed to move in a different direction. It was a bad decision to make from a professional standpoint because I couldn’t be a crime reporter anymore. I wouldn’t have been able to pick my own stories and say, “I just want to do unsolved crimes.” But I really like being part of the solution. And now I’m sort of a hybrid of a journalist, victims advocate and investigator as opposed to just a storyteller.

What skill that you learned as a journalist was most valuable to you when you began to solve the crimes you’d previously only reported?
One of the best skills you learn as a journalist is accuracy—and that has also served me well as an investigator because it’s so important to be accurate when you’re conducting investigations, especially in this day and age when information comes so fast. Everybody is trying to get things up fast, and you have to take a step back and make sure you’ve crossed all your t’s and dotted your i’s. And as a reporter, the most important thing you have to do is make sure the story is accurate. I learned that at the Times; accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. But the persistence and tenacity I have as an investigator came from my father. My father instilled those things in me, as well as never taking no for an answer. So accuracy and the willingness to keep moving forward—those skills are very important in what I do.

You describe the power of uncomfortable silences during interviews—leaving them wide open so that the interviewee will instinctively fill them with chatter. Besides criminals, do you ever use this technique on family and friends? (And similarly, what do they think of having a crime-solving expert in their lives?)
As humans, we are uncomfortable with silence. And if you’re trying to get information from someone who isn’t telling you anything, you just leave that silence out there and hopefully the truth will hit that silence. I don’t consider it a trick to be silent. I’m telling someone’s story in any interview, so I shouldn’t be talking over them anyways. Now with family and friends, I just keep talking—much to the detriment of my relationships.

How does my family feel about having a crime-solving expert in their lives? I think they like it because they, particularly my wife, saw how much frustration I had for 15 years working on these stories that had no ending. So now that I’m able to solve some of them—and believe me, there are far more that I don’t solve than I do solve—I’m losing a hell of a lot more than I’m winning. But to be able to solve one here and there is satisfying to me, and they’re happy for that.

You write, “The American media diet has gone from a fixed menu to an all-you-can-eat buffet.” It seems that our insatiable appetite for true crime is perpetuated by today’s constant stream of media. Has the never-ending news cycle been a boon to solving crimes?
You know what’s interesting? Take, for example, back in the 1970s—this is before cable and the internet—we had radio, TV news and the newspaper, so you didn’t have a lot of different places to get your news. So, if the media decided to run with a story, it was going to be everywhere. And there were so many murders that fell through the cracks because we had a lot fewer voices reporting the news. Now we have unlimited sources, and we’re seeing a lot more information about criminals and crimes that we never would have heard of before because they weren’t necessarily going to get ratings or gain listeners or readers. So the internet and podcasters are really the ones telling compelling narratives and telling stories that have never been heard before. So, yes, absolutely the internet has been a great boon for solving crimes.

You point out the danger of crowdsourcing. For example, internet sleuths on Reddit attempted to help law enforcement during the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing by collectively gathering evidence and potential leads. However, they ended up targeting and exposing the wrong person as the suspect. Is there a role for armchair sleuths who just want to help, and how can they do so without overstepping boundaries that could lead to the ruining of an innocent person? How can internet sleuths and law enforcement work together safely and effectively?
When I wrote this book I knew that some people were going to just read it and some people were actually going to try it. So we created an addendum in the back of the book about how to solve crimes yourself using social media. The first thing I go over are the rules—because all it takes is one person to mess things up, and it drops citizen crime investigation down a peg or two when that happens. So, number one, you don’t name names in public. Second, when you do get information, it has to go to law enforcement—every piece of the information you collect should go straight to law enforcement—I can’t say this enough. Third, no contacting family members. We have to trust law enforcement and let them do their job, and letting them contact family members with relevant information is important. You also can’t put yourself in harm’s way. A lot of things can go sideways there.

Before her death, your friend and colleague Michelle McNamara predicted the importance of online genealogy sites like 23 and Me in playing a key role linking relatives of killers to unsolved murders. How much do you already think is out there that just hasn't been discovered yet? How many more crimes will we see get solved in the coming years because of this technology?
Thousands! Thousands of crimes. And it’s not really 23 and Me and Ancestry.com though. Let me clarify: You cannot use those two databases. They’re private. But what we’re asking people to do is take the information 23 and Me and Ancestry.com send back to you and enter it into public databases like GEDmatch.com, which is how the Golden State Killer was caught. Since the Golden State Killer was caught using this technology, over 50 murders have been solved using this same technology. The more people that enter their information into these databases, the more crimes we’ll solve. Now it’s just a matter of getting the police departments to do it and follow that trail—as well as follow that trail for all cold cases. What I would love to do is create a team that just goes to every police department and collects the DNA they have and then enters that information into these public databases. That would enable them to put that information into the hands of amateur genealogists, who could create a list of suspects, which they could then hand over to police departments. The answers are all out there—not just murders but sexual assaults as well.

What is your favorite unsolved crime and why? Do you think it will ever be solved?
You never want a favorite crime, but living in Los Angeles, the Black Dahlia case is the biggest mystery here. When it comes to unsolved crimes in all of history, you’re looking at Zodiac, Jack the Ripper, JonBenét Ramsey, Jimmy Hoffa—but Black Dahlia fascinates me the most. Just the time period it happened (1947), when all of these servicemen had just come back from war, and there was a lot of crime in LA—it was the heyday of the noir period for films, and you have this very methodical murder that happens to a woman who recently relocated to Hollywood. The murder follows you around in LA because the victim visited a lot of very high-profile places around town before she died.

Once published, your book will be sitting on shelves alongside the classics of the true crime genre—books by Ann Rule, Truman Capote and Michelle McNamara. What do you hope it adds to those shelves? That is, what does your book offer readers that complements what’s already out there?
I think we need to add Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter. Those truly are the four true-crime classics.

What does Chase Darkness with Me add to those shelves? I think it’s a couple of things. The first thing is, it’s a story about how I got fed up with just writing stories about murders and said, “I’m going to solve them myself.” It’s a story about a guy who takes the next step—a guy who has gotten knocked down and hit so many brick walls in writing stories and conducting investigations for so many years that he finally came up with a system of how to solve them—and then went out and solved them.

Second, it’s a story about a kid who grew up around crime. It’s a story about how I grew up, where I grew up and how my relationship with my father painted how I would see crime in the future. My father was a voracious reader of the newspaper and was constantly telling me stories of crimes that were happening in that moment. That really molded me into a crime writer and, a step further, someone who actually went out and solved crimes.

It’s an honor to be alongside Michelle, Truman, and Ann . . . and Bugliosi. Thank you.

What’s next for you?
My podcast “Jensen and Holes: The Murder Squad” is a natural extension of the book. Writing the book, I knew there were only so many cases I could cover, and being able to talk about a different crime each week is something that is important to me. And then having the listeners to help move the case forward and hopefully solve it is great. Continuing to do the podcast is big to me, and doing big cases, small cases, fugitive cases and missing person cases are all directions we’re headed in.

I’m also doing a podcast called “The First Degree,” which is a little bit more victim-centric in a sense, because it’s about being one degree away from a crime—either the victim or the perpetrator. It’s about being that person who knows someone who has been killed or knows someone who has killed someone, and it tells the story through their eyes.

I’m also working on the next book. It’s about serial killers—serial killers who you have no idea about who are active in America right now. That’s all I’ll say about that right now.

And we’re filming the HBO docuseries for I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. We’re actively filming that now, and it should be out in spring or summer of 2020.

This interview was conducted by BookPage and sponsored by Sourcebooks. All editorial views are those of BookPage alone and reflect our policy of editorial independence and impartiality.

Author photo by Robyn Von Swank.

In We Keep the Dead Close, Becky Cooper uncovers the true story of Jane Britton, a graduate student in Harvard’s anthropology department who was found dead in her apartment in 1969. This 10-year investigation straddles the line between memoir and mystery, and the result is unlike any true crime book you've read.

We chatted with Cooper about her kinship with Jane, her transformation into an investigative journalist and the community she found along the way.

What is the significance of the book's title, We Keep the Dead Close?
When I first heard the story about Jane Britton’s murder, the rumor was that she had been murdered by her adviser with whom she was allegedly having an affair. Though that rumor would eventually prove false, that professor was a real person who still taught at Harvard. I decided to audit his class, and during one of his lessons, he said, in reference to the people of ’Ain Mallaha, “They kept the dead close.” The people of that settlement had buried their loved ones under the living areas in their houses. In fact, archaeologists believe that the population’s beliefs and ritual behavior were the reasons people settled there, rather than agriculture.

Even in that moment, back in 2012, I knew the quote would play a significant role in Jane’s story. It encapsulated so many things. I loved the idea that remembering the dead was maybe one of the earliest marks of our humanity. I also loved how ambiguous the nature of “keeping something close” is. Are you hiding it? Are you defending yourself with it? Is it an act of nostalgia? A tribute?

Over the course of working on the book, the ambiguity of that closeness mirrored the myriad ways people relate to the past, and to the dead specifically. How does someone grieve? How does someone honor what came before? Is it through telling and retelling the story of that person? Or is it by refusing to talk about it and, in that way, refusing to wield that story for your own purposes? The stories of our past and the stories of our dead can be molded, as that same professor said in class, to suit the demands of the present. I wanted the book to be an exploration of the ways in which we—as individuals, historians, detectives and archaeologists—keep our dead close, and what that reveals about who we are and what society we live in.

“I have trouble with true crime when it’s salacious or gratuitously violent—when it’s entertainment consumed without a sense of the victim’s humanity or the loss suffered by his or her community.”

Your kinship with Jane Britton is woven throughout the book. Now that the mystery of her murder is seemingly solved and your book is complete, do you still feel that closeness?
Jane still feels like a very dear friend (if you can say that without knowing if the other person would have liked you at all), but I don’t feel the same hallucinatory blurring I did at the height of researching and writing the book. When I was retyping the cache of Jane’s letters, for example, Jane felt as real to me as my own past did. It didn’t help that I was still adjusting to life at Harvard, and I felt surrounded by the ghosts of what had come before. But the new distance between us feels less like a loss than like she’s let me be at peace.

I think part of it is the resolution I feel from finishing her story, but another part of it is that the book captures me at a slightly younger stage of life. One reason I was able to channel Jane was that she and I shared a lot of the same essential preoccupations: a fear of being unlovable in some fundamental way, an inexplicable loneliness, a yearning to feel like I was made of a cohesive whole. I knew instinctively that I had to finish the book before I forgot those worries and that yearning, and before I fell happily in love.

In the year since finishing the first draft, I’ve felt more at peace with myself than I think Jane ever had the chance to feel. In other words, I was allowed to get older, and that fact only underlines the unfairness that Jane’s world stopped at 23.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of We Keep the Dead Close.

Intense experiences, such as those involving death, can unexpectedly bind people together. Have you developed friendships with anyone you interviewed for the book?
I feel very close to a number of the people in the book. Mike Widmer (the former journalist who was also pushing for the Middlesex records) would get coffee with me every few months or so at Flour Bakery in Harvard Square. I visited Don Mitchell (Jane’s friend and neighbor) for Labor Day weekend. Stephen Loring (Anne Abraham’s boyfriend at the time of her disappearance), thank goodness, still sends me postcards.

But I’ve been hesitant to blur the line from journalist into friend completely before the book comes out. Janet Malcolm’s warning that all journalism is an act of betrayal (forgive the paraphrase) preys on my mind. I wanted to be able to write an honest book, and I didn’t want the people in the book to forget that I came into their lives first and foremost as a journalist. I also wanted to limit how bereft I would feel if and when those people were dissatisfied with my account and ended our relationship. My hope, though, is that they will read the book, we will have an honest discussion, and we’ll be able to form a friendship on a foundation that isn’t transactional in nature.

Your undergraduate thesis was a biography of David Foster Wallace. What did you learn (either emotionally or practically speaking) about researching a person’s life and death from doing your thesis?
I was terrified by the idea of writing my thesis about David Foster Wallace. It felt too personal and too daunting. I toyed with the idea of writing about maps—some safe, literary-theory friendly chapters about the politics of memory and space. But the idea of writing about Wallace just wore me down through its insistence. So I guess what I learned most is that I should lean into the feeling of feverish identification, because the desire to write my way through it isn’t going to go anywhere. In fact, writing what scares and haunts me is the only way I imagine I’ll care enough about the material for the time it takes to write it.

The other thing I learned is not to allow admiration for my subject to blind me to that person’s flaws and inconsistencies. My thesis was too hagiographic; I idolized Wallace and failed to examine his treatment of women, for example. I’ve tried to correct that with Jane. My love for her was made deeper by an exploration of her complexities, and I’ve tried to convey that in the book.

Was We Keep the Dead Close your first foray into investigative journalism?
In terms of investigative journalism that I’ve actually published—yes, this book is my first foray into investigative journalism. The book is a meta kind of bildungsroman in that way, with the coming-of-age part partially about learning how to be a journalist. When I say that I shaped my life around Jane, I truly did, for about eight years, make every decision based on whether it led me closer to finishing her story.

Were there points along the way in the 10 years it took to write this book when an aspect of the research felt insurmountable and you thought about giving up? If so, how did you push past it?
The moment I think I came closest to putting the book project down was after I spoke with Jane's brother, Boyd, for the first time and he painted a picture of Jane that was at odds with who I had imagined her to be. It wasn't that I ever expected her to be a perfect victim—not that there is one—but I had so subconsciously identified with her that I was thrown off by her stubborn refusal to be me. Obviously I needed to take a moment to both get to know her on her own terms and also come to terms with the fact that I had been projecting myself onto her. I wasn't just too close; I had been blind. To do this right, I had to get to know her separately from who I wanted her to be. Would I still feel so deeply passionate about her story if that illusion of oneness was dissolved? The rupture took a few months of space and reflection to cauterize.

Was it helpful to be working at the New Yorker for a period of time, surrounded by some of the world’s best journalists, while you were writing this book? Or was researching a story of this magnitude difficult to do while working at a demanding full-time job?
When I took the job at the New Yorker, I had just started my first real round of reporting. I had spoken to Boyd, Elisabeth Handler and Ingrid Kirsch and visited the archives for the first time. I worried that taking an office job at that point was a kind of cloaked cowardice; I was walking away from the story while telling myself I was walking toward it. The job was a two-year commitment.

I'm so grateful I said yes, though. While the job did take me away from the book in some sense—I had to wait two and a half years before going on my reporting trip out west, and I had to relegate research to mornings and weekends––I don't think I could have done this book without it. The opportunity at the New Yorker was extraordinary.

Partially, I had been so exhausted trying to make ends meet in New York City that I didn’t have the energy to fully devote all my resources to Jane anyway. I felt like I needed a place to moor. Professionally, the generosity of the New Yorker staff was both unexpected and unparalleled. And finally, when I cold-called people in Jane's life, being able to say that, yes, I'm only 20-something years old, but I have the credibility of the New Yorker magazine behind me, was a complete game changer in terms of what doors were open to me.

Were you initially thinking this story could be a magazine article, or did you suspect from the beginning that We Keep the Dead Close would be a book-length narrative?
At the beginning, I wasn't thinking in terms of a writing project. Her death felt less like a mystery and more like an open secret, and it bothered me that people believed the rumor enough to repeat it but not enough to do anything about it. I wanted to be the one to take it seriously. As the story became more complex, I felt compelled to pursue it as far as it would go, even if the chances of solving the crime were increasingly slim. I hoped I would at least find peace with the project. That trail took years to follow. It started to change my identity by guiding all my decisions. Naturally then, as the narrative took shape, it blew past the outlines of anything other than a book-length story.

“No one person is the source for the authoritative version of history. It's important to collect myriad perspectives in order to capture an event as it's remembered.”

For many journalists who write about sexual violence and violence against women, the work can feel emotionally draining and despairing. Was this your experience while researching Jane Britton and Anne Abraham (another young archaeologist who disappeared in 1976)? If so, how did you cope with it?
I don't know whether it was conscious, but instead of focusing on the loss of Jane and Anne and the injustice of what their early deaths deprived them of, I focused on how lucky I felt to be spending time with women like them. I relished every moment I got to read another poetic journal entry or speak to the people with whom they had surrounded themselves. I don’t think I could have worked on this book for 10 years without the sense of hope I found in that community. The solace we felt in finding each other was extremely buoying.

You are critical of the entertainment aspect that can crop up within the true crime genre. What was your relationship to the true crime genre while working on this book?
I didn’t intentionally position the book to be a commentary on the true crime genre. It’s true that I have trouble with true crime when it’s salacious or gratuitously violent, when it’s entertainment consumed without a sense of the victim’s humanity or the loss suffered by his or her community or when the genre glorifies the killer. But rather than writing a book in the negative (i.e., I never said, “I don’t want to write a book that . . .”), I just set out to write one I would want to read.

The books I’m drawn to are rich character studies and philosophical explorations of moral ambiguity. The north stars for my book include In Cold Blood (though not in terms of the journalistic liberties Capote took), Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body, Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, Maggie Nelson’s Jane and The Red Parts and Melanie Thernstrom’s The Dead Girl. But my inspirations were also genre and form agnostic. The literary devices and character explorations in the book are equally indebted to "The Keepers," "Twin Peaks," Jelani Cobb’s This American Life segment “Show Me State of Mind,” Anna Burns’ Milkman, Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Lolita, Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief and Laurent Binet’s HHhH.

It may seem odd, but I sometimes didn’t even classify We Keep the Dead Close as a true crime book in my mind. It was a biography of Jane occasioned by her death, or a portrait of her community as impacted by the crime. In fact, that shared understanding was one of the reasons I decided to work with my editor Maddie Caldwell, who, from the very first meeting, focused more on the book’s repetition of the ritual motif rather than on its entry in the true crime genre.

You went down a lot of rabbit holes in your research and mentioned in another interview that your first draft came in 30% too long. What was a rabbit hole that you found fascinating but didn’t/couldn’t delve into?
I had always been intrigued by the whispers that there was some kind of government connection to the Iranian dig that Jane participated in the summer before her death. After all, the second time I heard the story about Jane was during a discussion of how commonly archaeology had been used as a cover for espionage. This avenue of speculation wasn't helped by the fact that the CIA was the only agency I queried that gave a glomar response. (This means they could neither confirm nor deny the existence of files relating to either Jane or to Tepe Yahya.)

Research led me to a man named Ted Wertime, who was the head of metallurgical survey team at Tepe Yahya in 1968 when Jane was there. It was thanks to Wertime that the Iranian expedition secured U.S. commissary privileges. He had been trained in hand-to-hand combat by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. And he was, for a time, the cultural attaché in Iran, which is about as stereotypical as you can get for a CIA cover. Finally, according to his son's memoir, when the son learned that Wertime had died, his first thought was, “You're finally safe.”

I ultimately got nowhere with that line of research; I could find no evidence that Wertime was still working in intelligence at the time of the dig, and the Harvard professor who ran Tepe Yahya vehemently denied ever working for the U.S. government. Without any of the dots connecting, I couldn’t justify putting any more than a hint of it in the main text, where it serves more as a reminder of my state of mind. A little is relegated to the source notes.

The two books you’ve written so far (Mapping Manhattan and We Keep the Dead Close) are extremely different. Do you have plans for a third book, and if so, can you tell us what it will be about?
On the surface, I completely agree that my books are very different, but I think what bonds them is the idea that no one person is the source for the authoritative version of either history or of a map. It's important to collect myriad perspectives in order to capture an event as it's remembered—or a city as it’s lived. I imagine anything I write will land close to this territory.

As for what comes next, I have a few things in mind, and I’m waiting to see if they’ll gain mass and inevitability. I’m especially curious to see if I can find something that is endlessly interesting but doesn't require what feels like soul scraping. I would love to be surprised.

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Author headshot © Lily Erlinger