A Private Investigator Puts Eyes on Himself — The week before Christmas, I was hired to find a guy who’d absconded from a drug-addled history with the state of Idaho. Database searches had been leading nowhere for my client, so I was called to surveil the man’s last known address, corroborate his absenteeism, and canvas the neighborhood for…

The tricky business of promoting my true-crime book — I didn’t read a true-crime book until after I’d written my own. This would explain why my true-crime work, The Kill Jar, doesn’t play by the rules. I simply didn’t know there were any rules until after I wrote it. …

Using fingerprint technology to track the victim instead of the perp — I recently published a book, The Kill Jar, about the Oakland County Child Killings, which occurred over a 13-month period from 1976 to 1977 in the Detroit area. I spent approximately 10 years researching the story, which ended up being as much about my own history with violence as it…

The lies and money behind a 1970s serial murder case — It’s autumn of 2010 and I’m standing in the exact spot where 10-year-old Kristine Mihelich’s ice-burned body had been found in the dead of winter, 1977, her newly plum-colored face a muted beacon in the freshly fallen snow off the side of a wooded cul-de-sac 30 minutes from the more…