When the series of Double Initial slayings began late one chilly November afternoon, I was probably sitting on the couch waiting for dinner and thumbing through the pages of the new Sears Wish Book for the 1971 Christmas Season. It seems like that’s all I did after school from the time the cherished catalog arrived in the mail each fall until Christmas Eve. It was a magical time in Upstate New York. By Thanksgiving, the first snows had arrived; and the stores had set up their holiday displays before they’d even put away the Halloween stuff. It never occurred to me that the world outside the bubble I lived in was anything but idyllic. Nobody had the internet or a Blackberry to access news as it was unfolding; and the only channel we got on our old Zenith before cable found its way up to the North Country was a single Canadian station. I was incredibly shielded from the world “out there,” which was just as well for a child so timid that I hid behind a chair with my eyes closed and ears plugged whenever The Bugs Bunny and Road Runner Show came on, because I didn’t want to see or hear poor Wile E. Coyote plummet over a cliff with that familiar, sickening whistle and splat.

     I didn’t care that our economy was the worst it had been since the Great Depression or that the “misery index” had reached an all-time high; and the reason my father could only get gas on certain days was because there was an energy crisis, and he had an even-numbered license plate. I was only eight! I didn’t want to know about the Vietnam War or the increasing violence in the Middle East or the outcome of Charlie Manson’s murder trial. My life as a child was carefree, as it should be. Had I known of the evil out there in the real world, had I known of the Co-ed Killer or the Railway Sniper or the Vampire Killer—serial killers terrorizing North America that year—I would never have walked alone again to Mayville’s for penny candy, even though the little store was practically next door to my grandmother’s house where I spent much time. And had I heard, at that tender age, about a ten-year-old girl’s brutal abduction, rape, and strangulation just five hours west of my hometown, I would have clung to my mother’s side and held on to her hand tighter and longer than I did.

     Fast forward nearly four decades. They say that the best way to overcome your fear is to face it. I don’t think that’s always realistically prudent. I say the best way is to give it a name and expose it for what it really is. That’s why I got my feet wet in the publishing industry by writing eleven books on ghosts and “strange phenomena” before crossing over into the historic true crime genre. When Stackpole asked me if I’d be interested in writing for their Crime Library, my editor gave me full liberty to choose whatever case I wanted to write about, as long as it hadn’t been written about in book form, at least not extensively. I decided that I wanted it to be about a child, the most helpless and innocent of all victims and preferably something that had happened in New York State, where it would be easiest for me to travel to research, since I work full-time and write only on evenings and weekends. But the most important requirement was that I wanted a case in which my research and the story I wrote about it might make a real difference; so it also had to be an unsolved murder. Finally, I had to feel strongly about it, because I knew from past experience that I would immerse myself so deeply into the research that it would consume my every thought and interrupt my sleep for the entire time it took to write it. My editor, Kyle Weaver, knew this when he reminded me to choose “something [I] wouldn’t mind thinking about constantly for the next few months.” An online search of New York State’s unsolved murders produced countless hits; but one, in particular, caught my eye:  Rochester’s “Double Initial” murders, a.k.a. the “Alphabet Murders” and the “Double Alphabet Murders.” 

     As much as this case met my every requirement, I initially tried to run from it. The more I learned about it in those first few days when I thought I had made up my mind, the more I hesitated and pulled back. I wanted a case that struck a nerve in me, because that’s one way writers become inspired. Well, this one struck a nerve, alright, big time. The victims would have been just a year or two older than me, were they still alive today. Worse, they reminded me of my own children when they were that age, and of their friends. In fact, suddenly everywhere I looked there were reminders of the case I was about to embark on writing about.  At one point, after I had already submitted a carefully laid-out proposal to Stackpole for this story, I confessed to my editor that I changed my mind. I’d had a few rough nights tossing and turning and thinking about the case—many rought nights, actually—to the point that I felt like I hadn’t slept in days. The case was too disturbing for me to commit a substantial amount of time to. I didn’t want to delve deeper. I didn’t want to know any more. I thought it would be easier to write a nice, safe book about a crime that happened a hundred years ago—a story I could easily detach myself from (see my other titles).

     Knowing me as he does, my editor didn’t judge my decision. He just replied with three little words that he knew would make me reconsider, putting the emphasis on the third. “Are you sure?” Damn him. That’s all it took. With the school-portrait images of those smiling little girls still fresh in my mind, I resolved then and there that I would not turn my back on Carmen, Wanda, or Michelle. I would accept this challenge to keep their story alive and hopefully shed some light on details that have long been forgotten or tainted by time.