How an Interview with a Killer Pushed One Journalist Toward Fiction ‹ CrimeReads

I spent many decades in journalism, most of that time for Newsday on Long Island. I covered criminal trials, town beats, and spent several years on the newspaper's acclaimed Investigations Team.
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For most of those years working as a reporter, and later an editor, my goal was to find a crime with enough layers and details that would enable me to write a true-crime book. Like so many journalists, I found In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, to be a masterpiece of this genre. Could I find something that could even come close to this book?

I found what I was looking for in the 1980s with the murder of Roy Radin, a Southampton, N.Y., businessman who went to Hollywood to produce a movie, got in with a group of cocaine dealers, and was brutally murdered. I covered the Los Angeles Police Department's investigation into the crime, which led me to another murder in Okeechobee, Florida, and I later covered the trial of the defendants who had murdered Radin.