Can you hear me okay . Im trying not to be in the view. By the end of this, we are both going to be behind the curtain. My name is becca oliver and im the executive director of the writers week of texas, the largest Literary Arts Organization in texas. We exist to support writers in every stage of their career and one of the things we love to do is have the opportunity to talk to authors about their most recent books and we will begin with a talk learning a little bit more about what craft went into creating in the c book and therethere is so many interestg things that kate can share that would be applicable to any writer that happens to be here. There are always a few of you. So, we are going to make sure that we get to some conversations as well. I just want to say quickly before we start,. A big thank you to the people. We have a lot of literary communitieswe and where the big house is that if the bookstore so thank you for having us here tonight. I hope that you will enjoy the conversation and that he will go downstairs and bring it up to be signed because we all know the best way to support writers is to buy their books so we are going to encourage you to do that tonight, too. And finally, i wanted to read the file and shes going to read a little bit from the buck and then we are going to dig into the conversation. A seasoned documentary producer whose work has appeared in the new york times, cbs news and abc news radio. Fox news channel, united press international, pbs news hour, just a few you probably havent heard of any of those. He author of the true story of a serial killer and the strangling of a city in addition to the book we are going to talk about tonight and she teaches journalism at the university of texas at austin. Please welcome kate winkler dawson. I am a multitasker. I knew one of the first questions is where i found the subject of the book. It fits perfectly like that and number two because the reading ive done in the past involves a lot of body parts and 210yearold daughters were here so we are going with a little more vanilla section. This is the case i actually read and how i discovered when i found him he was about a botched train robbery and it was four people dead and the robbers that actually were not robbers because they didnt walk away with anything and the only clues they had were a pair of overalls so the federal agents was sort of the extent and they did with federal agents do which is of course go through to try to find everything and the only thing they came up with is on one of theth pockets was some mechanics and this guy is in jail and the sheriff is nervous and assess whats called in Oscar Heinrich and he has been known for a few cases before n them. So, at this point he had a fantastic photo, he is pinned up the overall home from the feelings that you can look at it and he said. Shoes that would ought to be underneath is a sort of invisible man hanging from the ceiling wearing his overalls. Oscar days travel up the garment and convinced federal agents to the local mechanic was killer. He scraped off some of the sticky glue, spread it across and placed it underneath his microscope. He adjusted and rotated the minute they become magnification by. It wasnt grease he was sure because h he hasnt spotted anyf the standard components no oil, vegetable oil. He watched the chemical reaction. It was a purely organic substance. V with his pencil he made the most important vote of the case, a scribble on the back of an envelope that would save the mechanics life. The grease from the overall scheme from thoverallscame froma vehicle and soon, he determined itit actually came from a tree found in western oregon. The same type of naturally occurring rather resin. Oscar turned out the pockets carefully as little chips caught in the fiber reflected the light of his small flashlight. No larger than half the size of a pea pockets. Tiny chips debris peculiar to the western washington andth western oregon. The suspects lived in the western part of him again, he concluded. He understood human nature so the habits reflected the personality also. Now we are skipping over to the federal agents being tired of office and they want answers so they come down to his lab and theres one federal agent and they say to him who is this because weve got this mechanic and we are ready to put him to death for this and he said no, it is a lumberjack. The owner was a lumberjack employed in a logging camp. A man not over 5 feet 10 inches tall, probably shorter, weve got over 165 pounds, probably less. Not so fast, he said. You mean to say that he found all of the south merely from examining those overalls. He explained he could estimate the weight because lumberjacks meequently order their overalls and a larger size so they have room to shrink. Those appear to be new. The shoes that his assistant retrieved earlier walking shoes and when he placed them underneath the overalls cost th, they were the perfect length hoping to keep his clothing from being ruined from climbing trees. Lumbermen always wear their pants legs turned up in a deep cut halfway between ankle and calf and outside the booth, he noted. He measured the distance from the cuff creases to the shoulder straps to estimate the height. He also knew that the owners Left Shoulder was three fourths of an inch higher than the right based on how the stripes were adjusted. Tey were handled exclusively on the left side. That meant he might have been lefthanded. The suspect was caucasian according to the charts oscar used to classify two strands of hair and why they couldnt use e used to identify the suspect the assertion of the ethnicity of the owner was scientifically valid. He created a physical sketch of the killer, and incredibly accurate profile based on a single pairat of overalls. Buthey brown hair but lumberjack with a build and height of a man that worked in the oregon on spruce and fir trees. Deputies released now special agents focused research on the lumberjack from oregon. Once youve found him, and theres more to that story that once youve found him, how did you know that he was worth finding backs what did you discover . Because as you said, there is not a lot that was known about him in basicic searches, right . If we backtrack, it was the air pollution disaster called in with other people. I felt like i really wanted to go towards this. My father was a law professor at the university of texas and we pllked about forensics a lot so i was on the search for a forensic scientist and so i got this book and found this case in front of his american sherlock labeled and i was attracted to the naming o of a man and when i found out how significant he was, they were the pioneer forensics. There were so many other steps to writing what i thought was a nonfiction books of this is just for me. Number one, i like to write about people that are relatively unknown. I want the unknown person. I want somebody thats made history and this is certainly somebody that has made history. I want a time. So i feel like im excited about andbo the older the better for. My book was based in 1952 and Oscar Heinrich worked between 1910 and 1953. Before fantastic decade as far as i am concerned. So much happens in that time. How thats exciting for me and music and culture and crime and corruption and politics. All that stuff is important to me because i think that is how you build a really good story. And then i really wanted a great location. I loved San Francisco and i lived in the process go. He was out of berkeley so that was important to me. Then the biggest thing for me, well, besides making history, what he did make history which y which is a dancing forensics is it important now of course it is. And then really finally the big thing for heinrich that i found was in his favor for me at least in his collection at uc berkeley was enormous and that was a good thing and a bad thing because it was excellent because it gave me a huge amount of sources and it was also excellent because it scared everybody else away because and use a enormous like 120 boxes. And that doesnt even count the letters. It had been closed for 65 years. I think when he died and 53, his youngest son just basically go with whatever the 1965 equivalent is and dumped it at uc berkeley because everything wasau there a. The only researcher i go to idle start putting in some of these names into those websites will tell you if the person has a collection and if they have multiple collections, and like ilikeif you type in benjamin franklin, hes got 122 different locations so i put in heinrich, he was at uc berkeley but then its a closed, so that meant researchers cant go in. So, i read more about him. I got an email we are so understaffed and this collection is closed for reasons. About two days later her boss emailed me and said we will do it. We are taught here for 40 years and we should open up thehe collection. Having to take the step of saying this is why you need to open this up is worth it. Lets talk abou lets talk about what was in those boxes. If you dont mind im going to read this paragraph to give folks an idea. He meticulousl meticulously filt several pages of his journals every day of the week even on the weekends and holidays. He chronicled specific times for the phone calls or scientific wc tests and noticed the case c margin. He mark of a rigid man. 8 p. M. To 10 p. M. Journaling he wrote in one entry. You hit the jackpot. Also i imagine one wanting to burst into tears. He also had a lifelong friend he wrote a lot of letters to. It was complicated also because it is unbelievably timeconsuming. So, oscar had about three secretaries and had him type all of his letters out and thank god he had nice handwriting that everything type isy incredibleo she kept all his letters and he frequently kept letters that he sent out. His son, theodore, became a big deal in the museum world and his best friend whos kind of his watson character is a big deal in the Library World and his top sidekick was a big deal. There was a point i got two screens and i got theodore, his sons letters from january 12, 1933 and his letters to theodore january 12, 1933. I had threeway conversations at some point between the different people all had these incrediblee incredible collections and so having that rich of an archive is amazing to. When im in information iranian mike if you are a of a certain age, you might know if brad pitt were still relevant, he would be the brad pitt of 1912. [laughter] so he would be the brad pitt of 1921. He was a old star goldstar accused of killing a Movie Actress and so the things that were in the final, i was with an archivist and picked up the lock of hair and i said what is this and she said that the actresses hair he supposedly killed and its just playing in his final. He kept all this evidence that he really shouldnt have had. There were loaded guns. They had the Uc Berkeley Police come out and remove the pan to stop bad things from happening. He removed a bullet from a womans heart. It was pretty incredible things that wereh in there. He did chart his own urine levels. [laughter] itexpanded the interesting thig about Oscar Heinrich, that he wanted to do so much. So he was interested in his own forensics and chemistry and starting multiple businesses and it wasnt just a love of solving crime. In the books that he would send to them it would help him further his own science. I know that you said you also zeroed in on the files that were the largest. But then you have this science and true crime aspect. You have a narrative that they were weaving together and this book is wonderfully written. Its so beautifully written and i want to read something from the review because no one needs to take my word for it. An entertaining biography in true crime while many suffer from the pros the writing is remarkable and never uses the false sense that i will say it doesnt skimp on valuable details and i think some of that comes from the affect of a lot of great information. But how did you even begin to think about how you were going to craft the narrative. That its hard. Funny i just started learning about his life endocrinology and where did he go and what pieces did he do, how did he develop these incredible tools. Once you start with an outline where did he get married and grew up and where did he go to school then i can fill in where these cases are and it is overwhelming so where was he in his life i as the cases progres. Where are we in the world of forensics he is learning about the listening pattern analysis we have to make sure the whole world continues to move forward all based on what hes learning. Now it was difficult at times because he had the same level of insecurity throughout his life, which he didnt show very often except i dont even think he showed it to his wife. I think he showed mostly to his best friend, to the character, and i think that he felt over time he was Getting Better and he was speaking too the juries n a way that made them understand and that was kind of his big struggle and the struggle is with a lot of experts now is how do you take the chemicals that are 12 letters long and explain this intricate process that you spend four or eight years learning in schools and translate thatat to somebody tht likely in the 1920s barely even has a High School Education is not sitting on a jury. So there was a lifelong struggle for him and i was always looking for these ways of progress and it was cool to see it. For the csi in the room, can you talk about the 1920s and in this decade but really a lot of what takes place mostly in the 20s, what are those advancements that w we saw thout because it seems like so much of the pioneering happened around that time. Of course we see that in the Sherlock Holmes books where hes coming upwe with new things that are inspiring forensics and Forensic Science is inspiring him in the book, but in the United States you have a lot of these experts in the tying pure code are reading europeacoder r. They are professionally trained. They call them scientists by correspondence where you can read a book or two and be an expert. So, ask her what was unique wase the fields that were starting to take off, he had an interest in a. He became a pharmacist by the time he was 18 with no high school degree, he had to drop out to support his family and got an undergrad degree in chemistry and showed up. They led him i let him in on thl circumstances and they had a letter that just said we will let you in and if you take the certain tests and is the exam and then he just showed up and went into it essentially. So he went to uc berkeley, learn physics and chemistry and anything else you can think of and thene he took several jobs that played into the strength and the reason is because he became a sanitation engineer in tacoma where he was able to sort of figure out the way. They are often posed of differentle things, so when he decided to go into criminology he had all of these tools but he didnt even know he was going to need and he becamego this incredible person used forensic geology for the first time because the person who is investigating a crime is goingca to understand what kind of tests a sanitation engineer can run. He just happened to have been a sanitation engineer said he was the first to use that and how the bugs arise to have worked. He started to pioneer a pattern and used fingerprinting a lot. There was a whole list of things, botany, biology, the that a lot of these guys were just figuring out. We look at Calvin Goddard and all these people that are experts in ballistics. All of them are writing to each other and figuring it out together so this is the wild west or forensics because anybody could call themselves an expert and its just who is a better talker. Or he had a few experts he felt very competitive with. You cant write a really good book without having someone that is a jerk sometimes in some adversaries and he had a lot of adversaries. They are competing for the same money. I love the way you set the book up becaus because the book endet with a particular case and then each of the chapters is a different case. Just wondering can you tell us which of these cases was the most interesting for you or that you felt you learned the most about oscar for reading and curious if you have a favorite. My favorite in general i call it bit and pieces and its about a woman whose body parts are everywhere and they are trying to figure out where she is, so the case without givingpa it aw, the case he receives in the mail from the police and Southern California is an ear and a piece of scalp and they dont know if it is a male or female and they said we dont know where the rest of the body is. We are assuming that this person is dead and he said yes i think so. They said how do we figure this out, and he said what the let ma look at it. So it is a grain of sand he used as a sanitation engineer andby figuring out where the rest of the body was because there was no sand, it was in a marsh so he uses it to figure out the rest was 12 miles away from where the earr was and they found the rest of the body. And he spent time trying to find the killer and i think what i learned about this was he had sort of a complicated relationship in the way that he viewed women in the 1920s. He was very disturbed as were many who dressed sexy and provocative. They were later able to identify as someone that had affairs with multiple men and it was interesting because when i read about his opinion he never once seen her as a victim. He thought hollywood was defending everybody and any woman that wasnt modest was problematic for the world and he really didnt feel like that about this woman. She wanted to know why and he worked for years to figure it out. I was really surprised by that. Touch on Something Else i think you do very well in the book which is the tying pure coke especially the 1920s. The case brings out the idea of hollywood and its about time the videos started to pass more stringent regulations on what could be done and then also his own opinion and i think at some point he believed one of the reasons there is more crying now he felt that Young College women should wear corsets and dances should be supervised. He was an oldfashioned man who sometimes i think why are you involved in this stuff at all if you are so repulsed. He felt repulsed by the whole thing and so i do think that he felt like the sort of burgeoning freedom of women wask problemac for those that have impulse control is used but they also felt like very strongly that the victims were wronged and he wanted to write it and that was also problematic in that case because i think one of the most Dangerous Things any investigator can d do, and everybody here knows this but when you bring in your own feelings and biases into an investigation, then when you have your life in is that ife someone elses life in your hand, then there can be a bad outcome and he said six men to death row in one year. So, this is somebody that had a lot of power. When you read through, but hes going through the cases and the like okay with going to happen, and i start reading about his bias against hollywood and how he thinks that he should hang for this and lose everything and go to jail forever, before all the evidence is done that is when you start thinking he has a lot of power and that happens now is just another reminder to. Did you get thehe sense thatt affected him . That is one of the things i liked. There were probably a thousand letters that i never once saw any doubt. I certainly never saw him apologize for anything. No doubt our apologies were remarks, not one believer in his beliefs that are but he had in insecurity about the way that he performed in the courtroom and how people viewed him as this professor that wanted to be a crime novelist and he was a horrible writer. It was refreshing to see this guy when you read the newspapers its like hes a superhero. They dont even name him with his firstt name sometimes. Its just high enriched salt is another case. Its like saying sherlock. But to have been peeled back and realize that he has all of these incredible insecurities is just amazing. I think that is another great thing he was a guy that had a lot of amazing positives in terms of what he was doing, but they were able to find that through all of these personal items that they were able to. The letters in all the other things you were able to readad d cover. By rating in the collection and reading in the letters it is a little uncomfortable because ishe was writing about his insecurities and his childhood, which was difficult. He was describing to his best friend how they used to spend christmas and santa claus wasnt a santa claus other kids have. His was the one who wore the Salvation Army jackets and would come to the door and that was it because his family was in poverty in Washington State and is a you read that and then some ways i have to think its difficult to think about now how this isnt a book that you know, thousands of people are going to read that it is his personal feelings. Ari mean it really was that it fits into how he was this man who was able to it is incredible to see someone statecontrolled when people are attacking him and hes sitting on the witness stand and then they sort of just fall apart when hes talking to his best friend and hes got Police Detail outside of his house because hes afraid someone is going to kill his wife when they are traveling. There is a lot of us in this. When people talk about what is the biggest moment for me in the end it is maddening what happened i was about two weeks away from my deadline and i was up at three in the morning as usual and kind of going through newspapers. Com which anybody reads the newspapers does. You should have seen them 40 or 50 years ago. I did one more way every spelling his name and found out how his dad died. And i always wondered because he was so angry in his letters to his oldest son dont make these mistakes. Your grandfather left me high and dry. You cannot do this. I will not let you do the same thing that my father did to me. And i can never figure out what happened. I had to email my editor and say this is going to change some stuff. Those sort of pivotal moments when you ar youre exploring sos life is incredible. Nobody gets that except for you and he doesnt have any relatives, nobody is around. Its just kind of a million other than anybody does. And so i am thrilled that this is something that i think is a fair representation of who he s was. It wasnt all roses. He was a jerk sometimes. But i think it all came out of very specific reasons. He wanted things to be right and he wanted things to be fair and he wanted the right people to go to jail, the innocent people to stay out and that was a big goal for him. I want to open it up for questions if anybody has a question. Yes. Was there anyone or any case that haunted him to you couldnt solve did you pick up on that . If i get im afraid i would ruin one of the cases. But he did have she had a adversarial expert who tortured him for probably 20 years and tried to publicly humiliate him for a very long time until he finally died. And heinrich kind of had a one up on him. There is a case where he was not able to figure it out and i think that upset him for quite a long time and i do think that it was the serial killer that there was enough evidence to carry this on but this was the time you have that there have been multiple murderers. That would be great. It is a good title, too. From a writing process perspective, when you are zeroing in on something that is going to take a year or more of your life to start writing on how do youpe know when there is enough in the topic to actually make make a book out of s that . Something that is a leap of faith honestly because i knew that i had gotten really excited about the archives in the past. I had been completely obsessed with doing something on the forensic psychiatrist and i finally get to do that it looks like. That being said,n i did not anticipate like i have seen these huge collections and i dropped in and ive gone okay witokaylet me get these boxes ae things from a 19th century. And i cant read a thing. Or they might 19th century shorthand that would cost 5 million to have it transla translated. So, it is difficult because you do have to figure out any collection that you are in do you have enough if it is a biography certainly. Is there enough about the person. My editor is really, really anal which is great. Shes going to be watching this on cspan. [laughter] shes incredibly picky about topics, and thats good for me but its also maddening, but its really good because she wont put out a book that she doesnt think is going to be incredible so i will run things by her all the time and sometimes i will add something and she says no. But i have a folder of things that should be books. I almost called it the folder of things that should be looked at havent been able to get past the show bo yet, folder. I have several of those and they are going to become podcasts because they are really good stories that just dont have the checklist ive talked about. Like why is it relevant to them, whthen,why is it relevant today. Why do we care about the criminal mind. And at least for my editor i have to be able to justify that. The tinyar pure co really is how do i make this person more than just someone who checks in and out of work and make thanks his. That isnt enough or it hasnt been in my case. He doesnt have to be a cheater or a murder on the side like the dexter that nobody knows about but he definitely needs to be a human we all make mistakes and adjust the difference is that i hen see his mistakes because his son gave us all the tools we need to see. I think that is what most creative people grapple with is these categories with the newspaper article, magazine article, podcast, documentary, whats the book. A lot of times i will be convinced that this is a book and i will be told no i dont think so, or this is what you need to add. So, i think that if youre looking for anwe arelooking for, it is finding somebody that has that experience and maybe this will work but you need a different perspective or a different person or you need to add another character. The book that i did there wasnt one character that could carry the book and we were living in its world. We have these characters within his world of air pollution is the story. Its the people operating inside of their. This is what happened. This is what the Forensic Science really is in this tiny pure co. Any other questions . Okay. Over here. So, the family was extremely cooperative. Did they have any sort of push back or were you worried about how they were going to proceed your interpretation of complex no pushback because they are all dead. [laughter] when you either did to him getting the tools, unit through the letters. Everybody buy off a long time ago. Ive got to be honest it was ideal for me. I dont like dealing with living people. [laughter] so, but the first book i have come half of the characters i already and i had the journals and have the people were still alive and i was able to interview them, which is amazing because i can fact check and call them back and say i know you told me that the color of the carpet, you know, into her steps took you to your fathers funeral was this color but are you sure, give me some more details. The book side of that is then she will call me and say i read the book and you got my grade on my exams on. So there is this kind of half a dozen or the other. I love the tiny pure co before. The fact that he kept everything and there was so much to work with. And in those moments that you took letters from both sides of adthe conversation and it does read. Just saying okay so hes got these two sons. Did they do anything remarkable and it was almost luck that i ran across theodore in canada so then i hadad to call this university in canada and say how much is it going to cost me for you guys to give me a digital copy. He had like 2,000 letters from oscars before. I cant fly out there so i just had to do everything. I wrote a lot and then im making multiple pdfs and i color coded stuff so its hard to organize all that. One more question for the folks working on a project the t certainly goingth to archives aa way to do it to you have other suggestions for someone working on historical narrative nonfiction in terms of resources that use . Newspapers. Com. M. I use a if you go to books. Org, hatti. So i doubleclic double click on i will put Oscar Heinrich endquotes and that is something is figuring out how people. Respond. Any academic paper hes done, any kind of journal, and it was like 100,000 hits. So then you are kind of jumping down the rabbit hole. But i think it is hard when people ask where you find ideas. I found him just wikipedia in this picture from the cover. He bought a book that was a criminal is wikipedia from 1970. I looked through it was on page 100. Any bookk i ever write is going to come out of that but i know it. An we will go downstairs and see if the people have the book. [laughter]at this book is wonderful and i hope you all will pick out a copy or multiple copies and i can talk to you truly all day about this. But thank you for letting me be a part of this. Can we give kate a big round of applause. [applause] and now you are going to sign books. T. This is like my big book launch event. They have to put up with all of this research. Thank you. Youre welcome. Good evening and thank you all for coming to politics and prose. My namis