Im becka oliver, executive director of the rightist books of texas where the largest literary or its organization in texas, we exist to support writers at every stage of their writing career and one of the things we love to do is have the opportunity to talk to published authors about their most recent books but also to dig in a little more than i think we get to as we like it book events with a craft talk, learning a bit more about what went into creating the book and especially for the book we are talking about today, american sherlock murder, forensics, and the birth of american csi. So many interesting things kate can share that would be applicable to any writer who happens to be here. Who here is a writer . Who here writes but didnt raise their hand . There are always a few of you. We are going to make sure we get some conversation as well. I just want to say quickly before we start, a big thank you to book people. We are lucky to live here in austin and have a lot of really wonderful Literary Community and one of the big clubs of that is this bookstore so thank you for having us here tonight. I hope you will enjoy the conversation and go downstairs and find a book and bring it up to be signed because we all know the best way to support writers is to buy their books. We encourage you to do that too. Finally, i wanted to read kates bio and shes going to read a little bit from the book and then we are going to dig into our conversation. Kate Winkler Dawson is a document to reduce or his work has appeared in the new york times, wcbs news and fox news channel, united press international, pbs news hour and night line. You probably havent heard of any of those places, they sound really small, shes the author of the true story of a serial killer, the great london smog and the strangling the city in addition to the book we are going to talk about tonight and teaches journalism at the university of texas at austin. Please welcome kate Winkler Dawson. [applause] want to set the scene . Im a multitasker. One of the first questions will be where i found the subject of the book so i am going to is that a nancy pelosi move i guess . The excerpt, im picking this for two reasons, the reading i have done in the past involves long body parts in my two, 10yearold daughters are here so the setup for this is how it is the case i actually read and how i discovered Edward Oscar Heinrich and the reason he became called americas Sherlock Holmes. When i found him he was mentioned in a case about a botched train robbery in oregon and four people dead and the robbers who actually were not robbers because they didnt walk away with anything were in the wind and the only real clues they had were the federal agents, the government sent down us postal agents and 7 Pacific Railroad agents and that was the extent of federal agents sent down and they did with federal agents do witches go through with a finetooth come to find everything in the only thing they came up with was on one of the pockets was some mechanics greece so they listed a mechanic, this guys in jail, the shirt is nervous and says lets call him heinrich and see what he thinks. He had been known for a few cases before then. So heinrich at this point has a fantastic photo of him, penned up overalls on the door he hung from the ceiling so that he can look at it and put a pair of shoes which look odd to me underneath as a sort of invisible man hanging from the ceiling wearing his overalls. Officers he started the engine oil in the left pocket, evidence that convinced federal agents but a local mechanic was the killer. Oscar scraped off the dark sticky glue, spread it across the glass slide and placed it under his microscope. He adjusted the oculars and rotated the manufacturing, it wasnt greece, he was sure, because he hadnt spotted any of the standard components, mineral oil, vegetable oil, wine. He dripped a raisin on the slide and watch the chemical reaction, the guru was a purely organic substance. With his pencil oscar made the most important notes of the case, a scribble on the back of an old envelope that would save the mechanics life, the grease in the overalls came from a tree, not vehicle and soon oscar would determine the pitch came from a douglas for, a tree found in western oregon. The same type of naturally occurring sticky resin used to caulk the seams of wooden sailing ships for centuries. Oscar turned out the pockets of the overalls carefully as little chips caught in the fiber reflected the light of a small flashlight. No larger than the halfsize of the peace, he wrote, the pockets carry tiny chips, earth debris and biochemical debris peculiar to western washington and western oregon forests. The suspect lived in the western part of oregon, he concluded. Oscar understood human nature. A mans habits reflected his personality also. Now we are skipping over to federal agents are tired of all his notes and want the answers so they come down to his lab in berkeley and there is one federal agent, one is us postal and another named mcconnell so they say to him, who is it . We know he is a mechanic and willing to put him to death with this and he said no, it is a lumberjack. The wearer and owner was a lumberjack employed in a fair or spruce log, a white man not over 5 feet 10 inches tall, probably shorter, weight not over 165 pounds probably less. Not so fast, so the postal agent, do you mean to say you found all of this out merely from examining those overalls . Oscar explained, this is the razzledazzle part to me, oscar explained he could estimate the weight of the owner because lumberjacks recently bought their overalls in larger side so they have room to shrink and watch. The special shoes retrieved earlier were logging shoes and when he placed them underneath the overall tough they were the perfect length for a logger hoping to keep his clothes from being ruined by climbing trees, lumber men always wear their pant legs turned up halfway from ankle and task and outside the blue oscar noted. He measured the distance from the creases to the shoulder straps to estimate the wearer appetite. Also knew the owners Left Shoulder was 3 fourths of an entire than the right based on how the straps were adjusted, they were on the lefthand side. That meant he might have been lefthanded. The suspect was caucasian, according to two strands of hair. He was not able to use it to identify the suspect his assertion of the ethnicity of the owner was scientifically valid. He created a physical sketch of the killer, incredibly accurate profile based on a pair of overalls, the description tallied perfectly with the brown haired lumberjack with slight build and played, fastidious man who works on spruce and for trees. Deputies released the mechanic from jail and special agents focused their search on a lumberjack from oregon. [applause] how did you find oscar . Once you found him, theres more to that story but once you found him how did you know he was worth finding, what did you discover . As you said, there was not a lot that was known about him in basic searches. So if we backtrack when i was done with my first book about a london air pollution disaster and a serial killer caught in it along with a lot of other people i felt i want to go towards forensics. My father was a law professor at the university of texas and we talked about that a lot. I was on the search for a forensic scientist so i got this book and found this case and this american sherlock label and you are right, i kind of started, was attracted to the name and the man and when i found out how significant he was, a pioneer of forensics, very exciting. There are so many other steps to writing what i think is a comparative nonfiction book, this is just for me. I like to write about people who are relatively unknown. Im probably not going to write about jfk. I want the unknown person. I want somebody who has made history and this is somebody who has made history. I want to time period that i feel like im excited about and my first book was based in 1952 and heinrich worked from 1910 to 1953. That is four fantastic decades, so much happens in that time period that is exciting for me, food and music and culture and crime and corruption and politics, all that stuff is important to me because that is how you can build a good story and i really wanted a great location. I loved san francisco, lived in san francisco, he worked out of berkeley so that was important to me and the biggest thing for me one, besides making history, the book he did to make history which is advancing forensics, what does that tell us about now. Is that pertinent now. Is forensics important now . Of course it is and finally, the big thing for heinrich that i think was in his favor for me at least was his collection at uc berkeley was enormous and that was a really good thing and a bad thing because it was an excellent thing because it gave me a lot of sources, an excellent thing because its scared everyone else away. It was 120 boxes. That doesnt count the letters. It was totally closed, had been closed for 65 years. When he died in 53 his youngest son got whatever the 1965 equivalent of a uhauls and dumped it at uc berkeley because everything was there. And uc berkeley like many archives, libraries, is understaffed. When you do the search, usually of a researcher, i go to world. Org or archived grid and put in these names. Those websites will probably tell you if the person has a collection where the collection is. If they have multiple collections, type in benjamin franklin, i put in heinrich at uc berkeley and then closed collection, researchers cant go in. I read more about him, put together a good case and theres a form you can fill out and those archives that i know it is closed, i know this is a big deal and let me explain why. I am an established author with a Real Publishing company and this is why this man is significant and you need to open up the collection. I got an email back from the assistant to the archivist, this is probably not going to happen. We are so understaffed and the collection that is close for a reason. Two days later her boss, Laura Michaels emailed me and said we will do it, you are right, he is great, we should open up the deflection. It will take two years. All of that leads into not only what is where the book, having to take steps saying this is why you need to open this up, it is worth it. Lets talk about what was in those boxes, to give folks an idea, oscar meticulously filled out several cases of his, with chronicles specific time for every phone call our scientific test and noted the case involved in the margins. When he awoke in the morning and fell asleep, even journaled when he journaled. A fastidious rigid man, 8 00 pm to 10 00 pm journalizing and one in 3. You hit the jackpot and wanted to burst into tears. Talk about that. He had a lifelong friend, wrote a lot of letters. The reason everybody asked how have we never done anything on Edward Oscar Heinrich, you would know why. It is really overwhelming. This is what to me made it such an incredible book that was so unbelievably timeconsuming so oscar had three secretaries and had some type all his letters out. If they were really private he would handwrite them. He kept all his letters and frequently kept letters he sent out. His son theodore became, his best friend, his watson character is a big deal in the Library World and his cop sidekick was a big deal, they all had collections and everybody kept each others letters. For somebody doing this type of book was so incredibly important and unusual because there is a point i got two screens, very digital for me, two screens and god theodore, his sons letters from january 12th, 1933, and his letters to theodore january 12th, 1933, and i can create conversations. I had 3way conversations at some point between these different people paul had these incredible collections and so having that rich at an archive is amazing. Somebody asked me the other night how i pick the cases and i was a little embarrassed because my editor was sitting there and i said i just the archivist for the biggest files, the 10 biggest criminal case files you have, dont even care what they are because i want to that information and i adjusted, some works and some didnt but i was looking for not just compelling cases but a lot of information. When i mean information i mean in one of these, we will bring this up, one of the cases is fatty arbuckle, you might know, if brad pitt were still relevant he would be the brad pitt what are you talking about are right. That is true. Brad pitt would be the brad pitt, the brad pitt of 1921. He was a film star who was accused of assaulting and killing a b list Movie Actress and so the things that were in the files, i was with the archivist and picked up a lot of errors and said what is this and she said that the actresss hair that he supposedly cant killed, it was just lying in his fire which is incredible. He kept all the evidence he shouldnt have had. There were loaded guns. The Uc Berkeley Police had to remove the firing pin, just to stop bad things from happening, he had bomb parts, he removed a bullet from a womans hard and filled the heart up with wax to take a wax cast so he could match it later on and i found that and it was pretty incredible the things that were in there. Did you find year and . He did start his own urine levels for a year and a half and i think he want to do something with dialysis and the interesting thing about Edward Oscar Heinrich, he wanted to do so much. He was interested in his own forensics lab, interested in chemistry, interested in starting multiple businesses and it wasnt just his love of solving crime, there were so many other facets. It was interesting to because the library would also, he and that learning so much that would help him further his own science. He was ready begin . You have 5 decades of material and i know you said then you zeroed in on the files that were the largest but then you have this science, this true crime aspect and a narrative that you are weaving together and this book guide is wonderfully written, so beautifully written and i want to read no one needs to take my word from it. And entertaining, absorbing combination of biography and true crime. Many true crime books to full suffer from stale pros kate Winkler Dawsons reading never uses the crutch of false suspense but doesnt skimp on valuable details and some of that comes from the fact that you had a lot of great information but how do you begin to think of how you were going to craft this narrative . You want to start, for me i just started learning about his life and chronology, where did he go, what cases did he do, how did he develop all these incredible tools and so, once i started with an outline, what is like story, what are the key points, when does he get married, where did he grow up, where did he go to school, then i can sort of fill in where these cases are and it is overwhelming because i wanted to look at where he was in his life as these cases progressed. If you are looking at the narrative arc of the story you are thinking about the story from his life, from the beginning and what he has learned and who he is to the end of his life and what he has achieved and where he is in his personal life but then all these individual cases that have their own little arcs within them and then i have to keep an eye on forensics and say where are we in the world of forensics . Just blood stain pattern analysis . Where are we in that . And you have to make sure your whole world moves forward all based on what he is learning and proceeding to learn. It was difficult at times because oscar had the same level that he did not show often. Dont know if he showed it to his wife marion, but his best friend, the watson character john boyden heiser. Over time he was getting better, speaking to juries in a way that made them understand it that was his big struggle and the struggle with a lot of experts now, how you take the chemicals that are 12 letters long and explain this intricate process he spent four eight years learning in school and translate that to somebody who likely the 1920s barely had a High School Education sitting on a jury. That was a lifelong struggle for him. Im always looking for these ways to bring in his progress and he had a lot of progress over the years and it was pretty cool to see it. For the csi fans in the room can you talk about the 1920s, a lot of what takes place in the 20s . What are the advancements we saw . It seems like so much pioneering in the field happened around that time. It did. I would say pre1910 the europeans had a handle on forensics and you see a lot of advancements in france and italy and england and we see that in the Sherlock Holmes books where doyle is coming up with new things that are inspiring forensics and Forensic Science is inspiring him in the Sherlock Holmes books, but in the United States you have a lot of experts during this time who are reading european books, they are not professionally trained and oscar called them scientists by correspondence where you read a book or 2 and be an expert. Oscar was really unique because the fields that were starting to take off he had an interest in. Just to back up, he grew up really in tacoma, washington and his father which we wont talk about here, his fathers life ended abruptly and tragically and left him as the breadwinner and he became a pharmacist by the time he was 18 without taking any formal classes, just past the state board, kind of incredible so he learned about drugs there. He taught his way into uc berkeley with no high school debris, had to drop out to support his family and got an undergraduate degree in chemistry and showed up at berkeley when he did, youre going to let me in. They let him in on special circumstances because he had a letter that said we will let you and if you take these certain tests and he missed the exam so he showed up and charmed his way and essentially. So he went to uc berkeley, earned physics, chemistry, trigonometry and took several jobs that played into his strength. They really do, they are so pertinent in his life. He became a sanitation engineer in took, where he was able to figure out different components of fans and using special microscopes to look at dirt or sand and see what particles make it up. I did not know that sand is different in different places, depending on west coast or east coast, all composed of different particles of things. When oscar decides to go into criminology and become a criminalist he had all these tools he didnt know he was going to need and he became this incredible person who used forensics, geology for the first time, because what person who is investigating a crime is going to understand what tests a sanitation engineer can run . You just wouldnt. He just happened to have been a sanitation engineer. He was the first to use forensic entomology, how the bugs arrived to a corpse. He started to pioneer a bloodstain pattern analysis, he certainly used fingerprinting a lot. He took over handwriting. He was an expert in handwriting analysis and took over his mentors office for a while after mentor died so there was this whole list of things, botany and biology and ballistics that he knew that a lot of these guys were just figuring out and the people that if you do google famous forensic scientists and look at their wikipedia page, calvin goddard, all of these people who were experts in ballistics, paul kirk who solved the same shepherd case, they were all writing to each other and figuring it out together so this is the wild west of forensics because anybody could call themselves an expert and it is who is the better talker. He had a few experts he felt competitive with. You cant to me right a good book without having a guy who is a jerk sometimes and has some adversaries and he had a lot of adversaries. They are competing for the same money, the same prosecutors. I love the way you set the book up because you bookends with one particular case and each of the chapters is a different case and you have the post for Sherlock Holmes. Which of these cases was the most interesting for you or you learn the most about asking from reading . My favorite is called bits and pieces. It is about a woman whose body parts are everywhere and they are trying to figure out where she is. The case without giving away is he receives in the mail from the police in Northern California and ear and a piece of scalp. They dont know if it is a male or female and said we dont know where the rest of the bodies. We assume this person is dead which yes, i think so. They said how do we figure this out and he said let me take a look at it and okay, this case was pivotal because it was again, he used forensics geology by finding a grain of sand and figuring out where this body, the rest of the body was because there was no sand where the ear was found. It was a marsh. So he used the sand to figure out the rest of the body was 12 miles away from where the ear was which is incredible and the cop said you are crazy and he said go look and they found the rest of the body. Then he spent a lot of time trying to find her killer. What i learned about this was just, you know, oscar had a complicated relationship in the way he viewed women in the 1920s. He was very disturbed by the flappers. The women who dress really sexy and provocative and i think he distrusted hollywood and the woman who he found the rest of her body and was able to identify with someone who had affairs with multiple men and it was interesting because when i read about his opinion of this woman, betty ferguson, he never once shamed her as a victim, he just didnt and i would have expected, he was a real kind of stodgy guy who thought hollywood was descending everybody into hell, any woman who is not modest was problematic for the world and didnt feel like that about this woman. He really wanted to find out who killed her, wanted to know why and he works for years to figure it out. I was really surprised by that. You touched on Something Else which you do so well in the book, the time period especially in the 1920s, the fatty arbuckle case brings in the idea of hollywood and debauchery and around the time studios started to pass more stringent regulations on what can be done, censorship for lack of a better word and also oscars own opinion. At some point, he believes women are one of the reasons there is so much more crime now because they are ladies. I think that 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, the world stuff at all if you are so repulsed, really felt repulsed by the whole thing and i do think he felt like this burgeoning freedom of women was problematic for young the men who had impulse control issues but also felt like in the case of fatty arbuckle felt strongly that the victim was wrong that and he wanted to write it and that was also problematic in that case because one of the most Dangerous Things any investigator can do and Everybody Knows this is when you bring in your own feelings and biases into an investigation then when you have your someone elses life in your hands then there can be a bad outcome and he sent 6 men to death row in one year in san quentin. This is somebody who had a lot of power and so when you read through, when he is going through the fatty arbuckle case as a film star and it is like what is going to happen and i started reading about his bio bias against hollywood and how he thinks that he arbuckle should hang for this and lose everything and go to jail forever, before all the evidence is done, then you start to think this guy has a lot of power and that happens now, you have people who do right and people do wrong in law enforcement, just another reminder. Did you get the sense that that weighed on him . Know, thats one of the things i loved about him, probably 1000 of his letters, i never once saw doubt, certainly never saw him apologize for anything, no doubt, no apologies, no remorse, not one waiver in his belief ever which was incredible to me. But he had incredible personal insecurity about the way he performed in a courtroom, how people viewed him as this professor who looked 10 to up about he wanted to be a crime novelist. He was a horrible writer in that way, entertaining horrible writer. It was refreshing to see this guy that when you read the newspapers he is like a superhero. They dont even name and with his first name sometimes, just heinrich solves another case. Like he really is like saying sherlock, but to peel it back and realize he has incredible insecurities was amazing. That is another great thing, a gift that he was as a character in that he was a guy who had amazing positives in terms of what he was doing professionally but he was also flawed and you were able to find that through all of these personal items, letters and other things. Once you get to know somebody, by reading in their collection and their letters it is a little uncomfortable because he was writing about his insecurities, his childhood which was really difficult, he was describing to his best friend how he used to spend christmases, santa claus was never the santa claus of the kids had. His santa claus was the one who wore the Salvation Army jacket and would come to the door and give him oranges and that was it because his family lived in poverty in Washington State and you read that and i have to sit back and think it is difficult to think about then. This isnt a booklet thousands of people are going to read. This is his personal feelings and it really was but it all fits in to how he was this man, incredible to see someone say day so controls when people are attacking him when hes sitting on a witness stand, just sort of fall apart when talking to his best friend and he has Police Detail outside his house because hes afraid somebody will kill his wife when he goes traveling. Theres a lot of angst and i think the biggest moment for me in the book was it is maddening when it happens to anybody who is writing a book i was about two weeks from my deadline and i was up at 3 00 in the morning as usual and going through newspapers. Com which anybody who has ever written anything does and i had just changed the spelling of his name. If you think newspapers are unreliable now you should have seen them 40 or 50 years ago. His name was spelled so many ways and i did one more way every spelling his name and found how his dad died and always wondered, because he was so angry at his father in these letters to his eldest 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 to your child my father did to me. I could never figure out what happened. I saw these newspaper articles and okay. It changed i had to email my editor and say give me a second because this is going to change some stuff. Those pivotal moments when you are exploring somebodys life is incredible. Nobody gets that except you because youre deep in that persons life. He doesnt have any relatives, nobody is around. I know him better than anybody does. I am thrilled this is something that is a fair representation of who he was. It is not. He was a jerk sometimes. But i think it all came out of very specific reasons. He wanted things to be right. He wanted people to act right and wanted things to be fair and want to the right people to go to jail and the wrong people, the innocent people to stay out and that was a goal for him. I want to open it up for questions. Anyone have a question . Microphone. You have american sherlocks, what about the american moriarty . Was there anyone or any case the just hunted him that he couldnt solve . Did you pick up on that . If i did i would ruin one of the cases but he did have i would say was not a moriarty but he dead have an adversarial expert who tortured him for 20 years and tried to publicly, did publicly humiliate him for a very long time until the guy finally died and in heinrich, kind of a one up on him but there is a case in here where he wasnt able to figure it out and it upset him for quite a time. And i think it was a serial killer. There is enough evidence that this continued on. This was a time period that was not they said multiple murderers. That would be great. I will look into that and that is a good title too, american moriarty. From a writing process perspective, when you are zeroing in on something that will take a year or more of your life to start writing how do you know if theres enough weight in the topic to make the book work . It is really hard. Sometimes it is a leap of faith. I knew that i had i had gotten excited about archives in the past, doing something on alien nests, forensic psychiatrist. Im going to get to do that. I did not anticipate, i have seen these huge collections and dropped in and gone let me get these boxes of alien nests from the Nineteenth Century and i cant read a thing, 19thcentury shorthand that would cost 5 million to have translated. It is difficult because you do have to figure out in any collection you are in, do you have enough . If it is a biography certainly is there enough about that person, my editor is really able. Dont tell her i said that. Shes incredibly picky about topics and that is good for me. Also really maddening but really really good because she wont put out a book she doesnt think is going to be incredible. I will run things by her all the time but i have a folder of things that should be booked. I almost called it the folder of things that should be booked. I havent gotten past the michelle folder and several are going to become podcasts, and why is it relevant . Why do we care about 4 and 6. Why do we care about criminal minds, i have to justify that. How is this to make history . It hasnt been enough in my case. He does not have to be a cheater or a murderer on the side but definitely needs to be a human, the differences, i can see his mistakes because his son gave us all the tools you need as a state. That is the thing most creative people grapple with, these categories, magazine article, podcast, what the documentary a lot of times i will be convinced this is a book and i will be told i dont think so. If you are looking for any advice it is finding those, that kind of experience, maybe this will work but you need a different perspective or another person or another character. The book i did, there was not one pivotal character, the fog was a character and we were living in this world, we have characters in this world, air pollution is the story, people operating inside of it. This is Edward Oscar Heinrich is the lens and we are looking through all with his lens and eyepopping and go reality check, this is what happens. This is what Forensic Science really is. Other questions . Over here. The family was extremely cooperative. Did they have any pushback, where you worried about how you were going to proceed, your interpretation of him . Now pushback because they are all dead. Giving you the tools in journals and things. Everybody died off a long time ago. I do not like dealing with living people. Half of the characters died already and half of them still alive. I was able to interview them which is amazing because i can fact check and call them back, you told me the color of the carpet, the hearse was this color but are you sure . Give me more detail. The flipside is she will call me and say i read the book and you got the grade on my sealevel exams wrong, 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. I just love that. I love the time period before 1960. The fact that he kept everything and had so much to work with and those moments you took letters, both sides of the conversation. It is really i will say part of that is not limiting to that archive and got these two sons, anything that was remarkable, it was almost luck that i ran across theodores in canada so i had to call the university of canada and how much is it going to cost me for you guys to give me digital copies . Had 2000 letters from Edward Oscar Heinrich. I cant really fly out there so had to do everything. I read a lot and making multiple pdfs. It is hard to organize all of that. Those who are working on a project that is going to archives, a great way to do it. Any other suggestions for those working on historical narrative nonfiction in terms of resources that you used . Newspapers. Com. I use Something Else that is the same as archive. Org. If you go to books. Google it is just a button. And particularly with that i will click on it and put Edward Oscar Heinrich or e o heinrich. That is another thing, figuring out how people spell their name. Every academic paper he has ever done, any kind of journal and it is like 100,000 hits. You are jumping down a rabbit hole. It is hard when people ask where you find ideas. In 1952 i found wikipedia and found an incredible picture from the cover and i bought a book that was commitment wikipedia criminals from the pilgrims until 1970. I went through it, on page 100. I will never say the name of the book but i dont want anyone to do that. It is my book and for every book i ever write a book about a that but. Go downstairs and see if book people has that. I want to say one important thing which is for those people who want to write letters about bread pits relevancy, send them to me. This book is wonderful, i hope you all will pick up a copy. We have multiple copies. I could talk to you all day about this but thank you for letting me be part of this and give kate Winkler Dawson a big round of applause. And now youre going to sign books. This is my big book launch event. I really appreciate they put up with all this research. [applause] entertaining courts want to you what youre reading, send your list via social media at booktv good evening and thank you all for coming to politics and prose. My name is alan walkie, im a bookseller here where we host close to a thousand authors a year. For a full list of everything thats confirmed for the rest of the year please go to our