Two big things this month. The Martha’s Vineyard Times featured my collaboration on behalf of my book, The Silence in the Sound, with the RFK Community Alliance Organization and Martha’s Vineyard Ocean Academy, formerly FUEL, which is the phenomenal sailing camp I told you about in my last blog. Journalist, Abby Remer wrote about us and my donating a scholarship to a young Fall River girl who had quite a transformation from the experience. Read more about it here. I am more proud of this than anything, and I hope we can do it again next year with your support. Also, I was featured in Recovery Today Magazine. It was great being in this edition as RFK Jr. is on the cover speaking about addiction and his years in recovery. While I realize he is extremely controversial, where I partnered my book, The Silence in the Sound, with the RFK Community Alliance, Rob, the editor, thought it was fitting to publish my article on loving an addict. I am grateful that I hounded him enough to do so. A wise woman told me to make it in this publishing biz, you have to keep knocking on doors, even kicking them in if necessary. Thank you, Anna David, New York Times best-selling author and founder of Legacy Launch Pad.
Next up… How about some true crime? I know, I know, that’s what everyone talks, blogs, and podcasts about today, or so it seems, and I am not hoping on any bandwagons. I am not a true crime writer (yet). But I do have a slight obsession with a few cases. The first case I can never get over that still haunts me is the murder of Susan “Su” Taraskiewicz, on September 14, 1992. She was 27 years old when her body was found in the trunk of her car outside an auto repair shop on Route 1A in Revere, Massachusetts, just north of Boston and my hometown. While the case is thirty-one years old now, I can remember it as if it were yesterday, and her image on the billboard heading into the city right, where her body was found, which was there for years, is an image that is hard to forget. For more info on that case, you can click here. Years later, I became fascinated with the case of Maura Murray, the Amherst nursing student who disappeared on a New Hampshire road on a cold February night in 2004. No one knows where she was headed and why she left college, and there are so many theories as to what happened it is mind-numbing. Once you get involved in Maura’s case and the massive community that is trying to solve it, it’s hard not to become tormented, wondering what could have happened.
Currently, I am consumed with the murder case of John O’Keefe. A Boston Police officer found near death on a lawn by the road in Canton, Massachusetts. His girlfriend, Karen Read, has been charged with hitting him with her car on a snowy night in January a few years ago. It sounds cut and dry, right? But what about the two black eyes he had, massive laceration on the back of his head, defensive wounds, and what appear to be dog bites up his arm? Sounds odd for a car accident, doesn’t it? Also, what about that he was found in front of the house of another Boston cop who never came out to the scene? The mountains of evidence contradicting the state’s theory looks to be pointing to one of the biggest cover-ups in the state’s history that is ripping this small town apart, and becoming national news. If you want to get lost in this story, click here and spend all of your free time devouring it.
I am still querying and waiting for my second novel, The Summer Before, and working on my third, but I wanted to share the armchair investigations that distract me when I need to clear my head. The truth is out there, and I hope for justice to follow it. What do you think, true crime for my next work?
