A graduate of The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and the University of Arizona, she studied playwriting with Edward Albee and poetry with Peter Sacks, Carolyn Kizer and Joy Harjo.
You can find out more about Kerrie and find her books at KerrieDroban.com
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TRANSCRIPTION STARTS HERE:
Kat
Welcome back to the show, everybody. Today I have with me a true crime author. I think this is my first one on the show. Kerrie Droban. How are you doing, Kerrie?
Kerrie
I’m really great. Thanks for having me on, Kat.
Kat
Well, thanks for coming on because this is a whole different kind of writing than somebody that I’ve talked to before. But before we get into your latest book, Aurora, tell us a little bit about yourself, where you’re from and yeah, then we’ll go from there.
Kerrie
OK, well, my name is Kerry Droban in and I am a criminal defense attorney and a true crime author. It’s hard to answer the question where I’m from because I actually grew up overseas, but I went to college in New York and Baltimore and then eventually I came out to Arizona. I loved school, kept being in school until I realized that I couldn’t make it a career.
Kat
Well, my daughter has decided she wants to be a lawyer. And I was like, you better really like school.
Kerrie
Yes, I know. I was a nerd. I really loved school.
Kat
Did law come first? Did you want to study law when you were younger?
Kerrie
No, I actually have always been a writer. From the time I was seven years old, I asked my parents for a typewriter because I’m one of those very tactile writers. I really want to be able to feel the keys under my fingers and at the time, of course, computers weren’t around. And so I taught myself how to type, and I would write stories and illustrate them. And I still have them all. But then I went on to study poetry. Poetry really became my thing, and I spent several years writing poetry and studying it and getting MFAs in it, and I really wanted to teach it for a long time. I want to be a creative writing professor, but I could not eat as a poet, so sadly, I abandoned that. And then I wrote a couple of novels, and it was really around, I was really literally the starving artist when I was writing, and that’s the other recession hit. And then I really kind of was up against the wall, like, how am I going to support myself? And so I went to law school, really as a vehicle to kind of give me, this sounds crazy, to give me the time to write. Really crazy, right? Yeah, because being a starving artist was so stressful, and after a while it was so distracting because it was all I ever thought about was how was I going to eat? Where’s my next meal coming from? How am I going to support myself? And it became so distracting. I really couldn’t write very well. So law, seems like a very solid career path. It was one of the few degrees that I got, where I knew there would be light at the end of the tunnel. So I’d actually have a job that I could eat. Actually, ever since, it’s been a vehicle to fund my writing career, which is very backwards, but that’s kind of how it happened.
Kat
Yeah, but I mean, it is kind of like, I think that gives hope to a lot of people. There are a lot of full-time workers who write as well. But I like what you said, it also kind of fuels the writing, not only monetarily, but I’m sure idea wise. You’re out there, you’re a criminal defense attorney. You must see and hear and learn about some crazy things in the world.
Kerrie
Yeah, well, interestingly enough, I did not even have an idea what kind of law I was going to get into. I really just did it very unsystematically. And law school to me was I knew I was good at school, I was a good student and I loved learning and I loved debate, I was on the debate team in college, and I did a lot of acting. And so for me, it was a great vehicle to kind of marry them all. But when I was in law school, I realized that I really liked trial work, because trial work is very similar to telling a story. You have the opportunity to be in front of juries and tell a story and craft it, but of course with the facts. And so it was very challenging for me to have bad facts and be able to make an argument or make a story. So that was really what got me into the trial portion of it. So I wasn’t even thinking of true crime. It wasn’t even on my radar when I first went to law school. And I started as a prosecutor, okay, some people say I was on the good side.
Kat
But then things happen. Like, you know, what happened in Washington State when they put this guy in jail for no reason. So you never know. So when you said that you were writing poetry before and then you had written novels or you had started writing novels, they weren’t true crime in the beginning?
Kerrie
They were not actually crimes in another crazy way. So for anyone listening, there does not have to be a direct route. Yes. I mean, poetry was always my passion, my first love. But then when I became a lawyer, first couple of years as a prosecutor, I really missed writing. And I was so steeped in how to be a lawyer. Law school was very time consuming. My first job as a prosecutor is very time consuming, was always being thrown into trial. And I was invited to a writers group by a neighbor of mine who happened to mention that I like to write, had never written a novel before either. And so I went to this writer’s group and I thought, wow, I think I can do that. And so I started to write my first novel and it was called In the Company of Darkness. And it was a novel about a prosecutor who was investigating a case. And at the time, I was living in a home that had been infested with black widows. And so I started to write a story about a prosecutor investigating somebody who was trying to find a cure for black widow bites. It was a crazy story, but it wound up being a suspense thriller. So I thought, well, that’s what I want to write. That really kind of exciting and it’s kind of weaving in my experience. Everybody says, write what you know. That’s where I started. And it took me a year.
Kat
That’s not bad.
Kerrie
Yeah, I approached writing very much like a job from the very beginning, and that has served me very well because I have never been one to put an excuse on something. It was always a passion was always what I wanted to do. And so I made it a habit. And so I said to myself, there are 365 days in a year. An average book is about 350 pages. So I’m going to get up every day and I’m going to write something. And I had a finite amount of time to write because I had to become a lawyer. So I made it a habit. I started to train myself to get up at 05:00 in the morning, and pretty soon it became 04:00 in the morning.
Kat
Oh my goodness.
Kerrie
And I found my rhythm. And that’s really important to find your rhythm, like what’s going to work for you? And for me, I would write. I would write every day from 4 a.m. To about 7, and then I could be a lawyer. And so at the end of the year, I had a book.
Kat
So when you were writing for those 3 hours, did that include investigating or just sort of writing and throw away? How did that well, I guess eventually, once you’re really awake and you set up, what did those 3 hours encompass for a full-time worker?
Kerrie
Well, when I first started doing it, I really felt like an imposter, because like what in the hell am I doing? I would sit there and sometimes at the end of 3 hours, I would write two sentences and I would get very discouraged. But I didn’t stop. And that was the big thing for me, was do not give up, do not stop, I can do this. And I’d really never written a novel before, but I was a reader and so I really was trying to find my style and find myself. And so it was very, very challenging. And so writing fiction, a lot of it involved research. So you’re right, as I started to write, I realized that I didn’t know what I was writing until I started researching. And some of it, of course, was drawing on personal experience, so I didn’t have to go try to watch or find the case, I knew, stuff like that. But the book kind of took on a life of its own and I wound up having to research a lot more than I had planned. And thank God for the internet, that’s what my research was. I would still sit there. And so when I wasn’t getting ideas, I would research. But no matter what it was, I committed myself to those 3 hours. So I was either going to research for 3 hours or I was going to write two sentences and research whatever it was. And so pretty soon, the more that I had, the more information I had about the subject I was trying to write about, the easier it came to write. But I’m not an outliner, I don’t even know what I’m going to say until I start writing kind of thing.
Kat
But I like how you say you didn’t really give up on those hours, because I think the temptation is to be like, well, I don’t have it in me today. I’m going to go down and make myself some breakfast and take the dog out and maybe I’ll go exercise and maybe I’ll check my, now we have our phone. So it’s just terrible, all the distractions. But you really kept it, like whether or not you were writing, those were your writing hours. Like telling your brain, no, really, that self discipline is amazing, I have to say, but it’s probably good.
Kerrie
Yeah, it was necessary because it was never going to happen otherwise. I would hear a lot of people making excuses and say, I don’t have time. I’ll write when I retire, I’ll write when I’m on vacation. I don’t want to wait. I didn’t want to wait. I didn’t want to give it up because that’s really what I had started doing from a young age and I loved it. It definitely evolved over time. My whole process is a little bit different now, but I still commit to those 3 hours.
Kat
But I do think you already had sort of that background of poetry writing and studying that, so, you knew, it’s like when people say, I’m going to write on vacation. You know, as a writer, whether you’re a poet or not, that’s not going to happen. Because like you said, sometimes you sit down and you realize, oh, I actually need to know, like, how does a black widow bite? Like, does a bite or does it sting? I don’t know. I have to go research that now. So you know that writing isn’t just sitting down and putting words on a page. So yeah, I like how you said, those are the hours. I think our biggest problem these days is readers, is that distraction. But for anyone starting to write, that might be the thing that they need to do, right? Take an hour and you don’t do anything other than sit there.
Kerrie
Yeah, in sometimes, actually, it helped me to write it down in a calendar. I mean, these paper calendars, right? But I would literally schedule it like it was a meeting. And of course it’s 4 in the morning, so you don’t have a lot of distractions at 4 in the morning, but other than you want to go back to sleep. But depending on when a person’s rhythm is, it’s that physical act of writing it down and committing it to paper that makes you keep it, you know, I mean, I’m sure this is I mean, this has happened to me, so maybe it happened to you or you schedule a lunch date with a girlfriend and invariably something else is going to bump it. The lunch date is not that your friend is not as important as other things, but they don’t seem to be as urgent. And so for me, I made it an urgency. So I did not watch that.
Kat
That’s the thing too. As you study habits, and how to change the bad ones that you have. You realize, I’ve read or listened to podcasts and all that. They always say if you put it to the later on in the day, something comes up and it never gets done right. It’s like the gym. You should do it in the morning because you know feel like it later. I can imagine as a lawyer, the last thing you want to do is sit down at 09:00 at night and write. I would assume that you’re spent at that point.
Kerrie
Yeah, and I learned that pretty quickly. My brain is full by the end of the day. I am pretty incoherent. I really knew that I had about 8 hours in me and the law is pretty demanding. And so by the end of 05:00, I roll around. I just wasn’t one of those people that could work late into the night, even if it was preparing for a case. Just didn’t happen. I just knew my best work was going to be before that.
Kat
So your first one was a suspense kind of base, I guess, on what you were experiencing as a new prosecutor, right? And then when did you go into true crime and what is the difference really, for any listener who might not know?
Kerrie
A huge difference. Well, after my first novel, I wrote a second novel and then I was really trying to write, I had written a third novel and I wanted to move up into that level of like, okay, now I need an agent. The first two novels I published with a small press. And then I didn’t have an agent in the third novel, I was shopping for an agent. So I go to writing conferences and I would pitch my third novel. This is probably the precursor to true crime. It’s a pretty disturbing idea. Who knows where this came from? But I was getting the door shut on me a lot. I was sending things out and after a while, this is the other tip I’ll give to your viewers. I kept all of my rejection letters. I had a binder full of rejection letters, like over 300. And the reason I started doing that was not to depress myself, but because I couldn’t remember after a while my query letter here, my proposals here or whatever. And so all I was hearing was my head was being filled with information on the right way to do it. Like, this is what you do, this is the convention, this is, you know so you write your query letter, you send it out, you wait the obligatory six weeks. Maybe they’ll ask for a sample chapter or whatever. So it’s wasting a lot of time. And so it took me like two years of going to writer’s conferences, getting rejected and I was ready to throw in the towel. I was, I was so discouraged. So strangely as I was doing this, I was still a prosecutor. But I was pregnant with my first child, and I did probably the unthinkable because I did not want to be a prosecutor anymore, because I didn’t want to be confined.
Kerrie
I didn’t want to be restricted to a nine to five job. Like, writing was taking more time. I wanted to have flexibility. Really backwards. But I knew that in order to go to writer conferences, in order to do what I really want to do, I needed flexibility. So I’m nine months pregnant, I quit my prosecutor job. My husband at the time was losing his mind, okay? I went out on my own, and I started to do defense work, okay? And my very first criminal defense case out of the gate was a capital case.
Kat
Oh, my god.
Kerrie
Death penalty case. And I happened to be, total serendipity, I happened to be at the right place at the right time. And I had an attorney who said to me, I’m working on a case and I really could use some help. Would you? Cause it was the writing portion. So he wanted me to write the brief for this case or to help him write the brief for this case. And so that’s what launched me into death penalty work and like, representing the worst of the worst and getting into this criminal pathology and really starting to love it and thinking, oh my god, this was the perfect job for me because I got to study the cases. It involved investigation, it involved meeting with these death row inmates, doing interviews. I mean, it was everything that I needed to be able to write true crime. Now, I still didn’t have true crime on my radar at all. So the way that true crime came about was completely by accident, complete fluke. So I should mention that at the time, I was married to an undercover detective. And he was working a task force, okay? So there wasn’t a lot of information that we shared, which is why we are no longer married.
Kat
That’s tough, that’s really tough.
Kerrie
People think, oh, you’re in the perfect deal. You had an undercover detective. You have all this information. No, not like that at all, because we didn’t speak about our work at home or anything. That was our rule. Do not bring work home. So I knew that he was involved in a task force. And the PS to that is actually quite funny later on, but the operatives who are involved in that task force, they wanted to write their story, okay? And they couldn’t write it, while they were still involved in investigation, because it’s a crime to do that. So they approached me and asked me if I would be willing to write their story, under certain circumstances. Now, the story involved the first ever infiltration of the Hells Angels.
Kat
Yes. Oh my gosh!
Kerrie
I know. And so my first reaction was, no.
Kat
I have a child. No.
Kerrie
Yeah. I’m like, no. Hell no. I’m not doing this. And they said, but you’re the perfect person to write it. You can hold our secret. You’re an attorney. I’m like, no, not doing it. And so by the third time and it’s because I was having all this trouble publishing my third novel, by the third time, I said yes. I mean, I could hear the word coming out of my mouth and my brain saying, what’s the matter with you? You know? So I took a tremendous risk, and I said yes. Now, here was the caveat to this. So I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have a mentor. I had never written true crime before. I didn’t have an agent. Like the publisher that I had for my novels certainly wasn’t going to publish this. But it was an extraordinary story. It was the first of its kind. And by the way, if I did get lucky enough to get an agent, there’s nothing in writing, I could have nothing in writing. Okay. So that was my tall order with this book, and there was nothing written on it. So everything that I had to get the story was interviews.
Kat
With just them? Oh, my god.
Kerrie
With operatives who were undercover, who could not be identified. I had to hold their secrets and Hells Angel. Okay. And this operation was still going on. So conceivably, I could have been disbarred, and my writing career over before it even began. That’s what the stakes were when I took this project on.
Kat
Oh, my god.
Kerrie
Yeah. So the way that I did it and keep in mind that I had it kind of railroaded it into my head, this is how you do this. You send a query letter off you wait. I couldn’t do that with this project because nothing could be in writing. So that began this journey of trying to find somebody who had written something similar, and I wanted to find that person’s agent.
Kat
Okay, that’s a good idea.
Kerrie
Yeah. So I read things like Donnie Brasco, Levine’s Book, The White Lie. I mean, all of these things I had to do with undercover investigations and so and that’s what I did. So I found that person’s agent, and instead of writing the letter, I called him up.
Kat
Which is like a no, no.
Kerrie
I mean, I just did. I’m flipping everything on its head. This is also for your listeners. Sometimes you can go out, you can color outside the line. Because there is not one way to do everything. And I had nobody to ask. I mean, there was no one I knew that was a true crime writer. So I called up this agent at lunch, because that’s what lawyers do. We always get people at their desk at lunchtime, you know? And I remember making that phone call, and I could hear the agent. He was eating lunch, and he was eating a sandwich, and I could hear him chewing on the other end. And I said, my name is Kerrie Droban, and I know you’re probably going to find this crazy, but here’s what’s going on, I have a story. And so I pitched the story and I thought, you know, sometimes for me, it’s better to not have practiced something because I wanted it to be natural. And part of me was actually hoping he would…
Kat
He would say no?
Kerrie
I would go back to the operators and say, sorry, I’m the wrong person. Go do this yourself. But the funny reaction was is that the agent actually laughed and he said, I think I can sell your story. So it was nuts. And so I had nothing in writing. I don’t even know how the agent sold the story, honestly, but he still… before anything was written.
Kat
Wow.
Kerrie
Yeah.
Kat
Oh, my gosh.
Kerrie
Yes, it was nuts. That book eventually became Running with the Devil.
Kat
Right, Running with the Devil: the True Story of the ATF’s Infiltration of the Arizona Hells Angel. You can’t use their names. A true crime, how true? How much do you have to stick to the story into only the words that, you know, people have said or things like that? What are the rules, or are there any rules about true crime?
Kerrie
Well, for me, because I have the novel background and the writing background, I’m always looking for the story. And so I approached it the way I would approach a trial case. How am I supposed to tell the story here? But the story has to be true. And the reason it has to be true is I don’t want to be sued.
Kat
Okay. That’s a big one.
Kerrie
Right? So for me, accuracy was extremely important. Because a lot of it was interviews, most of it was interviews. You have to keep in mind some of them are confidential informants, so I couldn’t even use that. So I had the skeleton, the structure of the investigation itself, like the case itself, okay. But I didn’t have a trial because nothing had gone to trial yet. So I didn’t have any testimony, right? And there wasn’t like, books out there. I couldn’t go out and cooberate, the Hells Angels or whatever. So all I had was interviews with these sources, and I had some confidential memorandum that one of the case agent had obtained from me. And so because I was terrified about blowing this big investigation, I actually got involved and I put this information in a vault. And I thought, I can be subpoenaed, if it goes to trial, I’m going to be subpoenaed. This information is really important. So my whole thing is in fact, throughout my whole true crime career has been accuracy is key. The number one, like being a journalist, because I don’t want to be saying something, writing something that is not true and that I cannot back up with a source. But at the same time, like a journalist, I can’t reveal my sources either. So a lot of that I was learning as I was going. And during the writing of this book, the thing that I learned very quickly on, is very instinctual, I think, was get the information fast. As my sources went south. They got cold feet, and so midway through the project, they disappeared. I had all the information that I needed to write the book, and I had to make a decision whether I was going to write the book or not. And so I went ahead and wrote it, not knowing what was going to happen because the investigation had ended. So I had the ending of the investigation, but the prosecution was about to start. So here’s the PS to this, ready? Unbeknownst to me, my ex-husband was working on a piece of that undercover investigation.
Kat
Oh, man.
Kerrie
So as I’m struggling with do I, don’t I, the publisher has decided that they have this brilliant idea that they were going to put the Hells Angels logo, which is the Death’s Head, on the book cover. And it’s a trademarked copyrighted Death’s Head. And it’s on their cuts, it’s on everything that they have. And you can’t just take this and use it in the book world. So I was horrified when I saw the cover, absolutely horrified.
Kat
They hadn’t thought that it would…?
Kerrie
No they hadn’t thought about it. I mean, there’s so many stories with this. And by the way, I do have a writing workshop on my website which is kerriedroban.com.
Kat
I will never be able to do.
Kerrie
I go into a lot of detail on all of my books. Every one of my books has been an interesting backstory, because it is really challenging to navigate this world, not only the subculture of the Hells Angels, but the operatives who didn’t want to be outed. And I couldn’t help them. PS to all of this, while I’m really concerned about keeping everybody’s identities hidden, my ex-husband comes home the night before it’s supposed to be prosecuted, and he says, we’ve been outed in a grand jury indictment, so our last name is outed. And he goes, we have to move. Oh, no. So the terror of all of this is really scary at times. I had no idea what I was doing. I had a family now. I mean, I was just, like, freaking out. So we did we wound up moving, and I had to make a decision whether or not I was going to move forward with this book, with all of the repercussions in it. And I thought, I just spent a couple of years of my life invested in this, and I cannot not do this because I’m a writer first, attorney second. I was throwing it all on the table. And the indictments of the Hells Angels, all 16 of them, got dismissed. So there was no trial.
Kat
Oh, no.
Kerrie
The US. Attorney’s office dismissed the cases, so my book could then it was like almost divine intervention. Like, the book had a license now to go out into the world and these operatives can have their stories told. And I think that’s what really started this whole path of like, being a voice for people that can’t speak or won’t speak. But their stories are so compelling. They need to be told.
Kat
They didn’t even get a trial for their story. They didn’t have anything. Without the book, it would have just disappeared all their years of work. Wow, that’s got to feel pretty good, to have then accepted that job and to be able to tell that story, that would have been lost.
Kerrie
Actually, I felt very privileged to be able to tell that story. The main operative in the case went on to write his own story and has gone on to be able to tell it in the way that he wanted to tell it. Which I think also was really great. Because now you’ve got two versions of the same story and so they really cooperated and kind of dovetailed in with each other and they were told in different ways. So that’s another interesting thing from a writer’s perspective, the same story. It’s kind of like so many writers have written about Kennedy, but each time they write about it, it’s got a new and different perspective to it. I think a lot of people are worried about that sometimes. But can I write a story that is so heavily in the news or heavily profiled? Yes, you can. Because your voice is different.
Kat
Yeah, absolutely. So as you’re doing criminal defense and you are seeing like you’re delving into death penalty work and seeing sort of people in situations that I don’t think a lot of people in the world would be able to handle, very heavy things, and you’re writing very heavy things. How did you come to, I guess, continue on? Was it just love for writing and getting people’s stories out? Because it just seems like a lot of heavy work that you’re trying to do.
Kerrie
Work. Yeah. Honestly, after writing Running with the Devil, I thought I was done. It was so overwhelming. I was exhausted and I was, I think in a really crazy way, like almost traumatized by the whole experience.
Kat
I would be. Yeah.
Kerrie
Plus it took a serious toll on my marriage and I really took some time to sort of figure out what’s my next path here. And I was in law, so I couldn’t really switch gears. I already switched gears. So now I’m like, it depends where I’m doing this, I’m in it. And I really still found that work fascinating and, you know, paying the bills. So my ex said to me, don’t be surprised if somebody from a rival gang approaches you and asks you to write their story. And that’s exactly what happened. Yes. Running with the Devil, the Hells Angels launched my career, because the next book that came my way was The Story of the Pagans. And they’re another one of the Big Five outlaw motorcycle gangs. Now I’m in this niche, right? I don’t even ride a motorcycle. I know nothing about motorcycles at this point. And so I’ve now become like I’ve been positioned as this person who has a bird’s-eye view into this subculture, which is crazy. So, yeah. So I wound up writing Prodigal Father, Pagan Son about a, he’s not a kid anymore, but at the time he was a kid, who had grown up in an organized crime family. His father was the head of the Pagans, and he was recruited by his father’s nemesis to murder his father.
Kat
Oh, my god.
Kerrie
Yeah. This is real. It was a crazy, honestly, with the exception of Aurora, I think that book really hit home for me in a lot of ways.
Kat
Sounds crazy.
Kerrie
In his head writing his point of view, and I had to really, really get to know him.
Kat
He’s the one that wanted the book written.
Kerrie
Yeah. He called me up. He was sitting in his car and he said, I have read Running with the Devil, and I want you to write my story. And he lived in Philadelphia. So here I already have these hours, four to seven. So my writing, what I did with writing changed because I used that time to talk to him, and we talked for two years before I flew him out to Arizona. When I can meet him, because I needed to meet him face-to-face, I had to have that, sort of visceral, like, let me meet you so I can write a story. That was an extraordinary experience. It was a very moving experience, I think, for the both of us. We still keep in touch. Very powerful book, and that one launched the next one. So each person out there found, like, they found me. So I wound up writing about the Big Five biker gangs, and then I had positioned myself as sort of a biker expert.
Kat
Yeah, I would assume so after talking. Wow, it’s so interesting to me. Everyone has a story and to think that there wasn’t somebody out there, almost like they felt like there wasn’t somebody willing to write their story. I would assume a lot of us, sort of, that’s like the edge of society. Most of us don’t really understand or know what to do with that. And so that’s so cool that even your husband, your ex-husband, would think that they would call you. But it makes sense. It’s like, here’s somebody who’s not going to judge me or belittle me or push me to the side or think that my story doesn’t matter, because it does matter. That’s just an incredible thing to have happened.
Kerrie
It really was. And I’m very grateful for it every day. I never forget that, that I am a conduit for somebody else’s story, because for whatever reason, they’re either living undercover or they’re under the thumb of a biker gang or they you know, there’s something about what they’re trying to say that they need to be heard. Sometimes it just amazes me that I’m able to do this for them, and it’s really changed a lot of their lives. I mean, it really, truly has. Like this Prodigal Father, Pagan Son. He wound up going to Australia, to tour in Australia. He got foreign rights, and the publisher flew him out there. He’d never been on an airplane before. He’d never been on radio station. Suddenly he was important and somebody that people would hear his story. So I think, really, it’s such a powerful thing to be able to do. That’s why I think writers have just an incredible skill to be able to transform an experience or story, whether it’s fiction or true. In a way it’s very compelling.
Kat
Yeah, that’s amazing. And it’s definitely I mean, there are lots of people out there with stories, so anybody who’s especially into true, but knows how to write the narrative, like you said, storytelling, I think, always helps. But then so you wrote these different motorcycle gang, true crime, true stories. How did Aurora come about?
Kerrie
Yeah, I know. I write the 1% of true crime, right? I’m the 1% of biker gangs. I write the 1% of true crime that most people don’t even touch because it’s too crazy. Like, there’s not any crime. But I had written one regular crime about a bombing in Tucson, and so I had that ability to write in that style as well. There’s trial, and there’s, like, sociopaths I can deal with. And Aurora was complete luck again, because I was looking for an agent, and I was actually trying to pitch a completely different book at the time. And every time you finish a book, you always wonder, is this going to be my last book? Are really going to ever ask me to write another story? Right? And the agent happens to have Aurora come across your desk, and they needed a writer.
Kat
Somebody pitched the story without a writer.
Kerrie
Yes, they pitched it. The crazy thing is, there had been a gag order on the psychiatrist. So for people who don’t know what Aurora is, it’s about the mass shooter, James Holmes, who went into a Colorado movie theater during the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises and slaughtered 12 and critically wounded 72 others, but the story was also about his treating psychiatrist who saw him in the six sessions before he amassed this arsenal and committed outrageous crime. So she had been under a gag order for three years. The judge was a public trial, and the judge said, you cannot talk about this, everything was sealed. And he lifted that gag order. When he lifted it, all the documents were accessible, became public record. They’d never before been released, and the psychiatrist could tell her story. So it’s a very similar kind of thing. She had been silenced and really really wanted to say, this is what happened. This is why I couldn’t stop him. And the whole time that she was gagged, people were attributing things to her. They were demonizing her. They were threatening to kill her because she had not stopped this mass shooter. And so it was a fascinating case, not only because out of two perspectives, so I had everything about James Holmes that she didn’t know, that she couldn’t have known, right? But that was happening simultaneous to her treating him. So Aurora is this incredibly interesting, informative, like, bird’s-eye view into the life cycle of a mass shooter. And it’s never before been accessible. I mean, now we’ve had 37 mass shootings this year, which is really extraordinary. But at the time, in 2012, james Holmes was the first mass shooter to have intentionally survived his killing. He wanted to survive it. So he was a neurosciences doctoral student. He was brilliant. And he was in the university neurosciences program, being mentored with professors in some of the most, like, brilliant minds of the country. And the psychiatrist was also, like, in the top 1% of her profession, studying this. So here you’ve got this perfect storm, okay. And nobody saw it. And she, the psychiatrist, her name is Dr. Fenton, she actually taught a class in mass shooting. So, like, she was the perfect person that was poised to be able to spot this, right? If she could have spot it. And so the whole message behind this is, if you want to know how to spot a killer, read Aurora and find out that you can’t.
Kat
You can’t. That’s kind of heartbreaking.
Kerrie
It’s heartbreaking, but it’s also I mean, so not only do you have James Holmes as the only person to intentionally survive a shooting at the time, but you also have Dr. Lynne Fenton, his treating psychiatrist, who’s never had that before. She’s the only psychiatrist in the history of psychiatrists to have ever been outed publicly. So she had such a burden on her shoulder, so she decided to be the voice for this. And so she put herself at great personal risk to come out of hiding. Her whole life had been destroyed, as many lives were. And that’s part of the book too, which is the ripple effect of trauma. And just as a PS for that, it traumatized me too, as the writer. I mean, that book, beyond any other book, really took a long time for me to recover from it. I mean, I don’t think I ever really will recover from it, but there were scenes in that book where I would just be sobbing as I was writing it, because it’s like the first time that you not only get insight into what this mass shooter had planned, but just the methodology he went, how he amassed his arsenal, the intention behind it. But you also get what happened with the defense lawyers who represented him. So this was very interesting. It was sort of life imitating art, you know, because I had represented so many evil people. And, you know, my job was really to save them. Just like Dr. Fenton’s job, right? To do no harm. I mean, you’re a psychiatrist. You’re wanting to help people. As a defense lawyer, you’re wanting to help people. You’re wanting to see their redemption in people that other people see as monsters. So it was a very interesting sort of like, wow, you know, here’s this woman who I can really relate to, and here are these defense lawyers that I can really relate to. And what happened to them. And many of them, this was a career-ending case for them. They couldn’t go on. And the other really fascinating thing for me as a defense lawyer is we’re not allowed to interview jurors in penalty cases. There are certain rules that are in place for that because, you know, and I think for good reason. I mean, jurors don’t want to be you don’t want to have a chilling effect on your jury. You don’t want to be able to broadcast, hey, this is what happens to them, so that the next capital case that comes around. You have now tainted a pool of jurors. As a writer, I could talk to jurors. And that was very interesting because I had an insight into how these cases impact jurors and it gave me a whole new sensitivity toward it. James Holmes didn’t get the death penalty.
Kat
Is it not in Colorado?
Kerrie
No, they had it in Colorado. But one juror held out. He got life. He got the longest sentence in US. History. He got over 3000 years.
Kat
Was he trying to get the death penalty? Why did he want to stay alive?
Kerrie
He wanted to stay alive because he wanted people to study his brain.
Kat
No way.
Kerrie
He actually produced a notebook that he mailed to the psychiatrist on the night of the shooting. And the notebook, I mean, Dr. Fenton never saw this notebook until recently. But the notebook really outlined his methodical plan to murder. It was fascinating. In the notebook, he has several pages, that just have one word, ‘why’. And the word why gets bigger and bigger and bigger as the pages turn. And I think he was very himself, very troubled and conflicted as to, because he had fantasies of killing people from the time he was a child. So it’s a really disturbing book on a lot of levels, but it’s also really insightful because people always want to I think it’s human nature to want to point a finger at somebody and blame somebody. If you had done XYZ, this wouldn’t have happened because it’s such a senseless, horrific crime and you want to be able to have some kind of vindication. But I think that really what is most helpful in maybe prevention of these, is not mental health, ironically. Because, a lot of these individuals that commit mass shootings do not go to psychiatrists.
Kat
Or they don’t tell them the truth.
Kerrie
They don’t. James Holmes, it was an aberration that he wound up there, and he wound up seeing Dr. Fenton for a completely different reason, wasn’t because he had thoughts of killing people. So mental health is great for the ripple effect, for the people in communities. This is not going to stop in most of these cases, it’s not going to stop a shooter. And so I think what really this book says is it’s pretty impossible to spot a killer. But there are some common denominators. They’re mostly young men between ages of 18 and 24. And if we had more laws, like red flag laws and things where people felt like they could identify a problem without a repercussions. And I think that’s the biggest issue is that people are afraid to come forward and say, hey, I think this person is really trouble. They’re posting things on social media where they’re in my English class and they’re sending me very disturbing essays, and I think we should take a closer look. But the problem now is that a lot of those individuals are afraid to come forward because they don’t want to be wrong.
Kat
Yes. Isn’t that a terrible ripple effect? We don’t want to get involved in other people’s lives because if you’re wrong, there’s a different ripple effect, right? So we just all wait and then like you said, we point the finger. But I think this is a really important book because we all talk about how we need to try to understand something. But this has a perspective of so many different people and what can we do? And what can’t we do? And maybe the change of the conversation, the change that needs to happen, instead of just feel like America sometimes just talks in circles.
Kerrie
Yes. It’s rhetoric, and we don’t need rhetoric, clear cut answers like, what can we actually do about it?
Kat
It’s not just saving their lives, the 12 people or the 72 that got hurt, but his. Like, if you could help somebody not commit that, that is saving their life. He’s going to die in jail.
Kerrie
He himself is tortured by it. Yeah, it’s really interesting. Mass shootings are an epidemic now. And I know people are grasping at straws and they’re having this, but I think you’re right. It is a conversation that needs to continue, and it needs to expand, and it needs to not be so, you know, forgive the pun, but shooting from the hip. You don’t want to just say, this is the catch all to solve the problem, because it’s a very complicated issue. I really applaud Dr. Fenton for the courage to come forward and say, this is what happened to me. This is my story. And I really hope that with this story, this telling, we can continue the conversation.
Kat
Right. Right. I think it’s a very it’s very important also for the American public to understand what people know and what they don’t know. Like, what do jurors know? Because we tend to assume a lot. I mean, it’s terrible that she got death threats. She’s not responsible for another person’s motives or actions. But like you said, we just were trying to find a reason and being able to tell the story. That’s wonderful that the judge allowed her to do that because I wonder how many stories are under gag orders and they can’t say anything and they just have to live in silence.
Kerrie
Yeah, I think many more than we care to really pay attention to. I also applaud the judge in this case for allowing it to be publicized. He also was part of that conversation and changing it and saying, look, we have a chance here. Somebody actually survived this mass shooting to delve into his brain, into his psyche and find out was he an American Psycho or was there something else going on? Here’s Dr. Fenton, who’s in a listening profession, and here she is confronted with what she actually describes as the presence of evil. And so it’s so conflicting for her as somebody who has sworn to do no harm. She’s there to help people. She’s there to really dig deep to find out what’s going on. And she really did go above and beyond to try to get help for him. I mean, she violated HIPAA to find out was this thing that was happening to him something that was recent or was it provoked by something? Was he always this way? She reached out to his mother. I mean, these are things that psychiatrists don’t do, right? She saw a need and just went above and beyond and was completely crucified for it.
Kat
I’m so glad that she gets to tell her story. Not to make it completely different. But I am very, I guess, perturbed by the fact of gag orders. I have a friend in Canada that can’t do it, the royal family. It really perturbs me that they can’t say anything because you have a story, you have your side and you should be allowed to defend yourself. And so I’m glad that she found you and that you could write the story together about Aurora and about her side and then, like, the other side as well. And hopefully others will write their story. I mean, it would be fascinating to hear the judge or the jurors about this case. But now that you have this out, you said it took a while to sort of get through this. It’s impacting you still. Do you think it is your last book or do you think never say that?
Kerrie
No, it’s not my last book. I really believe that a story that is not shared is not heard. And stories are really for other people because they can change lives and so I think it’s that mission and that thing that propels me forward. I love the process of writing, but I do think that the more provocative the subject, something that I really believe in, that I think is going to get to lend a voice to something, is what propels me to continue. So I don’t think that I will ever stop writing because it’s really, truly a passion. I think it’s my heart center, but I really do try to take gaps between them.
Kat
Yes, and recover.
Kerrie
I recover. My children used to be my comic relief. They were such bright spots. They still are very bright spots in my life, but they’re grown. So now I have to find other bright spots.
Kat
Maybe TikTok.
Kerrie
Yeah, I know. So, you know, nature, things that are just the complete opposite of this dark world.
Kat
Yeah. That’s a good point, though, for any writer who is going to write true crime or even fiction crime, like mental health for us will work.
Kerrie
Yes, absolutely. Mindfulness. Mindfulness.
Kat
Yes. So where can people find you mentioned that you have, like, a true crime. Do you have a course or just you have a writing workshop?
Kerrie
Yeah, it’s a writing workshop. It’s on my website, kerriedroban.com. And it’s a nine-week course. You can take it at your own pace, but it’s chock full of information on basically how I did this and the background of it. And there’s a lot of really great tips in there. Sort of goes through the rewards and pitfalls of writing true crime, because I wish that I had had a mentor, to say these things. So I feel like it’s something that I also want to share with other people. Who want to embark on this.
Kat
And if they’re not a lawyer, do you think that that gave you an advantage? If you’re going to write true crime, do you kind of need to know a lawyer?
Kerrie
You know what? You absolutely do not have to be a lawyer. I don’t even think you have to be a journalist. I think you have to be curious, and kind of go for the jugular. Because writing true crime is like a hybrid. You know, you’re getting into the heads of your characters who are real people. So you have to really be good at interviewing and talking to them and not be afraid to approach them. But you definitely can have a lawyer in your back pocket and that’s always helpful.
Kat
And have your course.
Kerrie
Yes, we talk about that in my course.
Kat
And then where can they find Aurora?
Kerrie
Aurora is on Amazon. It’s in every major bookstore. So you can Google my name and you’ll see all the books that come up under my name.
Kat
Well, we will have those links in the show notes and you can find Kerrie on pretty much every social media. And then kerriedroban.com we’ll have in the show notes below, that you guys can click on thank you so much, Kerrie. This is fascinating. True crime is like something I didn’t know much about, but it sounds like a lot of work, but interesting work.
Kerrie
Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.