The Tricky Business of Promoting True Crime

I didn’t read a true-crime book until after I’d written my own. This would explain why my true-crime work, The Kill Jar, doesn’t play by the rules. I simply didn’t know there were any rules until after I wrote it. The Kill Jar is as much a memoir as a dissection of the Oakland County Child Killings circa 1976 to 1977 in Detroit, and thereby falls outside the norm.

Mostly, the book gets a lot of four- and five-star reviews from readers who appreciate that I wove my personal narrative with the narrative of the crimes. There are also readers who say things like, “Who cares about Appelman’s shady, drug-addicted girlfriend! I want to know about the murders!” And I’ve been accused of being a narcissist for speaking about myself in the same sentence as the dead, even though a major goal of the book is to connect the living with those who we’ve lost. Insinuations that I’m self-serving are always hurtful but those few disgruntled readers approach The Kill Jar through a strict true-crime genre lens, so they’re understandably disappointed. They don’t get what they expect and they give the book meager stars to reflect that. I’ve mostly stopped reading reviews, but on occasion, I will glance at my Amazon rating, and I’ll feel either joy or anguish—predicated not by the reviews themselves but by the degree of shame I feel at having looked at the reviews in the first place.

I like to think that public reception doesn’t matter, that we write the book we were meant to write. In fact, I didn’t even set out to write about a true crime event. But perhaps I should have known I would end up in this genre: As a child, somebody had tried to abduct me during a period when the city of Detroit was on alert for a serial killer of children. It’s natural that my own abduction story, as uneventful as it was, would make me obsessed with unsolved child killings, which would turn into a major focus of my work.

I need to confess, though: I’ve always been an obsessive. Once, a woman from my graduate school disappeared for two days. She was rumored to be suicidal and I spent approximately 24 hours out of 48 driving in a one-hour radius around her home, intensely searching for her. She turned up in a motel room 10 minutes beyond that radius, alive but having overdosed. Later, when she got out of the psychiatric ward, we took a walk and held hands. But here’s the twist: I barely knew her. Rather, I had obsessed about her possible demise and, in doing so, had briefly fallen in love—not with the woman but with her potential absence.

There was also a brief period in my life when I would park my car outside a certain mobile home community where 12 out of 30 residents were registered sex offenders. I took my lunch breaks sitting behind tinted windows and watching the community entrance. I like to think I was standing guard, trying to protect future victims, but like most obsessives, I was also standing guard over something from my past. In this instance, I think I felt compelled toward duty and service. I was somewhat darkly honoring the lives of those I hadn’t the power to affect when it might have mattered most.

In writing The Kill Jar, I also set out to tell a story that deals with my obsessions. One of the unforeseen consequences of exploring the Oakland County Child Killings (OCCK), as with any true crime exploration, is that the victims’ remaining loved ones were affected by my obsession. In my book, my intention was to treat the dead and living alike with great respect. Upon reflection, I can see moments when I inadvertently overstepped. I give myself 4.5 out of 5 stars for consciously caring about everyone my research and writing touched. I was pretty good, but I wasn’t perfect. I remember reading from The Kill Jar to a public audience, with 150 people present. One of them was a family member of an OCCK victim. I spent a lot of time schmoozing the crowd, exciting them with tales of how my book found its way to a publisher. But later, the shame I felt for doing this was overwhelming. My obsession had shifted from selling the case to selling the book.

Last week, a TV show, which my book was the springboard for, debuted on the Investigation Discovery Network. Titled Children of the Snow, the four-hour docuseries chronicles, among many other things related to the OCCK investigation, my personal hunt for the truth behind these killings. I was an on-camera investigator and one of the executive producers, so of course I wanted people to watch the show. I sent out messages about the project via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I updated my website and sent emails. I texted friends and used my family members to help spread the word through their own social platforms.

But at some point, a few days after the airing of Children of the Snow was met with accolades, I watched a cold rain fall outside my living room window and felt that familiar shame again. I spend a lot of time alone, writing in rooms that nobody visits, speaking to walls that don’t speak back, so it’s natural to want company, to want an audience, to nearly beg for a conversation about what I’ve been up to. I’m alone with my process and I’ve now dedicated 14 years of my life to thinking about four children I never knew. That’s important, right? That’s what I tell myself, anyway, when the machine (the publishing industry) requires that I promote the material at my own time and expense. In fact, if I don’t promote The Kill Jar, the machine might just turn itself off to me.

I have other obsessions besides the dead. One day, I hope to write about life. Sometimes I think about Mark Stebbins, Jill Robinson, Kristine Mihelich, and Timothy King—each a victim to the OCCK—and I imagine them playing in the grass somewhere, or I imagine the chlorinated smell of their hair after a swim, the hot sunlight across their cheeks. I like to think that those perfect moments, for all of us, can outlast the darkness.

But I think part of the shame I feel comes from my accidental objectification of the dead. I know, deeply, there are many reasons to have written about the OCCK case, not the least of which was to provide exposure in an effort to solve these crimes. Still, I think my fluctuating sense of shame is important to maintain because writing about murder is really something. The dead bang their fists on our doors, telling us they’ve paid enough. They don’t want a ticket to whatever show we think we’ve done them justice by. When I’m writing, the threat of the dead approaching my threshold keeps me honest. If they never show up again, I hope this means I’ve done my job or, at least, whatever job I could do with my limited skill set. True crime is, after all, a story of the once-living, those as close to our hearts as our own loved ones and neighbors. As an honest person, I might sell you a copy of my book but I wouldn’t sell you out. Why should I be any less careful about my relationships with the dead?