Goodbye. Have a great year. Carry your cell phone

Goodbye. Have a Great Year. Carry Your Cell Phone.

My youngest niece has left for college. Kate is bright, beautiful, and enthusiastic about this new adventure. I’ve had a flurry of excited e-mails with pictures of her dorm room. She loves her classes. Her roommates are great. She calls to ask if I can order a book from Amazon and rush it to her when the school bookstore doesn’t have it. She e-mails to say she’s made the cheerleading team.

I’m so happy for her, this strong and agile young woman who wants to help others train to achieve their full athletic potential, and thrilled that she wants to share this with me. Yet my pleasure is tinged with sadness. I wish my sister, the mother who loved her so much, could be the recipient of these messages.

My sister Sara has been gone for ten years. I’m not sure what I believe about the afterlife, but I do know that sometimes I feel her spirit’s restless stirrings. Sara was a ruthless and incisive iconoclast, so usually she’s around to tweak my ego. Right now, though, she’s restless for a very different reason. Sara was hypervigilant about her children’s safety; now her daughter is embarking on an adventure that is full of wonder and promise, and fraught with danger.

Recently, I spent 2 ½ years researching and writing a book about a young woman’s murder. Amy St. Laurent was smart and lovely woman who believed in people’s essential goodness. She was also sensible, self-confident, and risk averse. She was forthright about keeping herself safe. She carried mace in her purse. She didn’t hesitate to leave uncomfortable situations or challenge those who made her feel unsafe. Yet one misstep put her in the hands of a charming predator without her cell phone, and within hours, Amy was dead.

We all want our children to believe that the world is a good place. We want them to feel safe, to be able to trust people, and to live their lives without looking over their shoulders. We also want them to be safe. To do that, they have to take responsibility for their own safety.

At every book talk I’ve given for Finding Amy: A True Story of Murder in Maine, mothers, grandmothers, and aunts have thanked me for writing the book and asked for advice to keep their loved ones safe. With the help of Lisa Beecher, police chief at the University of Southern Maine and others, my co-writer, Portland Deputy Chief Joseph Loughlin and I developed a list of safety tips for young women to help them avoid being a victim.

The last thing Amy St. Laurent’s mother heard from her daughter was “I love you, Mom,” at the end of a phone call. Tell your daughters, your granddaughters, your nieces or your friends that you love them and want them to stay safe. Please print out these tips and send them to the ones you love. Please call them and insist that they carry their cell phones and keep them charged.

· Statistics show that most sexual assaults involve alcohol and drugs. Ingestion of even a small amount can alter your perceptions and lower your defenses. Avoid excessive use of these substances.

· Trust your instincts. If a situation makes you feel uneasy, leave.

· If you go to a club or party, go with friends. Have an understanding that you will watch out for each other.

· Never leave your drink unattended. It only takes a few seconds for someone to add a debilitating substance, commonly known as a date rape drug, to your beverage.

· Never accept a drink from someone you don’t know well. Bartenders and waitpersons are the only strangers you should accept a drink from.

· Never drink anything that looks or smells strange.

· Avoid drinking from punch bowls.

· If you feel very drunk after having only a small amount of alcohol, don’t take any chances. Tell your friend, the bartender, or waitperson that you think you may have been drugged.

· Women are often conditioned to be "nice," trusting and to spare other people’s feelings. If someone is interested in you and you don’t feel the same way, be straightforward. Don’t make excuses or try to spare their feelings. Just tell them you are not interested.

· Be cautious about giving out your personal information or that of others. The less information a stranger or casual acquaintance has about you, the better your chances of not becoming a victim.

· If you think you are being stalked, contact local law enforcement immediately.

· People are not always honest about themselves. Always keep this in mind.

· Don’t get into a vehicle with someone you don’t know well, because you become a prisoner if that person has negative intentions.

· If you suspect that you or someone else has ingested a date rape drug or sedative-like substance, get help immediately. Call 911 or have a friend help you get to a hospital. Tell medical staff what you suspect, so the appropriate tests and samples can be taken for evidence purposes and proper treatment. Date rape drugs do not stay in the body for long and delay may mean the loss of valuable evidence.

· If you a partying at a private location, remember that video cameras or tape recorders may be set up and operating even if you can’t see them.

· Don’t hesitate to call the police for help. Don’t feel you would be bothering them, or that your situation is not serious enough. They would much rather prevent a tragedy than respond to one.

· Keep your cell phone charged and keep it with you.

I just learned that my niece does not have a cell phone. We are going to take care of that today.

(Note: for tips about internet safety, go to www.findingamy.com and follow the links)

Kate Flora is the author of 10 books, including the Edgar nominated nonfiction book, Finding Amy: A True Story of Murder in Maine

Seeing Characters Come Alive

Last Friday night, my co-author, Deputy Chief Joe Loughlin, organized a big launch party for his Portland friends at the Regency Hotel. Around seven p.m., when the party was well underway, Joe announced that we were going to be doing a press conference, and a few minutes later, there were people with TV cameras and Joe was standing at the podium, speaking into the mic.

This was not the sort of book party I was used to. Mine are generally populated by my neighbors, the friends who have supported me through the long process of writing a book, and lots of other writers.

Joe spoke about the process of writing the book, and his goals for writing the book--to immortalize Amy St. Laurent's spirit, celebrating all that she had done in her twenty-five years of life; to warn other young women about the existence of predators, how ready they are to prey on an unwary or trusting moment, and how often they don't look predatory but may be extremely glib and charming; to take readers inside the investigation so they can have a realistic glimpse of the police officer's daily reality, and see how dedicated and hard-working the case detectives were; and last, but by no means least, to make people aware of the Amy St. Laurent foundation, begun by Amy's mother just months after her daughter's death, and to promote the foundations goals of funding projects such as R.A.D. courses, to help make other vulnerable women and children safer.

Then came what was for me an amazing moment. One by one, Joe called forward all of the people I'd striven so hard for the past two years to bring to life. The primary detectives, Danny Young from the Portland Police Department and Scott Harakles from the Maine State Police. Sgt. Bruce Coffin, the other Portland detective who'd worked on the case. The detective's supervising sergeants, Sgt. Tommy Joyce, from Portland, and Sgt. Matt Stewart, from the State Police. Then came the wardens, my wonderful telephone pals, who had generously spent so much time explaining their part in the search for Amy's body: Lt. Pat Dorian, who had made that first, tentative phone call offering help, and Sgt. Kevin Adam, the mapping and GPS expert. They were joined by the two prosecutors who'd tried the case, Deputy Attorney General Bill Stokes and Assistant Attorney General Fern LaRochelle.

Then Amy's family joined the line. Her mother, Diane Jenkins, her father, Dennis St. Laurent, her sister Julie, her stepmother, Kathy Tuttle, her ex-boyfriend, Richard Sparrow, and Diane's good friend, Lucille Holt.

Suddenly, lined up across the back of a hotel function room were many of the major characters from the book. When Diane stepped up to the podium, and spoke of how the book would be worth it if it saved just one young woman from what had happened to her daughter, most of us were in tears. And it brought home again, as had so many other moments during the writing of this book, how this isn't just a story. This is a real book about real people. Real dedication. Real heroes. Real suffering and real loss.

And once again, as has happened so many times during the writing of Finding Amy, I felt the huge responsibility of trying to tell Amy's story, and hoped I'd done it well.

Here are some comments from our readers:


I loved how you made the real life of police officers and their work
come alive. I was literally in tears about 4 or 5 times. It was
fascinating...you must write more! Really, though, the heart and soul you put into that project shines through on every page. Congratulations.

Lisa Beecher
Chief of Police
University of Southern Maine


Just finished your book. The most emotional, gripping book I've ever read. When you finally found her, I bawled like a baby. Was sitting at my kitchen counter reading the book, and when I came to the page when you'd finally determined it was Amy, I put the book down and just cried. Hard.

Cried again like a baby when the verdict came in.

Christ I knew the outcome and I was STILL on the edge of my seat. I'll never look at you and Tommy Joyce the same again. Thank God you had the guts and courage to put this in writing.

Bob Cott

The 3:00 a.m. Club

I'm only a part-time member of the 3:00 a.m. club, those restless sleepers who find themselves awake, brains buzzing with anxiety, ideas, or lists in the darkest hours of the night, but last night I was up and writing and wondering what the other members of the club were doing out in their dark and private spaces. It's strange to sit alone at the keyboard, imagining other writers doing the same while the world around us is sleeping.

This is supposed to be the honeymoon time--those lovely moments when the book is finally written and beginning to appear in stores and the writer can sit back and enjoy a sense of accomplishment before reviews start coming out--some inevitably unkind--and the pleasure becomes bittersweet. But the experience is different from that of bringing out my seven works of fiction. This story is real and everywhere I go, I seem to meet someone who has a connection to the book.

I find myself holding my breath when the phone rings, uneasy when I log on to check my e-mail. What will people be saying? How will they react to the book?

Writing Finding Amy was a huge challenge for me. As a fiction writer, I'm used to being almost entirely in control of character and story (although, like most writers, I do have characters to take on lives of their own). It isn't like that with writing the real. I'm tied to what actually happened in the case--people, places, timelines and facts--yet still challenged to find a way to organize the material and write about it that will make it interesting reading. In this case, the facts themselves and the way the evidence and characters emerged allowed me to create a natural tension and story-line as dramatic as any fiction.

Because increasingly publishers are pushing the job of promotion onto writers, lately I've spent a lot of the time I'd like to use to create new stories sitting at my desk, trying to imagine what I could write or say that might get someone to pick up the book and read it. One day I was heading into Cambridge, Ma to meet my husband and my son for dinner. On the drive in, an idea hit me. The instant I was inside Legal Sea Foods, I pulled out the notebook we writers always carry and jotted this down:

Imagine a mother so close to her twenty-five year old daughter that they talk on the phone almost daily, and then one day...the phone stops ringing.

Imagine a homicide detective getting a phone call at home, telling him that a 25-year-old woman named Amy is missing and asking if he can help, when at the time, his own daughter is 25, and named Amy....

Imagine eight weeks of searching by police and her family, tromping through woodlands, walking beaches, looking under piers and wharves, searching dumpters and abandoned buildings, railroad rights of way, culverts and storm drains, with winter coming on.

Then imagine...Finding Amy