Playing God and Finding Amy – How One Thing Leads to Another

Several years ago, I was having breakfast at the Mid-Atlantic Mystery conference in Philadelphia with a police lieutenant from Newark, Delaware. I had met Tom LeMin over the internet when he answered a query about digging up buried bones. He had asked what I needed to know to write the scene I was working on and then sent me a whole notebook of excerpts from his training manuals about how to excavate buried bones. Now, over breakfast, he was telling me a heartbreaking story about a Newark detective who had been so affected by a case involving the killing of a baby that he’d suffered a heart attack and had to leave the force. LeMin’s story sparked my writer’s imagination and his damaged detective gave me Sgt. Joe Burgess, a Portland, Maine homicide detective haunted by a case where he could never get justice for a murdered child. I went home with the story cooking in my head, sat down, and for the next four and a half months, wrote obsessively until I had finished Playing God, my first Det. Joe Burgess mystery. Needing to get Portland police procedures and culture right, I began an e-mail correspondence with a Portland police lieutenant. During a tour of the police department, he introduced me to Lt. Joseph Loughlin, who was head of the Criminal Investigations Division (CID). Lt. Loughlin shook my hand enthusiastically, saying, “You’re a writer? I’ve always wanted to write.” In that instant, he became my “go-to” guy when I needed information about police procedure. In my meetings with Lt. Loughlin, he often talked about a real murder case he was working on, the mysterious disappearance of a pretty 25-year-old woman after a night of dancing in Portland. The young woman had gone out one night to show a visitor from Florida the nightlife in Portland’s Old Port area, and was never seen again. He said someday he wanted to write about the case, so I urged him to take careful notes. Two years passed. I went on to write a Second Joe Burgess mystery, The Angel Of Knowlton Park. Lt. Loughlin kept saying someday he would write the book about Amy St. Laurent.

Finally, one day, I got sick of waiting for him to find the time to write. His talk about the case had convinced me that Amy mattered too much not to tell her story. I called him and suggested we try a collaboration. After a few nervous meetings, he agreed, and we embarked on our project. I’ve spent the past two years driving to Maine, reading police reports, interviewing detectives, learning about investigation, interviewing more detectives, interviewing the prosecutors who tried the case, and developing a deep respect for the victim. I’ve also learned the many differences between writing fiction, where the author is completely in control, and writing nonfiction, where the challenge is to tell the story using real characters and real facts. In introducing his book about the Rwandan genocide, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, Philip Gourevitch says, “This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.” That was the challenge writing Finding Amy. Her murder was real, yet the detectives and prosecutors had to imagine it to solve the crime and prosecute her killer. And we had to imagine it again to tell her story. The result of our two-year collaboration is Finding Amy, A True Story of Murder in Maine. Finding Amy Captain Joseph K. Loughlin and Kate Clark Flora University Press of New England ISBN: 0-58465-533-X $26.00 Lt. Joseph Loughlin and Kate Flora