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It's always a good idea to put your characters under stress. For some ideas, take a peek at the Holmes and Rahe stress scale:

Life Event Value
Death of spouse 100
Divorce 73
Marital separation 65
Jail term 63
Death of close family member 63
Personal injury or illness 53
Marriage 50
Fired at work 47
Marital reconciliation 45
Retirement 45
Change in health of family member 44
Pregnancy 40
Sex difficulties 39
Gain of new family member 39
Business readjustment 39
Change in financial state 38
Death of close friend 37
Change to a different line of work 36
Change in number of arguments with spouse 35
A large mortgage or loan 31
Foreclosure of mortgage or loan 30
Change in responsibilities at work 29
Son or daughter leaving home 29
Trouble with in-laws 29
Outstanding personal achievement 28
Spouse begins or stops work 26
Begin or end school/college 26
Change in living conditions 25
Revision of personal habits 24
Trouble with boss 23
Change in work hours or conditions 20
Change in residence 20
Change in school/college 20
Change in recreation 19
Change in church activities 19
Change in social activities 18
A moderate loan or mortgage 17
Change in sleeping habits 16
Change in number of family get-togethers 15
Change in eating habits 15
Vacation 13
Christmas 12
Minor violations of the law 11

A local 12-year-old boy was found by a passing motorist, tied up and pleading for help. He told investigators that two older teens who had already bullied him in the past had tied his hands and feet with his own shoelaces and rolled him down a hill. Two hours later he managed to make his way back up and flag down help. He worked with a police sketch artist to help identify his tormentors.

But then the story took a twist.

How many times have you watched a TV detective show and wondered why the good guys used their flashlights at a crime scene instead of flipping a switch. Is it all just because it makes for cool visuals on screen?

It turns out the answer is no. A crime scene investigator explains why it might make more sense to use a flashlight than turn on the lights.









A man who was a spy writes, “Operations people don’t just collect intelligence; they blackmail foreign officials, scientists and business people; bribe union leaders; break into embassies; assassinate people; overthrow governments; and sometimes, far worse (or better, depending on your perspective).”

Read about who makes the perfect spy here.

You've got to turn your speakers way up to get the full effect. I wasn't the only one in my neighborhood who went outside to gape.

A story in the New York Times begins: “In the dark early hours of an October morning in 2009, acting on an anonymous tip, police officers in the French city of Mulhouse picked up an elderly German doctor who had been left — bound, beaten and bleeding — in a street near the municipal courthouse. The man, Dieter Krombach, had been kidnapped outside his home in Germany and secreted across the border into France, where there was a warrant for his arrest in connection with the death of a French girl nearly three decades ago.”


Truth is stranger than fiction. Read more here.

Researchers found that psychopaths:
- Use the past tense more.
- Have more “dysfluencies” — the "uhs" and "ums."
- Show a lack of emotion.
- Speak in terms of cause-and-effect.
- Focus on basic needs, such as food, drink and money.

Read more here.

I’ve known two psychopaths. Possibly a third. None of them killers (at least not of physical bodies).

When I was at my mom’s house recently, I came across this picture of my grandmother. It was taken around the time that my great grandfather gunned down her boyfriend.

My grandmother didn’t marry until she was 32, in 1920. I used to just figure she was a late bloomer.

In 2009, when I should have been working on my editor’s revision letter, I goofed off by Googling my grandmother’s name. “Effie Satterwhite.” Google has obviously been scanning more books since the last time I looked, including one published in 1907 that listed the opinions of the Arkansas Supreme Court.

One of which involved Effie. When Effie was 18, her father shot her boyfriend for kissing her.

I’ve got booklets of family history and this is mentioned NOWHERE. My mom didn’t know it. She is also sure my dad, who died in 2003, didn’t know.

According to the court records, when she was 17, Effie started seeing a man named Jim Wallis. One night they went to an “entertainment,” and returned at 11 pm. “She started to go in the house, but was stopped by Wallis who reached out his hand and drew her to him and kissed her. She put her hands against him and pushed him away. They walked to the end of the porch, and stood there talking until the clock struck eleven. Wallis looked at his watch and then turned and kissed her again. He then left the house.”

Effie went inside, heard a door open, and then saw her father “going down the steps with a gun in his hands.” She heard the shot, and tried to run to Jim. Her father grabbed her, and said it was all her fault for hugging and kissing Jim. Finally he let Effie go to her boyfriend, who lay bleeding in the street.

At the trial, Effie’s brother testified that a year earlier he had seen Effie and Jim together “in a very suspicious attitude, conducting themselves in what he thought a very unbecoming manner on the front porch.” He ordered Effie inside, and told Jim to never come back. But Jim did, the next day, and told Effie’s brother that he loved her.

They continued to see each other until the night he was gunned down. My great-grandfather’s defense was that he was sure Jim “was trying to seduce his daughter and relieve her of her virtue.” But the jury found that the two intended to marry.

My great-grandfather was convicted of assault with intent to kill, and his appeal was denied. Jim died in a hospital four months after the shooting.

And my grandmother did not marry for 14 more years.

She was 72 when I was born, and 90 when she died. She was slender, with a sharp mind and sharp opinions. She was prim, severe, judgmental, fanatically religious. She could whistle really well.

I want to write a book where my grandmother and Jim, the star-crossed lovers, are reunited in the present time.

These lines popped into my head today while I was running:

"I'm not going with you," she says, not even looking at the gun. "You're going to have to shoot me."

So I do.

“Five nights a week, Phoenix dresses in a superhero outfit of his own invention and chases car thieves and breaks up bar fights and changes the tires of stranded strangers.” writes Jon Ronson in GQ. “I've flown to Seattle to join him on patrol.”

Read more about men who dress and act as super heroes.

Knight Owl supposedly watches over my city, but I've never seen him. (Then again, I don't go to the kind of places that call for super heroes.)

If you write about crime, then you should know about process servers - and one might make an interesting character. A process is set of court documents giving legal notice to a person that they are subject to a summons or a complaint. As Wikipedia says, " In California and most other states, the documents must be visible to the person being served, i.e., not in a sealed envelope. If the individual refuses to accept service, flees, closes the door, etc., and the individual has been positively identified as the person to be served, documents may be "drop" served, and it is considered a valid service."

An article in the Anchorage Daily News about a process server says, “Severson will find you on Facebook. He'll camp out down the street and wait for you to come outside. He'll show up at your work. If he needs to, he'll fly to you in a small plane, four-wheel to your rural cabin, or paddle to you in a canoe. He's a process server. He's been in the business for more than 20 years, longer than most anybody here.”

Read more about the life of a process server here.

Can you see what's right in front of you?

Maybe not. [And if you haven't watched the video of the folks playing basketball while you count how many passes they make, click on the link.]

In an experiment, volunteers are asked to run after a jogger (who is part of the experiment) and count how many times the jogger touches his hat. But what happens when the researchers add in something on the side? Will the volunteer see it?

Two-thirds of the time, no. Not even when what's going in the side is especially violent and startling.

This finding comes too late for Kevin Conley, a Boston cop convicted of perjury when he said he had never seen other cops, all of them involved in an intense chase, who brutally assaulted what turned out not to be the bad guy, but a black cop in plain clothes. Conley was the only cop who even admitted being near the beating. But he claimed not to have seen it.



Read more here.

Imagine you are at a bar or restaurant and you tweet about it, not even naming the place. A little while later, an employee says there's a call for you. When you answer, a voice calls you by name and says, "Like this phone call, death can catch you anywhere, anytime. Don't you want to leave a last message before it's too late?"

This is actually really happening. Ad age reports: This is "an actual scenario, being played out again and again, in the service of a web app called If I Die from a startup called Willook. Two Israeli boutique agencies have collaborated in the effort, which chooses prospects from the Twittersphere, follows their feeds and -- using the geolocation metadata embedded in the tweets to ascertain the prospect's whereabouts -- phones them there to recommend If I Die. Yes, the marketer just appears, like the Grim Reaper, to warn you that the Grim Reaper can just appear. The offer is to leave a farewell (or parting shot) for friends, enemies or loved ones via your iPhone or whatever."

Read more about this rather creepy use of technology and social media.

The news story begins:

Gaby Rodriguez would worry whenever anyone asked to touch her baby bump.

It wasn't because she felt shy or embarrassed. It was because the bulge - fashioned from wire mesh and cotton quilt batting - didn't actually contain a baby.

For the past 6½ months - the bulk of her senior year at Toppenish High School - the 17-year-old A-student faked her own pregnancy.

Only a handful of people - her mother, boyfriend and principal among them - knew Gaby was pretending to be pregnant for her senior project, a culminating assignment required for graduation.

Her teachers and fellow students, except for her best friend, didn't realize they were part of a social experiment.

Neither did six of her seven siblings, including four older brothers, her boyfriend's parents, and his five younger brothers and sisters.

Could you? Would you? Would you let your kid?

Read the whole thing here.

The New York Times reports: “There are 238 license plate readers in use in New York City, said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman. Of those, 130 are mobile. They are mounted on the back of police cars assigned to patrol duties across the city’s five boroughs and to specialized units like the highway and counterterrorism divisions. The remaining 108 cameras are set up at fixed posts at city bridges and tunnels and above thoroughfares.”

“The cameras have provided clues in homicide cases and other serious crimes. But they have been used in lesser offenses, too. With them, stolen cars have been identified, located and returned. The cameras have uncovered unregistered vehicles and those with stolen license plates. They can pinpoint fugitives from out of state who are linked to specific automobiles.”

The idea is spreading to smaller cities and towns. Read more here.

I personally will never be the kind of gal to carry a concealed weapon, but my characters occasionally do. If you wonder how a woman can conceal a gun, you should watch this video.

Including a girl who died inside one of those cakes girls pop out of. (Full disclosure: I was once one of those girls myself.) What a great way to being a murder mystery.

Here are all nine: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/9-bizarre-ways-to-die.html

Want to know more about:
- General Crime Scene Investigation
- Fingerprints
- Footwear, Tire Track and Other Impressions
- Computer Forensics
- DNA
- Human Remains
- Crime Scene and Evidence Photography
Packaging Evidence

Here’s a cool site for CSI professionals.

The National Library of Medicine has put online a selection of murder pamphlets from the late 1600s to the late 1800s online. The murder pamphlets in the NLM's collection address cases connected to forensic medicine, especially cases in which doctors were accused of committing-or were the victims of-murder. You can see the NLM broadsides here.

And Harvard Law School has contemporary broadsides about sensational London crimes and executions primarily during the period 1820-1840 which you can see here. There’s a chilling account of a man who was executed in 1819 for an “unnatural offense” (being gay).

Feeling a bit under the weather? Have I got the book for you! I originally got How to Survive Anything, Anywhere: A Handbook of Survival Skills for Every Scenario and Environment, because I thought I was going to have a character making her way in the woods on her own.

My idea changed, but I kept the book. And when I came down with a cold, I found myself dipping into the pages. It covers how to:

* Make a shelter
* Find underground water
* Survive urban terrorism
* Hunt, trap, and fish with jerry-rigged tools
* Build fires or escape them
* Negotiate arctic, desert, jungle, or mountain terrain
* Win hand-to-hand combat

After all, no matter how badly I feel, I don't have to worry about this tip:
"Remove yourself from the presence of corpses (after checking for any survivors). They will distract the focus of your thinking and produce a very negative mind set." {And you thought checking your Amazon numbers was disheartening!]

And how about these body signals which you can use if someone is flying overhead:


I especially like the one where the person is lying on their back, which is "need medical assistance urgently."

And I know a sad story about the "All OK, do not wait" signal. I remember a few years back there was someone stranded in the outback (an island or maybe in Alaska) with no food or supplies. He was super excited to see a plane and waved his hand over head.

Satisfied that everything was okay, the pilot flew away and never returned. And if I remember correctly, before he starved to death, the man figured out his error.

The Daily Mail reports “Police Chief J.R. Blyth, who was called in to investigate, described the discovery at the George Washington Hotel in Pittsburgh as 'the most grisly murder scene in his 35 years in law enforcement'. Detectives had spent eight hours of overtime on the investigation before Chief Blyth realised the blood wasn’t real and that the murder scene was in fact the leftover set of a horror movie filmed two years ago with Corey Haim.”

Read the story here. You can’t make stuff like that up.

A Eugene man has formally changed his name to Captain Awesome. As in first name: Captain, second name: Awesome. He also changed his signature: "Mitchell also allowed Awesome to change his official signature to a right-pointing arrow, a smiley face and a left-pointing arrow. The state Department of Motor Vehicles actually accepted the cheerful new signature. But alas, his bank refused to honor it, Awesome said. "They said it was too easily forgeable," he explained."

You can read the article here.

If you were going to just go for it and change your name, what would your new name be? And your signature?

Portland’s Willamette Week has a story about two teens who met, fell in like and fooled around. Like many teens, they took a few pictures to commemorate their relationship. Supposedly, one showed them touching tongues and another implied, but didn’t show, oral sex. They didn’t share them with anyone else. But when the younger teen’s mom found them on her daughter’s phone, she turned the phone over to the police.

The 19 year old ended up in prison, facing 70 months in prison for child pornography and a permanent entry on the list of sex offenders. For a consensual relationship. Sounds like it might make an interesting premise for a YA.

WW reports, “When he sentenced Brown moments later, his terms were not as harsh as they could have been: three years of bench probation, $3,000 in court fees and an order to stay away from Jenkins until she turns 18 in July.”

You can read the whole story here. One interesting twist: both are female, and the younger girl says her mother never had a problem with her dating older boys.

Eighty-five -year old Gert Boyle is a local legend. When her husband died, she took over Columbia Sportswear, succeeding despite a lot of pat on the head sexism at the idea of a woman running a company. I met her when her book came out - she was as no-nonense as you might expect.

And she still has spunk! The Oregonian reports: "Boyle, 85, had returned home to her house in the city's Hidden Springs neighborhood about 5:50 p.m. Wednesday and pulled into her driveway when a delivery man approached her with a gift basket. He followed her into the garage and then tried to have Boyle sign a book.

"When she grew suspicious and tried to turn him away, the man pulled a gun.

"As Boyle was going into the house, she told the man she had to disable her alarm system. Instead, she hit the silent panic button.

"He tied up her hands and started ransacking the house. An officer responded to the alarm, rang the doorbell and saw that Boyle's hands appeared bound as she approached and that there was someone lurking in the hallway."

He ran away and was caught six hours later.

Go Gert!

So did you hear that amazing - and scary - story about the young Asian guy who boarded the Air Canada plane in Hong Kong as an old white guy? He wore an incredibly life-like silicone mask. Makes you wonder how long it will be before we'll need to have our fingerprints or DNA matched to board a plane. Although I'm sure there will be ways around that, too.

Read the whole story here.