Murder Cases Whet Appetites of Authors, Publishers

“Big crimes generate big books, lots of them.”

If what one New York publishing industry observer says is true, three Orange County murder trials have the potential of generating volumes.

The Randy Steven Kraft murder trial in Santa Ana, which prosecutors call the biggest serial murder case in California history, has sent several writers--newspaper reporters among them--scurrying to their word processors to crank out book proposals and query letters to publishers.

“I’m interested in truth and what actually happened,” said Pat Sales of San Juan Capistrano, a 47-year-old professional truck driver and fledgling writer who plans to write a book about the case.

Sales, who has been a fixture at the trial since testimony began Sept. 26, said she has been doing research and interviewing people connected with the case--mostly victims’ parents--since Kraft was arrested in 1983.

Superior Court Department 30, where the Kraft trial is unfolding, isn’t the only Orange County courtroom that has attracted the attention of writers bent on creating best-sellers.

At least one newspaper reporter is working on a proposal for a book on the case of Richard Dale Wilson, the 47-year-old San Francisco accountant who was found innocent in October of charges that he murdered a Manhattan Beach man in Costa Mesa 4 years ago to avenge the death of his socialite fiancee.

Another case that has drawn the attention of writers is that of Sheryl Lynn Massip, the 24-year-old Anaheim woman who was accused of killing her 6-week-old son in 1987 by running over him with a car. While not denying that she killed her son, Massip claimed she was temporarily insane because of a rare maternal disorder known as postpartum psychosis. Massip was found guilty of second-degree murder Thursday, and her trial in Superior Court in Santa Ana was the first in Southern California in which a postpartum insanity defense was raised.

A few days before the Massip guilty verdict, Milton C. Grimes, Massip’s attorney, said that Massip “is interested in spreading whatever benefit society can get from this thing. This girl went through something she said she would not wish on her worst enemy. She is desirous of no one else having to experience this, and if it can help new mothers or the medical profession, she feels she can be the catalyst for that.”

Grimes said that once the trial was over, he and Massip would discuss the best way to present Massip’s story to the public. “I want to sit down with people more knowledgeable in this area,” he said. “I’m not sure yet which way to go--if there’s a book to be written or a movie to be done, I don’t know.”

From Truman Capote’s artful blend of journalistic investigation and fictional technique in his 1965 book about a multiple murder in Kansas, “In Cold Blood,” through Joe McGinnis’ “Fatal Vision” and Thomas Thompson’s “Blood and Money,” real-life crime books have proven to be the stuff that best-sellers are made of.

Larry Ashmead, executive editor at Harper & Row, said true-crime books are “few and far between.” But when they succeed, “they succeed very well.”

Last year, the publishing industry witnessed an explosion in true-crime books. One case, the 1985 murders in Florida of tobacco heiress Margaret Benson and her adopted son, Scott, by Benson’s 35-year-old older son, Steven Benson, generated four books. Two books, “Echoes in the Darkness” and “Engaged to Murder,” dealt with the so-called Main Line murders in suburban Philadelphia in 1979. Other books chronicled the disappearance and presumed murder of a newly married Oklahoma convenience store clerk (“The Dreams of Ada”), the highly publicized 1980 killing in Australia’s Outback (“Evil Angels”) and the 1982 murders of a bookkeeper involved in a multimillion-dollar diamond swindle and the two technicians who tried to come to her rescue (“The CBS Murders”).

Whether any of Orange County’s current crop of murder cases make it to the bookstores remains to be seen.

Harper & Row’s Ashmead said a newspaper reporter sent him a proposal for a book on the Kraft case several weeks ago and he turned it down.

“I said no just because it’s such a grim, unrelenting, down subject,” he said. “It doesn’t have the earmarks of a true-crime book that would sell. You have to have at least a hero in the book. I didn’t see any hero emerging--at least in the outline I saw.”

As Ashmead sees it, “serial murders are difficult (to sell) because they turn people off.” There is just one murder after another and, he explained, “each one is more grim and unsavory” than the other.

When it comes to true-crime books, Ashmead said, “you need a self-contained plot with a recognizable number of characters--the same as a novel--with a beginning, a middle and an end.” Serial murders are “just a kind of crime that doesn’t lend itself to a book.”

But that doesn’t mean the right approach to the same material won’t result in a sale.

In reference to the Kraft case, Tom Stewart, president and publisher of Atheneum, said “you can’t generalize” on the salability of a book about a serial murder case.

“You can, however, say as a generality that very few readers are going to go through 300 or 400 pages of gruesome horror unless it is relieved by something that makes the reading experience pleasurable,” he said. “And whether that is the heroic, dogged investigator, the intrepid reporter, or a victim who is able to carry the story, you’ve got to have somebody the reader thinks is normal. You just can’t wallow in this stuff.”

The elements of a best-selling, true-crime book, editors say, are not unlike those of a best-selling novel.

“First of all,” Stewart said, “it has to have a crime that’s inherently fascinating. Some are not. I have seen true-crime books proposed and published where the intricacy of the crime simply didn’t justify asking the reader to pay $18.95, and they didn’t work. It helps if the crime takes place in what readers conceive of as being a glamorous or showy setting. Whether that be location--Southern California is going to be better than southwestern Oregon--or whether it involves money. Generally speaking, money is the root of a lot of crime books.”

When it comes to writing best-selling, true-crime books, Stewart summed up: “Money helps. Family helps. Location helps.

“What really helps the most, though, is a real baroque, intricate plot. It’s got to have a good story. It’s got to have red herrings and a complex investigation--or it ought to. Again, you can find a zillion exceptions to all this.”

Newspaper reporter Jeanne Wright of Long Beach believes the Richard Wilson case has all the earmarks of a best-seller.

“Writing a book on a true murder is something I always aspired to do,” said Wright, who covered civil and criminal courts in Orange County and now free-lances for USA Today. “I wanted to pick out a case that I thought had all the elements that would be popular. And this case really has it. It has sex, drugs, murder and wealthy people. There’s a lot of intrigue and mystery that I thought is more than your average run-of-the-mill murder case.”

Wright said she started thinking about doing a book on the Wilson case in 1986 when Wilson was indicted. She also considered writing a book about the Massip case, but abandoned it after a literary agent told her the subject matter was just too horrible to have potential for a book.

Wright said, however, that two literary agents have expressed a “keen” interest in a book on the Wilson case. Asked whether Wilson’s acquittal in October would hurt the sale of a book, Wright said she has heard differing views.

“One view I’ve heard is, yes, it does because it gives more exposure possibly for some kind of libel suit or a legal action if someone wanted to stop it from being published. On the other hand, it lends an air of mystery to it. It (the acquittal) didn’t really resolve the murder, especially because the defense had resurrected a whole host of other possible suspects who would have had a motive for killing Jeffrey Parker,” the 36-year-old Manhattan Beach man who was fatally shot in 1983, 2 days before he was to stand trial on charges of murdering Wilson’s fiancee.

Wilson’s acquittal, Wright said, simply “makes it more of a whodunit in my mind.”

An intriguing murder is only half the battle, however. The actual writing of a successful true-crime book is another matter.

“The ability of the writer is tremendously important,” said Jeanne Bernkopf, a special editor for William Morrow and Co., who has worked with Newport Beach writer Joseph Wambaugh on nine of his fiction and nonfiction books. “It isn’t a matter of just reporting as in a newspaper, but a matter of putting the reader into the happening. And that takes a great deal of skill.

“If you don’t have the power to evoke it, you’re never going to get beyond the National Enquirer level.”

Wright said that, despite their enthusiasm, both agents who reviewed a sample chapter of her proposed book on the Wilson case encouraged her to rewrite it: to describe everything in richer detail, to put more of her own feelings into it, to make it more novel-like.

“It’s much harder than I suspected it to be,” Wright said.