Killer Kids: The New Paradigm by Lisa Black

 LUCY BURDETTE: Please welcome Lisa Black to Jungle Red Writers today. She has a new thriller out, SUFFER THE CHILDREN, and she's written a difficult but important essay about the research behind the new book...

LISA BLACK: In my recent release, Suffer the Children, my protagonists investigate a series of deaths at a juvenile detention facility for violent or traumatized children. As I don’t have children of my own this particular book required a great deal of research, all of which fascinated me.

        

    These days, school shootings have become de rigueur. Children in school today now have ‘active shooter’ drills the way kids in the fifties used to duck and cover. They never remember a time when school shootings weren’t a thing, and truthfully, neither do most of us—not since Charles Whitman climbed the tower at the University of Texas in 1966. Up until then, school shootings would more likely be called workplace killings, the results of arguments, estrangements, or revenge. Beefs were personal. Whitman was the first to kill complete strangers for no apparent reason. (Fifty years later, there is still no standard profile of a school shooter, except for two things: they plan their attacks [they don’t ‘snap’] and they are always boys.)

    

        Fast forward to 1999 and the one that forever remains as horrific as it is confusing: Littleton, Colorado, where Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed thirteen and wounded twenty-one. Then, as now, we have one question: why? And then, as now, not even the hint of an answer presents itself.

            Eric Harris was the son of an Air Force transport pilot. Dylan Klebold’s father was a geophysicist. Each kid had a stay-at-home mom and a brother with whom they got along fine. They lived in nice neighborhoods in quite comfortable homes. These were teenage boys and yet had nothing but good things to say about their families, even in private to each other (in their ‘basement tapes’ and diaries). Obviously the source of their angst was not a miserable home life.

At school, they got good grades. Teachers liked them. They were bullied by the jocks the way nerdy kids are always bullied by the jocks, but apparently it didn’t rise above the standard hallway shoving and derisive comments—nothing like the suicide-inducing, pervasive social media campaigns waged by kids today. And Eric and Dylan had other nerdy kids as friends who understood, friends they hung out with, made amateur movies with, went to the prom with. They had a general list of people at school who, on the day of the shooting, they did not want to harm. They were not isolated.

Basically these were kids who didn’t have a single damn thing to complain about. But in private, that’s all they did. In private, the world was a horrible place, determined to crush them under its asinine rule.

They had one relatively minor run-in with the police, and impressed the officers so much that their probation was cut short. Their written apologies were sincerely eloquent, and complete lies. In private, they weren’t remotely sorry.

So while we might criticize parents who provided a son in (temporary) court-ordered anger management classes and already on antidepressants with a supply of firearms, we can perhaps believe that they were simply fooled by him in the way that the teachers, the cops, the therapists were. Eric and Dylan fooled everyone. They were very good at it.

They planned the massacre for some time and in great detail. People believe Eric was the ringleader, the one with the military background, the gun nut, the one who had no roots in the community, and Dylan the follower. But I believe Dylan was the loonier of the two. He seemed to be clinically depressed and viewed the world as hellish. Both of them veered between feeling like scum and feeling like ‘gods.’

So, why? I have no idea. But I think if they had never met each other then maybe, maybe, they would have gotten through life without actually killing anyone. Their personalities entwined in all the wrong ways and encouraged all the worst parts of each, until they spiraled into a well of violence from which no one could escape.

In the nearly 20 years since this tragedy, do you think schoolkids are better prepared to stay safe in the event of a school shooting?

(And a follow-up question from Lucy: How can we better tackle this horrific problem as a concerned society?)

About Suffer the Children: Maggie Gardiner, forensics expert for the Cleveland police department, and Jack Renner, a homicide detective with a killer secret, return in bestselling author Lisa Black’s new thriller as they confront the darkest threat yet to their careers—and their lives.

The body of fifteen-year-old Rachael Donahue—abandoned by society, raised in foster homes, and violently unapproachable—has been discovered at the bottom of a stairwell at Firebird, the secure facility for juvenile offenders in Cleveland. 

But Rachael’s not the only resident at the center to come to a dead end. Firebird’s ten-year-old “wild child” has overdosed in the infirmary—back-to-back tragedies that appear to be terrible accidents. As a forensic investigator, Maggie knows appearances can be deceiving. And Jack knows all about deceit. That’s why they both suspect a cold-blooded murderer is carrying out a deadly agenda.

As Maggie’s ex-husband gets nearer to uncovering the secrets that Maggie and Jack must hide, it becomes increasingly harder for them to protect a new and vulnerable victim from a killer with unfathomable demons.

   

     Lisa Black spent the five happiest years of her life in a morgue. As a forensic scientist at the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office she analyzed many forms of trace evidence as well as crime scenes. Now she’s a certified latent print examiner and CSI in Florida and is the author of thirteen traditionally published novels. Some of which have been translated into six other languages, one has been optioned for film and one reached the NYT bestseller’s list. The latest is Suffer the Children, which involves forensic scientist Maggie Gardiner and homicide detective Jack Renner in a series of deaths inside a center for violent children.

Plots from the Family Tree

LUCY BURDETTE: I went to a family wedding in Illinois over Labor Day and happily spent the weekend with my father‘s brother and his sons, my cousins. One of my cousins is the genealogist of the family, so we took this chance to query him about our history, and also to get details about old family stories from my Uncle Don. I knew the tragic story about my grandfather who co-managed a silk factory in Paterson, New Jersey with his sister and another relative. As I'd heard it told, he had wanted desperately to sell the factory, but the others refused to accept a very good offer on the business. And then came the development of synthetic fibers and the Depression, which reduced silk to a nonstarter. And so they were stuck with the factory worth exactly nothing. Obviously this had a big impact on him both financially and psychologically. My uncle said his father had never been willing to discuss this.

What I didn’t know is that we also had a relative who made Ferris wheels in Paterson, NJ. When the market for those dried up, his company turned to metal crypts, a product that never goes out of demand.

Now surely I can find a good plot in all that! What stories do you have in your family that might be good fodder for a novel?

HALLIE EPHRON: Metal crypts! And your protagonist inherits a basement full of them... only they're not all empty. (Cue scary music.)

My family favorite story is about my father's mother who died before I was born. She famously saved the family from economic disaster. In one of several unpublished manuscripts my dad left behind, he says, "In 1921 my father was in the woolen business, and when the depression of 1921 came, he went bankrupt. He told mother something she had guessed long before. She put her arm around him and said, "We'll be all right. For the last two years I've been in the real estate business. I've bought and sold five houses and I've got enough money to buy that rug store we saw in the Bronx." Now, if only I still owned five houses in the Bronx.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Both sides of my family talked so little about their family history that I'm beginning to wonder what skeletons were in the family cupboards! I know that my maternal grandmother, recently widowed, had to sell her wedding ring during the depression to put food on the table for her four kids. I also know that she taught school in California for a while, before she came back to Texas to live with my folks when I was born. Now I wonder what adventures she might have had there.

My dad started his own business in the Forties, selling raw popcorn to movie theater chains. He was The Popcorn Man, and quite the entrepreneur. I'm seeing a musical here!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: SO funny--my dad asked Gramma Minnie to tell him about life in Russia in the say, 19-teens. She lived in a little village somewhere in Russia, and she told him, "Oh it was lovely, and everyone was lovely." Gramma? Ya THINK?  Doubtful. So I'm wondering what she was hiding, right? My mother's mother, Gramma Rose,  was a strange fashionista. And I do mean..strange.  When she died, I was maybe 10? And we went to clean out her closets. her house was beautiful, immaculate. BUT in the closet: she had several dresses--in several sizes. Like, every size. Like--the blue one in a  2,4,6,8,10..etc. The red one in a 2,4,6,8,10. Untouched.   It still disturbs me. And now when I buy two of something, it gives me chills. I'm seeing scary movie, got to say.

NOT Rhys's great-grandmother.

 RHYS BOWEN: My great aunt Min (really Sarah Ann) told many stories of the family history on my mother's mother's side. My favorite story was that my great great grandfather was disinherited when he ran off to marry a gypsy. It's always intrigued me to know I might have gypsy blood. My great grandmother on my mother's father's side must have been a fabulous woman. She was French--Josephine--and she married a 35 year old Welshman when she was just 17.(I've no idea how or where they could possibly have met) She had 14 children with him. I have a picture of her, surrounded by her grown children, and she still looks incredibly young with a tiny waist. When my great grandfather died she married again. He died. In her eighties she decided to go out to Australia, to her daughter. So she went alone on a ship. I clearly get my adventurous spirit from her, although I wish I had her waist! 

INGRID THOFT: My grandfather came to the United States, through Ellis Island, when he was seventeen-years-old, his only companion his best friend.  That journey would be a tale all its own, but after making his way across the country, he drove an ambulance in San Francisco at the time of the great earthquake in 1906.  He was still a teenager; I guess anyone was allowed to drive an ambulance?!  Eventually, he married my grandmother and became a homesteader in Montana.  My maternal grandmother, who I’ve mentioned before on the blog, was a radio actress on WBZ Radio Boston in the 1920s and 1930s.  I think her stage name, Constance D’Arcy, would be a great jumping off point for a historical murder mystery!

JENN McKINLAY: I am descended from pirates, thieves, and other assorted ne'er do wells. Shocker, I know! Scottish, English, Irish, and Russian - my grandparents  were all escaping something and arrived in America to start anew. My aristocratic Russian grandmother married an Irish fisherman - much to the dismay of

both their families - and my Scots and English grandparents met at a dance in the basement of a church in Yonkers where they were carousing - playing piano, dancing, smoking, and drinking gin. My grandmother told me they got into big trouble for that! My people seem to think of the rule of law as more like a set of "guidelines". LOL.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: We had a family story that didn't come out until my mother and her siblings were adults. My maternal grandmother was the cherished younger granddaughter of the Most Important Family in our upstate NY town, so when she left her parent's farm after graduating from the Argyle academy to waitress at a speakeasy in a neighboring town, eyebrows were raised. 

But that was nothing compared to the man she brought home and told her parents she wanted to marry. First off, he was German. Secondly, he was ten years older than she. Finally, he had been married before - and his wife had died in childbirth, along with their baby. My grandmother would not be deterred, and so she became Mrs. Greuling. It wasn't until the birth of their first child that her parents softened up enough to visit the couple.

But what none of the family knew, until after both Grandpa and Grandma had passed away, was that Theodore Greuling had been married TWICE before. Unbelievably, and tragically, his second wife had also died while giving birth to a girl, who didn't survive. A family member tracked down their gravestones. The baby's name was Lois, and her mother was Lila... which were the names of my mother and her older sister. Grandma never knew her husband had named two of their daughters after his lost wife and child. 

Now THAT'S a novel-worthy family tale!

How about you red readers, do you have plots in your family history? Will you share them?

It's Pumpkin Spice Time, or not!

RHYS BOWEN: It is officially fall. The leaves are turning, there is a nip in the air, Halloween candy has appeared in all the stores AND pumpkin spice has returned to the universe with the punctuality of the swallows coming back to Capistrano.

I have a confession to make that may anger many of you: I do not like pumpkin spice! I can tolerate pumpkin pies, although they are not my favorite. I like pumpkin soup, but not with that cinnamon kind of flavor. But pumpkin spice lattes? Yuck!

It's that season when we are overwhelmed with everything pumpkin spice. The stores are full of pumpkins. Starbucks had a countdown to the day when pumpkin spice latte would become available.
And it seems that pumpkin spice flavor/scent is available in almost everything, from candles (which are actually quite nice) to condoms.

But when I saw this post by my friend Eileen Dreyer on Facebook I felt I had to share. Is it for real? Eileen is an ER nurse so she should know a thing or two.

Should I add a clause to my will stating that in no circumstances am I to be embalmed with pumpkin spice flavored fluid? I will come back to haunt anyone who tries to do this!

So is pumpkin spice a thing that you either love or hate? Who loves it? And who thinks the embalming fluid is going too far?