The Marble Hill Crime Blotter Origins
A number of years ago, I was browsing the internet looking at police cases for story ideas when I came across one in which the main clue was some blood splotches on a cat. That tidbit sparked an idea for a story. For that story, I came up with a fictional town in Iowa called Marble Hill. My main character is the police chief, a former Chicago homicide detective who moved back to the small Iowa town because his father died, and his mother was confined to a wheelchair.
When I finished “Blood on the Cat” (free to download until 9/17), I loved the characters and setting enough to consider other stories. Then I decided that those stories should also be based on true crimes or pieces of true crimes. And now, quite a few years later, I’ve decided to release all the Mable Hill stories as a collection. These stories all have a basis in truth. A couple are fictionalized accounts of nationally known cases. Others were born just from something in the news I stumbled upon.
“Motherly Love” is the second novella in The Marble Hill Crime Blotter. This story is based on a famous case from 1996.
JonBenet Ramsey was a six-year-old beauty queen that was found murdered in her basement. The case has never been solved. Various family members were investigated. Many theories. The parents were suspected of staging her death to cover up the murder, possibly by another family member. They were less than cooperative with the police. “Motherly Love” is my theory on what really happened to JonBenet Ramsey.
I came across an article one day a while ago that told the story of a police officer that saw a man hanging in a jail cell. However, there was no one in that cell. The officer claimed he saw a ghost. “Spiritual Guidance” is inspired by that article.
A man hangs himself in Marble Hill’s jail cell. Later, after the body is removed, Chief Tom Petrosky sees a different man hanging in the cell, though when he enters to investigate, there is no one there.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1989, Mandy Stavik disappeared. Her murdered body was found three days later in a creek. The case went cold, and for over twenty-five years, little progress was made. Then in 2013, two mothers met at a water park and started talking about that case. One of them said they knew who killed Mandy. The mothers swapped stories about encounters with this suspect. Eventually, they went to the police with their theories. These and many of the details of this solved cold case are the details of my story, “Holiday Indulgence”. I moved the story from Bellingham, Washington, to Marble Hill, Iowa. And I made Tom Petrosky an acquaintance of the disappeared teenager. I also upped the ante on solving the case, as another girl has recently disappeared from Marble Hill.
And for those of you who don’t mind a spoiler. Here’s a link to the original CBS News story about Mandy Stavik (I changed her name to Penny Sanders).
In June of 2020 the bodies of two children who had been missing were unearthed on a property owned by the children’s mother’s relatively new husband. If you’re from Arizona or Idaho, you’re familiar with the case of Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell and the murder of Lori’s children. This is a complex, convoluted, bizarre, and tragic story. And a story that will fit perfectly into the Marble Hill Collection. However, given the breadth of the case, it may become my first Marble Hill novel. Time will tell.
Pick up a copy of The Marble Hill Crime Blotter today. It’s available in eBook and paperback with 5 full color cover prints, one for each story.
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