The eerie connection between real life and fiction

Writing murder mysteries is full of eerie coincidences.  As we’ve all heard, real life is stranger than fiction and life imitates art. Sometimes, we can't tell whether real life really is stranger than fiction or where it's art imitating life.

When we wrote Murder for Old Times’ Sake, our third mystery novel, we thought we were creating a unique central character, a respectable man who breaks into houses and steals women’s underwear, then graduates to rape and murder.  He photographs himself wearing the underwear and then keeps the lingerie as souvenirs.  No one, not even his wife, has the slightest suspicion of his evil nature.

We thought the combination of an underwear fetish with a respectable facade and successful career, not to mention the range of crimes -- from breaking and entering to rape and murder -- was credible but strikingly unusual.  

Imagine our surprise when, months after publishing our novel, we watched a true-crime show about Colonel Russell Williams.  A respected officer in the Canadian Forces, after leading an apparently law-abiding life, Williams started breaking into women’s homes and stealing their underwear -- which he photographed himself wearing in some of the most perverted and darkly hilarious images we’ve ever seen.  Then his crimes escalated to kidnapping, torture, rape and murder. 

Colonel Williams went undetected for a long time because of his apparent rectitude.  He was a hero, the public thought, not a pervert.  A decorated military pilot, Williams commanded Canada’s largest military airbase.  He flew VIP aircraft for such dignitaries as the Prime Minister and Queen Elizabeth II.  He was well-educated, married and lived an outwardly normal life.  His hobbies were normal -- fishing, photography, running, and golf.   Nothing about him gave rise to suspicions about just how evil he really was.   

We didn’t make our character in Murder for Old Times’ Sake a military man, and we didn’t have him break into women’s houses 82 times -- but we did, all unknowingly, make him a runner and golfer, just like Col. Williams, a much-admired man with the same underwear fetish and a burning need to maintain the facade of respectability. 

We had a somewhat similar experience after publishing our first novel, Face Off.  In our story, a respectable man’s wife dies by drowning.  Everyone, including his closest friends, believes she was his first wife.  What no one knows for a long time is that he’d been married before, in Germany, to a woman who died the same way.  For us, the manner of multiple deaths established an interesting pattern common to serial murderers:  whatever works the first time, if undetected, will be used again and again. 

Then we discovered the story of Michael Peterson, a novelist whose wife allegedly died falling down the stairs.  She wasn’t his first wife, as it turned out.  The first one died in Germany after falling down the stairs.  In a forensically difficult case, the pattern of deaths helped convince the jury that Peterson had killed his second wife -- just as it convinces our detective in Face Off that a third wife is about to drown.