“True Crime Redux”: Coming to terms with a murder in the family

This book was a finalist for the 2024 Colorado Authors League award for Biography/Memoir.

1. Just Start Telling the Story

It is the process of storytelling rather than the story itself that is the point. What excited Sarah Polley about making a documentary about her mother was watching the aftermath.

—Sarah Polley | Filmmaker

If there’s a story you like, just write it up and see how it feels. It’s not illegal until you do something with it.

— Alan Sharp | Screenwriter

My story begins on a hot Saturday morning in June 1973. The phone rang in the apartment I shared with my fiancé in Boulder, Colorado. I picked up because Doug was in the shower. It was his mother, Betty. She’d never called before, and this call was awkward and brief. Doug and I were getting married in two weeks and didn’t know, even then, if she would be coming to the ceremony. Two hours later, she was dead.

I thought about that phone call for thirty years. Every night, I ran through my exchange with Betty and the events that followed. Sometimes it was the first thing on my mind when I woke up. I didn’t want to forget. Even more than needing to understand her death, it was important to remember the details. In 2001, I published Quiet Time, a fictionalized version of Betty’s murder. The nightmares stopped.

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Then in 2005, I got an e-mail from a cold case cop looking into Betty’s murder. He asked if I was willing to talk. I’d long since come to terms with not knowing the truth about that day but had never resolved my role in it. But this was bigger than me. The legal battle that followed consumed the next decade of my life.

Fifty years have passed since Betty’s call. From a college-town apartment to a karate studio, from a blood-spattered suburban garage to a rogue ex-cop, law school, a mystery novel, grand jury indictments, subpoenas for a manuscript’s drafts, trips up and down appellate courts, to a family irreparably fractured and turned on itself.

And at the heart of it all was a brutal murder.

2. Not From That Place

I don’t have the advantage of being from there, from that region, of that race. But my responsibility is to tell stories, to tell the story I want to tell in the way I want to tell it. And if there are repercussions from that, I’ll just have to face it.

—Bill Cheng | Author of Southern Cross the Dog

Locard’s Exchange Principle: The theory that anyone, or anything, entering a crime scene both takes something of the scene with them, and leaves something of themselves behind when they leave.

—Brent Turvey | Criminal Profiling: An Introduction to Behavioral Evidence Analysis

I met Doug at a karate studio in Boulder, Colorado.

I’d applied to CU because it was 2,000 miles from Brooklyn. But the moment the plane landed, I was in over my head. The dry wind, blazing sky, and strapping kids playing frisbee on a campus backed by mountain peaks felt unreal, like a technicolor movie.

“True Crime Redux”

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I wandered into a karate studio and watched my future husband, Doug, throwing one perfect kick after another. With his crisp white gi and sun-streaked hair, he embodied everything foreign and exotic about Colorado. We moved in together that summer. And that fall he brought me home to meet his parents.

Home was a tract house in a suburb south of Denver. Doug’s father, Duane, was an engineer whose kids called him “Mr. Work the Problem.” His mother, Betty, was a stylish blonde straight out of Vogue or Better Homes & Gardens. Doug told her I was a vegetarian majoring in Italian, so she served melon and provolone.

Duane was Field & Stream. Over dinner, he railed against Texans snatching up prime Colorado mountain property, and an East Coast cabal that he believed controlled the news media.

I might have debated Duane, but I was too intimidated and intent on being liked. The following June, on the morning Betty was murdered, Duane showed up at the karate studio unannounced, with a bruise on his forehead and a warm six-pack of beer.

Doug’s family was foreign but enticingly normal—or at least how I fantasized a normal family would be. But it’s impossible to know any family’s truth. And being an outsider makes that truth even harder to see. In telling their story the way I wanted to tell it, Quiet Time initiated a cold case but barely scratched the truth.

Families are also like crime scenes. Entering one, you bring something with you. Leaving, you bear its mark. The very act changes that family’s story and makes you of that place. The story continues to be reshaped by the marks you leave on each other each time you collide.

3. Memory and Procrustean Narratives

memory/1 The faculty by which things are remembered; the capacity for retaining, perpetuating, or reviving the thought of things past.

—The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary

Procrustean/ Of or pertaining to Procrustes, a robber who in Greek legend stretched or mutilated his victims in order to make them fit the length of his bed.

—The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary

Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory, and follows from its basis and mechanisms in the human brain. The wonder is that aberrations of a gross sort are relatively rare, and that, for the most part, our memories are solid and reliable.

—Oliver Sacks | Speak, Memory

This is what I remember about Saturday, June 9, 1973:

I remember Betty’s call that morning. The hopeful look on Doug’s face that said, maybe she’s coming around. Doug’s 13-year-old brother, Greg, coming for his first karate lesson. Me sneaking into the empty pool next door because it was already so hot. Seeing Duane on the studio bench in a white T-shirt under a dark, long-sleeved plaid shirt. The bruise on his forehead. A lawn chair fell while he was doing spring cleanup with Betty, he said. She hadn’t told me he was coming. Why was Duane there? To pick up Greg, he said, and to show him your apartment.

The last time we saw Betty was at the Flagstaff House, a fancy restaurant above Boulder where they’d taken us to celebrate our engagement. When Duane toasted our future, she cried, and when they dropped us off, she wouldn’t come in. She made us promise her one thing: that Greg would never know we’d lived together before getting married.

After the karate class, Duane drove us home to the apartment. He gave Doug a six-pack—not 3.2 beer but the real stuff, warm from the car. While Greg looked around, Duane sat on our daybed with his head in his hands. Then he abruptly stood and said they had to go. I wonder what’s wrong, Doug said. I’ve never seen him act like this.

We left to pick up Doug’s wedding suit—his first suit ever. When we got back, the phone was ringing. Come home, a neighbor said. Your mother’s dead.

In 1973, the only person who interviewed me was Duane’s defense investigator. He liked my description of Duane’s clothes. No one asked about Betty’s call, the beer, or the bruise.

When you don’t know the bigger story, all you have are the details. From them, you weave a hopeful narrative: She called because she was coming around. He gave Doug the beer because he recognized his son was a man. All will be okay if Greg never knows. But what about the bruise?

Because details don’t fit a story that’s wrong, it doesn’t mean you got the details wrong. Years later, defense lawyers will pound you in briefs and on the stand. You’re out on a limb, no one else saw it. After so long, how can you be sure? But the stubbornness of those memories—the fact that they don’t fit— makes them indelible. And you retained them because you re-categorized your narrative into a new one of hope: That one day you would know.

Stephanie Kane is a lawyer and award-winning author of seven crime novels and a true-crime memoir. She lives in Denver with her husband and two black cats.