Author Stephanie Kane has lived the difficult life of a family member affected by a heinous murder. Just before she married her first husband, her mother-in-law, Betty, was beaten to death in her home. Soon the leads went dry. After writing a fictionalized portrayal of her mother-in-law’s death several years later the cold case was brought back to police attention, and soon her former father-in-law, Duane Frye, was on trial for murder. She has now written the a part-memoir, part-true crime book entitled Cold Case Story, detailing what occurred and the effect it had on the Frye family.
FGN: With most true crime, the author is distanced from the story. In this case, you became part of the story. What was the writing process like? Did you have to approach it almost like fiction in order to get out the necessary details?
SK: I was part of the story in three ways: marrying into Betty’s family at the time of her murder, writing the fictional Quiet Time decades later, and testifying in the cold case. Unlike my mystery novels, I had to write Cold Case Story in first person because the details were so personal to me. The challenge wasn’t getting them out, it was wrestling them into a coherent shape.
Each section of the book begins with definitions or quotes, and often these have to do with screenwriting. Did you pace the book this way because this was how you processed the crime? How does the process of writing a book like Cold Case Story differ from writing fiction like Quiet Time?
Quiet Time and Cold Case Story are both based on Betty’s murder, but there the similarity ends. Quiet Time used a true event as a springboard for an imaginary plotline and characters; in nonfiction like Cold Case Story, you have to stick to the facts. Since the murder and cold case investigations were intertwined, I had to merge them into a narrative with an overarching theme. Because a cold case is the story of a murder told twice, the theme is storytelling.
Chapters kick off with definitions to frame the theme and quotes to bring the facts alive. Quoting transcripts and police reports lets witnesses speak directly, in their own voices. The chapter titles are storytelling terms of art: Story Worlds; Show, Don’t Tell; Works in Progress, etc. To define them, I turned to screenwriters and dictionaries.
FGN: You mention feeling something was off with Betty’s husband at a reception at a hotel, shortly after your wedding. Was that the first time you suspected he may be involved or did you originally believe it was just grief?
SK: When I walked into the karate studio the day of the murder and saw the bruise on Duane’s forehead and the clothes he was wearing, I knew something was off. I never believed it was grief that made him act so peculiarly, but my focus back then was trying to get back to some kind of normal, returning to our “real” lives and picking up where we’d left off—which was of course impossible.
FGN: When writing Quiet Time was there ever a moment where you worried about how it would be received? Were you ever afraid of how someone like Duane Frye would respond?
SK: I didn’t think anybody would connect Quiet Time to Betty’s murder. For one thing, I didn’t believe anyone cared; after the charges were dropped in 1973, nobody talked about her murder, and once I was no longer part of that family, I had no contact with them. Quiet Time was meant to be an entertaining mystery and to put the case to rest for my own sake.
But I was frank with Bantam (the publisher) about the story’s origins. Their legal team reviewed it and requested a slew of changes: moving the timeline up ten years, changing the karate studio to a hockey rink, purging all references to Colorado and even columbines (the state flower). And I adopted my second husband’s last name as my pen name. I wasn’t trying to cause trouble for anyone, so I didn’t worry how they might respond.
FGN: What was the experience like being on the other side of an attorney you’d previously worked with? Was it difficult to separate a friend from their job?
SK: I felt betrayed, but not because he’d been a friend or someone I’d practiced with. The betrayal was him making me his target based on things he knew were untrue. Advancing false claims isn’t part of an ethical lawyer’s job.
FGN: Do you feel that writing Cold Case Story has finally given you a sense of closure in regards to Betty’s murder?
SK: One person I interviewed for Cold Case Story was Howard Morton. Morton founded Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons (FOHVAMP), an advocacy group for the families of cold case victims, after his son was murdered in Arizona. When I asked him about closure, he said that word was an insult to victims’ families. A better word is acceptance. Finally knowing what happened to Betty has enabled me to accept it and move on.
Stephanie Kane’s books Cold Case Story and Quiet Time are now available.
