Something Shifted This Week For years, I’ve been researching, reporting, and writing The Jacklighter, a narrative true crime book about the 1976 murder of Montrose attorney Martin Dillon and the decades-long quest for justice that followed. (Set for publication this fall.) For 30 years, I’ve kept boxes of newspaper clippings in my basement. Decades ago, I sat with the...
Jacklighter-Bonus
🗣️ Listen to this short post and full excerpt, narrated by the author (23 min): New excerpts from THE JACKLIGHTER mark 50 years since a Pennsylvania attorney was murdered in the woods. In a perfect world, The Jacklighter would have been published on June 2, 2026, exactly 50 years to the day that Martin Dillon walked into the Pennsylvania...
Some mysteries are buried deep, but they never truly disappear. For the past year, I’ve been immersed in the cold, hard details of a case that’s haunted me since I first started researching it three decades ago. Bringing The Jacklighter to life has been an exercise in reconstruction—sifting through old boxes of evidence, documents, and now thousands of pages...
Last week I had the pleasure of joining the legendary Ron Chepesiuk for a full hour on his award-nominated show, Crime Beat—and it was the best conversation I’ve had about The Jacklighter so far. We covered a lot of ground: how I first stumbled onto this story nearly 30 years ago in my husband’s hometown of Montrose, Pennsylvania; why...
What happened to the couple in this photo? This week, I found a photo I forgot I had. It’s a 3½-inch-square, faded color snapshot of a glorious 1968 wedding party—nearly 20 people posed on a sunlit lawn in Binghamton, NY, the bride stunning in white lace and a full veil, the groom beaming beside her. Two flower girls in...
It’s Day 3 of THE JACKLIGHTER’s pre-launch phase on Kickstarter, and I’m thrilled to report that things are already off to a promising start. 🎉 As of this writing, The Jacklighter is trending #6 out of 206 projects in Kickstarter’s “most popular upcoming nonfiction” publishing category—and I have my fabulous first 11 followers to thank for that early momentum....