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Two Boise authors, Kim Cross and J. Reuben Appelman, have new books out today. Both are true crime stories.

Kim’s book, In Light of All Darkness, is about the 1993 kidnapping and murder of Polly Klaas and how the case transformed how the FBI does its work.

J’s book, While Idaho Slept, is about the four University of Idaho students who were murdered last fall and the media frenzy that has surrounded the case from the get-go.

Next Tuesday, October 10, Kim and J are speaking at an event called Making Sense of the Senseless. The discussion explores the ethics behind consuming and producing works of true crime and poses the ethical questions behind the research and writing of tragic stories.

Where is the boundary between factual and sensational?

Do these stories reopen old wounds or promote healing?

Can true crime be more than entertainment, or even be a catalyst for positive social change?

In a time when the true crime genre is more popular than ever, it’s an important and timely discussion to have.

I am not a true crime fan at all. I have never had any trouble conjuring up all the horrible things that could happen to me or the people I love or people in general. Therefore, I don’t read the books, I don’t watch the shows, and I don’t listen to the podcasts. And I’ve realized that it’s the ethics of true crime stories that keeps me from consuming them. It bothers me that in so many true crime stories, entire lives are summarized into a few cherry-picked bullet points, then defined by the worst thing that happened to them.

Where is the line between entertainment and empathy? What is the purpose, what is the goal of sharing such tragedies? I think these are questions that we should be asking ourselves every single time we start to delve into a true crime story.

So, I chatted with both authors to learn more about their new books and what their goal was for sharing these stories.

In Light of All Darkness

Kim Cross’s new book, In Light of All Darkness, is about the 1993 kidnapping and murder of Polly Klaas and the subsequent investigation, where brand new FBI investigative tools and procedures were put to the test. Polly’s case forever transformed how the FBI does its work.

On October 1, 1993, 12-year-old Polly Klaas was having a sleepover with two friends at her home in Petaluma, California. At about 10:30pm, a man dressed in all black entered Polly’s bedroom holding a large kitchen knife. He told the girls not to scream or else he’d slit their throats. He bound the girls’ hands behind their backs, put pillowcases over their heads, and gagged them. He told Polly to stand up and told the other girls to count to 1,000. While her friends counted and her mom and sister slept in the other bedroom, he kidnapped Polly and later murdered her.

A stranger abduction from the home is the rarest of all kidnappings. Polly’s case triggered one of the largest manhunts in FBI history, and the investigation would become so significant that it’s still used as a case study in law enforcement education to this day, 30 years later.

“I’m not a true crime reader. I’ve never been into the shows or podcasts or anything,” said Kim. “But I wrote this book because I have this crazy family connection that made me, possibly, the only person who could have done it this way.”

Kim’s father-in-law is Eddie Freyer Sr., who was the lead FBI agent on Polly Klaas’s case. He made key decisions as the investigation unfolded with 60,000 tips and 12,000 leads and investigations. He also made it possible for Kim to conduct over 300 interviews with nearly every key FBI agent, detective, and crime-scene investigator who worked within this investigation. Most of the people Kim interviewed had rarely or never spoken to the press. Some hadn’t even talked to their own families about the experience. None of them would have talked to Kim without Eddie’s blessing.

Kim is a New York Times best-selling author and journalist known for meticulously reported narrative nonfiction. In Light of All Darkness is an impressive demonstration of her ability to present the facts in a narrative form. The book reads like a thriller, yet it is an incredibly detailed and factual account of what an FBI kidnapping investigation entails.

When Kim’s husband, Eddie Freyer Jr., first suggested that she should write a book about the Polly Klaas case, she rejected the idea. It wasn’t really her kind of story.

“I would need for there to be some, like, really uplifting or redemptive message for me to go to a place that sad and to take readers to a place that dark,” said Kim. “But then I started looking into it, and I realized that it's still being used as a case study today. That's kind of crazy, because how much technology has changed in 30 years, right?”

While she was considering writing a book, Eddie Freyer Sr. invited Kim to sit in on one of his classes. Kim saw an entire class of young investigators transfixed while learning about the Polly Klaas case.

“This case was so complicated and so massive, and there were so many red herrings and things that didn't go the way they expected. There just are so many things that you can learn from it,” said Kim.

As she started doing more research to put together a book proposal, she found that so many of the people that had been involved in the case were now using it to teach. Forensic investigators were teaching it in fingerprinting classes. The case was used in leadership classes and crisis management training. She also looked into what books had already been written about the case, and found two books had been published around 1994 that were both riddled with errors. Eddie Freyer isn’t even mentioned in them. Kim realized that she had an opportunity to write a book that no one else could.

“It really was, I think, a great combination of I had the skills to [write] it and it probably helped that I was very squeamish about doing true crime, and really afraid of re-traumatizing people and opening old wounds, and, you know, stirring up things that people want to heal from and move on from,” said Kim. “Maybe all the reasons that I thought I shouldn't write the book, were maybe the reasons that I could.”

Kim spent seven years writing In Light of All Darkness. Much of that time was spent meeting with retired FBI agents, investigators, and witnesses, and combing through boxes filled to the brim with documents that have never been released to the press or made public. Kim interviewed both of Polly’s friends who were in the room with her that night, she talked to FBI and Petaluma agents and detectives, she talked to the citizen who found items that led to the pivotal break in the case. She listened to never-before-heard interviews with Polly’s mom, the recording of the first 911 call, and the entire, unedited recording of the confession.

She took years of research and took on the seemingly impossible task of writing the story of the Polly Klaas case from beginning to end, presenting the facts and nothing more.

“Processing the primary source documents and photographs that I had to process for this was really hard because I'm the filter. I didn't want to include anything sensationalistic or gratuitously graphic. But I had to look at a lot of graphic stuff to understand what happened, and then translate it in a way that I felt was giving the reader only what they needed to know and nothing more,” said Kim. “That was really hard, because I had to see things that I can never unsee. There were many days when I had to write through nausea. Like I would just feel sick to my stomach all day. Not even necessarily the days looking at it, but just writing and thinking about what happened to her and what she must have felt like and how scared she must have been.”

Kim’s goal for writing this book was simply to tell the story in detail. She wanted to share the truth about what happened to Polly and to chronicle the new science and advances that were used by the FBI that have gone on to save lives in the three decades since Polly’s murder. During this case, which took place in 1993 at the dawn of the internet, the FBI tested and proved success for new advances in fingerprinting, polygraph, criminal profiling, composite sketching, hair and fiber examinations, fingerprint analysis, DNA analysis, and the use of forensic light and chemical tests to indicate the presence of bodily fluids.

“My goal was just to write the book of record, to get it right, and be as comprehensive as possible. I feel like I did it respectfully and accurately and mindfully of all involved,” said Kim. “I really felt like it was a collective effort. You know, the agents are incredibly invested in this book. It means so much to them to, I think, be part of the book of record. So I'm really proud of that. I felt like a story midwife, more than an author. I never felt like it was my book; it was our work.”

Polly’s case was the FBI’s first time lifting latent fingerprints with fluorescent powder and an Alternate Light Source (aka ALS, which is referred to today as “forensic light”). At the time, the technology was so new that the FBI didn’t even own an ALS. The FBI’s Evidence Response Team leader, Tony Maxwell, happened to have one on loan the night he got the call about Polly. He had been teaching himself to use the new equipment by lifting children’s fingerprints from his wife’s home daycare center. This is just one example of new technology and new organizational processes that were proven successful by the FBI’s work throughout the Polly Klaas case.

“The theme of all my best work is that beautiful things come from our brokenness. And I hope that people know that as dark as this case was, really good things happened because of it. Like it literally changed the way the FBI does things in a lot of ways, you know, forensically. And the kidnapping protocols that are used today were written because of this, by someone involved in this case and what they learned from it,” said Kim.

At the end of the book, readers meet another 12-year-old girl in Lodi, California, who was kidnapped at knifepoint by a stranger from her house while she was home with her sister and friend – just six months after Polly had been taken. The Lodi police chief in that case had been to a briefing held by the investigators in the Polly Klaas case, where they taught other investigators what to do if they were ever in a similar situation. Because of that, Lodi police and the FBI were able to find and save the girl within 24 hours.

“We can trace back to one life that was absolutely saved because of this case. But I have a feeling that, you know, if you think of the thousands of investigators that were trained by this case, who then went on to share what they learned – I feel like there's a ripple effect where I think a lot of lives have been helped by this,” said Kim. “I guess my greatest hope is that this book helps someone that I'll never meet, in ways I can never imagine, and maybe I'll never hear about. Or maybe it makes someone act in a different way that makes them safer, or makes them help in times of trouble. That's my big hope.”

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While Idaho Slept

J. Reuben Appelman’s book, While Idaho Slept: The Hunt for Answers in the Murders of Four College Students, is about the four University of Idaho students who were murdered in November 2022. The book effectively summarizes all of the publicly available information regarding the four students who were killed, the man accused of the crime (who has yet to stand trial), and the media and social media frenzy that has surrounded the case from the very beginning.

J is no stranger to true crime. He’s a true crime writer and a private investigator. His 2018 true crime memoir, The Kill Jar, chronicles Detroit’s most notorious, and officially unsolved, serial killer cases. It was named one of the best true crime books that year and inspired the popular Hulu docuseries, “Children of the Snow” in 2020, with Appelman serving as on-camera investigator and Executive Producer. J also has a “True Crime 101” mentorship program for aspiring true crime writers where he teaches the ethics and morality of the true crime genre, how to research a case and understand documents and evidence, writing about cold cases vs active cases, and ethically moving forward with publishing and promoting a true crime book.

While Idaho Slept is his latest true crime story. Given that this horrific crime happened less than a year ago and the trial for the man accused still has yet to happen, a book about this may seem a bit incomplete – perhaps rushed – but J didn’t set out to write the book of record. More so, he wanted to put together a rundown of what has happened thus far, especially how the media and people on social media acted and how their actions helped and harmed the investigation and people involved.

“I wrote about – from everything we can know so far – what happened, who these victims were, who the alleged perpetrator was, how this case blew up on social media, how the social media presence around this case affected the investigation, how cyber sleuthing and armchair detectives are affecting investigations around the globe and will continue to change the nature of investigative work for detectives working, let's call it, popular homicides,” said J. “And what this means to the communities that are touched by these crimes. Not just in the traditional sense of how they recover from the visitation of this violence, but what it means to have massive social media presence and global spotlight pour into your town.”

As I’m sure you know, in November of 2022, four University of Idaho students were brutally murdered in their off-campus home. It’s unimaginable to think about this happening to anyone, and it was especially unbelievable for something so horrific to occur in the ultra-safe town of Moscow, Idaho. The media and people on social media went absolutely nuts over the case, particularly while investigators were working to find a suspect.

J says the involvement of social media in major crime cases is happening more and more frequently. He noted that in many instances, the “social media mob” is determining what is a major case in the online world. J said this can be a good thing, but it can also be a very bad thing.

“I mean, in some ways, it's been very helpful to investigations. Especially to the surviving family and loved ones of victims. If the social media community of investigators decides that this case is of merit – or somehow a case is just confusing enough that they want to latch their claws into it to figure out the puzzle, so to speak – that's a great thing for the for the family members of the victims, because then you have not just 25 investigators, you've got 25,000,” said J. He noted that in the first few days after the Moscow murders, thousands of tips were sent in to investigators by random people online who had gone through public Venmo transactions and TikTok posts and social media comments.

“So, it's not necessarily a bad thing. It brings a lot of attention to cases. But where it goes bad is in instances, like with the Moscow case, where they started combing through too much, where the imagination runs too wild, where the investigative impulse is too hungry without enough skills to back it up,” said J. “The social media mob started to name suspects in the case, like I think it was this guy and then 12 more people think it was that guy too, and then all of a sudden there are people getting called out as being related to these murders that actually had nothing to do with it. And now when you Google search those names, there’s thousands of pages related to people who should have never been named as suspects. They were only named as suspects by the mob.”

Almost immediately after news broke of the murders, hundreds of people descended on the small college town. Nearly every national, regional, and local television station and newspaper outlet was onsite. True crime podcasts, TikTokers, and YouTubers camped out in the freezing cold. Reddit threads and Facebook groups formed within days, with thousands of people constantly discussing the case and naming possible suspects.

While I’d like to think that some of these people had good intentions, there is an incredibly fine line between helpful information and entertainment. The victims’ family members and friends were harassed with questions. People camped outside their homes, hoping to get a glimpse of their pain. Friends and even people who were simply acquaintances of the victims were named as suspects online. People started receiving death threats. A University of Idaho professor is currently in a legal battle with a “TikTok physic” who was adamant that the professor orchestrated the murders.

All of these groups and podcasts and YouTube videos are still going to this day. People are still posting about the case, even though there has been no trial and no new information. People are still sharing their theories and carrying on with their own “investigations” about who killed the four students and why.

“There's a lot of damage that was left behind by the social media, cyber-sleuthing mob. Equal to the amount of help, was the amount of harm,” said J. “At some point there has to be a balance. Hopefully there is a sort of internal code of ethics that develops within the mob, but in practice, I don't know how that happens.”

Making Sense of the Senseless

This delicate balance between presenting facts and sensationalizing crime, educating vs entertaining, and the sometimes blurry code of ethics is what J and Kim will be discussing next Tuesday, October 10th at Making Sense of the Senseless. The event is a partnership between Rediscovered Books and The Cabin’s Ghosts & Projectors reading series. Tickets are $20.

I think it’s important to note that the authors are not making money from this event and that $5 from every ticket sold will go to Faces of Hope, a local nonprofit supporting those affected by domestic abuse and interpersonal violence.

Thanks for reading!

With love from Boise,

Marissa

PS - You may notice a lack of photos in this story compared to my other stories. I didn't know what photos to use. I felt weird using a bunch of photos of the victims. Photos of authors writing (typing) are not really that interesting. And I most definitely was not going to use any sort of crime scene photos. So I just went with the book covers and called it good. Both authors have more photos and videos and such on their social media pages, if you'd like to see those. Thanks for understanding.

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