Welcome to kate dawsons become event. Im becka oliver, we exist to support writers at ever stage of their writing career, and one of othings we love to do is have the opportunity to talk to published authors about their most recent books but also to dig in at bit more than i think we get to as often as we would like at book events with a craft talk so learning more but what craft went into creating the book, and i think especially for the book were talking about today american sherlock, so many some thing that kate can share that i think would be applicable any writer who happens to be here. Who here is a write center who here righted but didnt raise their hand. There are always a few of you. So were going to make sure that we get to some craft conversation as well, but i just want to say really quickly before we start a big thank you to book people. We are so lucky to live near austin and have a lot of wonderful Literary Community and one of the big hugs is this become store so thank you for having us here tonight. I hope you will enjoy the conversation and you will good downstairs and get a book and bring it up to be signed. We know the best way to support writers is to buy their books. Yes. So, were going toern courage you to do that tonight, too, and finally, i wanted to read kates biorealy quick and then she is is going to read allege bit from the book and then well dig into a conversation. Kate is a seasoned documentary producer whose work has appeared in the new york times, wtbw us and abc news radio, fox news channel, united press international, pbs news hour and nightline just to few. You probably havent heard of any of those places. They sound really small. She is the author of death in the air the true story of a serial killer, the great london smog and the strangling of the city, and she teaches journal jim at the university of texas at austin. Please welcome kate winkler dawson. You want to set the scene. Im a multi tasker and i knew she would be asking me where i found the subject of the book, and so im [laughter] is that nancy pelosi move . So, the excerpt is im thinking this one for two reasons it fits with that and, two, because the reading ive done in the past involved a lot of body parts and my two tenyearold daughters are here so were going with a little more vanilla of a section. The setup for this is how its the case i actually read and how i discovered edward oscar hinrich and the why he was call americas sherlock holme. When i found him he was mentioned in a case about a botched train robbery in sis cue, oregon and it was four people dead and the robbers who were not robbers because they didnt walk away with anything, were in the wind and he only real cloud theyd had war a pair of overalls so the federal agents the government sent down u. S. Postal agents and Southern Pacific Railroad agents and that was the extent of the federal agent investigators and they went through with a fine tooth comb to try to find everything and the only thing they came up with was on one of the pockets was some grease, some mechanics grease. So they arrested a mechanic who was a neerdowell and this guy is in jail and the sheriff is nervous and said lets call in hinrich and see what he thinks help had been known for a few cases before that. So hinrich at this point has the i have this fantastic photo of him. Penned up the overalls on a door that he has hung from the ceiling so he can look at it and put a pair of shoes which look odd to me underneath as a invisible man is hanging from the ceiling wear overshall oscars a gaze traveled up the garments and stared the engine oil on the left pocket. Evidence that had convinced federal agents that local maybe danic was the killer. Oscar scrapped off the dark sticky glue, spread it across the glass slide and place placed it underneath his microscope. Adjust the oculars and rotated the magnification dial. It wasnt grease. He was sure, because he hadnt spotted any of the standard components. Mineral oil, vegetable oil, lime. He dripped a reagent on the slide some watch the chemical reaction. The goo was a purely organic substance. With his pencil he made the most Important Note of the case, a scribble on the back of an old envelope that would save the mechanics life. Pitch, not oil, on the left pocket. The grease on the overalls cam from a tree, not a vehicle. And soon oscar would determine that the pitch actually came from a douglas fir, tree found in western oregon, the same type of naturally occurring sticky resin used to caulk the seams of wooden sailing ship tore centuries. Oscar turned out the pockets and little chips caught in the fiber reflected the light of his small flashlight. No larger than half size of a pea, he wrote. The pockets carry tiny chips, earth debris and botanical debris peculiar to the western washington and western oregon forests. The suspect lived in the western part of oregon, he concluded. Oscar understood human nature so a mans habits reflected his personality also. Now were skipping over to the federal agents are finally tired of all of his notes and want answers so they come down to his lab, which is in berkeley, and theres one federal agent, one from the u. S. Postal and another federal agent named mcconnell and they same to him, who is this . We have this mechanic and were ready to put him to death for this and he said, no. Its a lumberjack, employed in a fir or spruce logging camp. A white man, not over 510, probably shorter, weight not over 165pounds, probably less. Not so fast, professor, said the postal agent. Do you mean to say you found all of this out from examine thing overalls . Oscar explained, this is the Razzle Dazzle part to me. Oscar complained he could stilt the weight of the owner basalomaerjacks frequently bought their overalls in a alarming size to they had room to shrink in the wash. Those overallses appeared to be new. The special shoes that his acity is tenant retrieved earlier were logging shoes, and when he placed them underneath he overall cuffs they were be perfect length for a logger hoping to keep his clothes from being ruined about climbing trees. Lumbermen wear pant legs turn up in a deep cuff halfway when the foot and the calf and outside the boot. He measured the distance from the cuffs creases to the shoulder straps to manipulate the wearers smythe new the owners Left Shoulder was threequarters of an inch shorter then the right. They one handled on the loved side. That meant he might have been lefthanded. The suspect was caution caucasian, classifying two strands of hair and was not able to use the hair to identify the suspect his assertion of the ethnicity of the owner was scientifically valid. Created a physical sketch of the killer, incredibly accurate profile based on overalls. His description tallied pen live with a braun hairedded lumberjack with a slaying built and hide, man who worked in oregon on spruce and fir trues so deachtys release the mechanic from jail and special agents focuses their search on a lumberjack from oregon. Du du du. Thank you. Indicate, how did you find oscar . Once you found him, and theres more to that story, right . Once you found him, how did you know that he was worth finding . What did you discover . Because as you have said, there was not a lot that was known about him in basic searches. So, if we backtrack, when i was done with my first book, called death in the air, about a london air pollution disaster and the serial killer caught in it with other people. Felt like i wanted to go toward forensics. My father was a law professor at the university of texas and we talked but forensics a lot, and i kind was on the search for forensic scientist, and so i got this book, and i found this case and i found this american sherlock label, and youre right, i kind of started was attracted to the name the man and when i found out how significant he was, that he was pioneer in forensic it was very exciting. So many other steps to writing what i think is a compelling narrative Nonfiction Book this is just for me. Number one, i like to write about people who are relatively unknown. Im not going to probably write about jfk. I want the unknown person. I want somebody who has made history and this is certainly somebody who has made history. I want a time period that i feel like im excited about, and the older the petitioner for me. My first poock was based in 1952 and hinrich worked between 1910 and 1953. That is four fantastic decades as far as im concerned. So much happens in that time period that is exciting for me. Like food and music and culture and crime and corruption and politics, all that stuff is really important to me because thats how you can bailed really good story build a really good story. I wanted a great location. I love san francisco, i lived in san francisco. He worked out of berkeley so that was important to me. And then the biggest thing for me theres one thing. One is, besides making history, what he did to make history, which is advancing forensics. What does that tell us about now . Is that pertinent now . Is forensics important now . Yeah, of course it is. Then really finally its the big thing for hinrich that i think was in his favor for me at least, was that his collection at uc berkeley was enormous, and that was a really good thing and a really bad thing because it was an excellent thing pause it gave me a huge amount of sources, was also an excellent thing because it scared everybody else aware. When you say enormous. 120 boxes. And that doesnt even count the letters he had. It was closed. Closed for 65 years. Think when he died in 53 his youngest son mortimer got whatever the 1965 equivalent of a you haul is in dumped it at uc berkeley his entire lab because everything was there. And uc berkeley, like many other archives, libraries, is understaffed and so when you do this search, usually as a researcher i go to world cat. Org or archive grid, and ill start putting in somebodys name, and those websites will tell you if the person has a collection, where the collection is. If they have multiple collections. And like if you type in Benjamin Franklin hes at 12 different locations, so i put in hinrich, and he was at uc berkeley and then it said, closed collection. So that meant, researchers cant go in. So, he read more about him and theres a form you can fill out that says i know its closed, i know this is a big deal, and let me explain why it should be opened. Im an established author with a Real Publishing company, putnam and this is why this man is significant and you need to take the time to enup the collection, and i got a email back from the assistant to the archivist who said, good luck, because it is probably not going to happen. So understaffed and this collection is closed for reasons because its so large. Two weeks later her boss emailed me and said well do it. She said youre right, great, taught here 40 years, we should on up the collection. It will take two years and ill work one day a week on it. Said, great, ill take it. So all of that leads into me not only identifying somebody who was worth a book and really compelling cases but actually having to take the step of saying, this is why you need to open this up, why it takes your time, its worth it. And let talk bat what was in the boxes. Im going to if you dont mind im going to read this paragraph to give folks an idea. Oscar filled out several pages of his large field journals every day of the week, even on the weekends and holidays. Chronicled pick time for every appointment, phone call or scientific test and noted the case involved in the margins. Oscar noted when he awoke in the morning, fell a sleep, when he required this afternoon naps and journaled when he journaled. The mark of a fast studious man, 8 00 p. M. To 10 00 p. M. Journalizing he wrote in one entry. So, you hit the jackpot. I did. And also i imagine wanted to burst into tears, how much there was. So, talk about that and i know he also had a lifelong friend a wrote a lot of letters to. It was complicated because like i said the reason everybody asked me how come nobody has done anything ago american sherlock, when oscar. It was time con sewell can. Oscar had a secretary three secretaries and he type had them type all of his letters out. If they were really private he hand write them and thank god he had nice hand writhing but everything was type, so he kept us a letters and frequently kept letters he sent out, and his son theodore became a really big deal in the museum world, and his best friend, john kaiser who is his watson character, is a big deal in the library world, and his cop sidekick, august, was a big deal in the policing world. They hauled collections and everybody kept each others letters. This was for somebody doing this type of book, was so incredibly important and i think really unusual because there is a point where i have two screens. I work agent is digital for me. I have two scenes and have his sons letters from january 12, 1933, and his letters to theodore, january 12, 1933 and i can create conversations. Literally and i had threeway conversations at some point between vollmer and this different people that all had these incredible collections. So having that rich of an archive is amazing. Somebody asked me the other night how i picked the cases, and i was a little embarrassed because my editor was sitting there and i said i just asked the archivist for the biggest files. Give me the ten biggest criminal case files you have. Didnt care what they are. I wanted that information and i adjusted some worked and some didnt. But i was looking for a lot of information and when i mean information, i mean like in one of these so okay. Well bring this up. One case is fatty arbuckle. You might know of fatty arbuckle who was i say if brad pitt were still relevant he would be the brad pitt of 19 sorry. Okay. Okay. All right, all right. Won an dame academy award. He would be the brad pitt of 1921. So he was a film star who was accused of assaulting and killing a movie actress, and so the things that were in the file were like dish was with the archivist and picked up a lock of hair and said what is this. She said thats the actress hair who he supposedly killed, and it was just laying in his file. Which is kind of incredible. He kept all of this evidence he shouldnt have had. There were loaded guns. He had load pistols and they had Uc Berkeley Police had to come out and remove a firing pin. Just to stop bad things from happening. He he had bomb parts. He removed a bullet from a womans heart and then filled the heart up with wax to take a wax cast of it so he could match it later on. I found that. And i it was really pretty incredible. Thank you urine . He did chart his own urine levels for a year and a half. I think he wanted to do something with dialysis and thats an interesting thing but Oscar Heinrich was that he wanted to do so much. He was interested in his own forensics lab, i in chemistry, and starting multiple businesses and it wasnt just his love of solving crime. There were so many other facets to him. It was interesting, too because his friend, the librarian, he ended up learning so much from the books he would send to him that would actually help him to further his own science. Right. He was his watson. Where do you guinn you have five decades of material and you zeroed in on the filed that were the largest. Then you have this science, you have this true crime aspect, you have a narrative that youre weaving together, and this book is wonderfully written. Its so beautifully written, and i want to read from the star review because no one needs to take my word for it. An entertaining, absorbing combination of biography and two time. While while many true crime books suffer from stale process, dawsons writing is remarkable and never uses the crutch of false suspense but doesnt skimp on valuable details and i think some of that comes from the fact you had a lot of great information. But how did you begin to think of how you were going craft this narrative . It gets hard. You want to start for me i just started learning about his life in chronology, where did he good, what cases did he do, how did he develop all of these incredible tools, and so once i start with an outline, what is his life story, the key opinioned, when did head get married, where did he grow up go to school. Then i can sort of fill in where these cases are, and it is overwhelming because i wanted to look at where he was in his life as these cases progressed. Youre doing three things. Youre looking at the narrative archivist story, youre think can but the story from his life at least, from the beginning and what he has learned and who he is to the end of his life and what he has achieved and where he is in his person life and then i have these individual cases that have their own little arcs within them and then i have to keep an eye on forensics. Where are we in world of foreignsticks. Just learn bought blood stain pat at the analysis and where where are we in senate you have to sort of make sure that your whole world continues to move forward all based on what he is learning and what im per viving to learn perceiving to health itself was difficult at times because owes scar had the same level of insecurity in his life which he didnt show often. I dont think he showed is to his wife marion. He showed it mostly to hisbed friend, this watson character, john kaiser. So i think he felt like overtime he was Getting Better and he was speaking to juries in a way that made them understand, and that was kind of his big struggle and the struggle of a lot of experts now. How do you take the chemicalled that are 12 letters long and explain this intricate process you spent four years or eight years learning in cool and and translate that to somebody who likely in the 1920s barely even has a high school education, if that, who is sitting on other jury, and so that was a lifelong struggle for him and i was always looking for these ways to bring in his progress and he had a lot of progress over the years. Just pretty cool to see it. For the csi fans in the room, can you talk about the 1920s and this and those decades but really a lot of what takes place, happens in the mostly in the 20s. What are those advancements we saw . Because it seems like so much of the pioneering in this field happened around that time. It did. I would say pre1910, really the europeans had a handle on forensics and advantagement inside france and italy and england. And of course we see that in the Sherlock Holmes poocks where doyle is coming up with new thursdayed thing are inspiring forensic and Forensic Science is inspiring hmm in Sherlock Holmes but in the united states, you have a lot of those experts during this time period just sort of reading european books. Theyre not professionally trained. Oscar called them scientist by correspondence where you kind of just read a book or two and be an expert. And so oscar was unique. Because the fielded that were starting to take off he had an interest in