Writers are often asked where they get their ideas. Some ideas—maybe most—begin as kernels. Just a sense of something that could expand. Sometimes, they sit for years before they pop. When they do, one little kernel could set up a whole novel.
 
We should always write them down for future use. It’s amazing what can happen when we light the fire to see if they’ll pop. My third novel, Dead-Handed, was based on the kernel of an idea from thirty years ago. I read about a cursed property and thought, “I’ll use that one day.” My latest book, You Can’t Hide, popped from another one: from a plot around the daughter of a serial killer.
 
I’ve encountered several relatives of serial killers and have found the daughters to be especially interesting. One desperately wanted to believe her father’s lies that he wasn’t as bad as people said. A few helped to hide evidence while others assisted police to find it. Several have used the popularity of true crime culture to establish notoriety and financial support. Some have falsely posed as serial killers’ daughters, accusing their fathers (without evidence) of substantial criminal behavior.
 
Those daughters who’ve gone public often claim they’re victims, too. They go on talk shows and podcasts, and some have written memoirs. Melissa Moore, the daughter of “Happy Face Killer” Keith Jesperson, developed a TV series, Monster in My Family, in which she joined relatives of serial killers with members of families whose loved ones were the killers’ victims. The goal was healing for both parties.
 
Kerri Rawson, the daughter of Dennis Rader, Wichita’s “BTK” serial killer, has wavered between outright rejection and coming to terms. A decade after his arrest in 2005, she described her anguish and humiliation upon learning that the doting father she’d loved had murdered ten people. In A Serial Killer’s Daughter, she describes the difficult process of trying to understand. “It’s horrible to realize that as my dad was raising children, he chose to take another mother away from her own children. He was about to have a daughter yet took two more daughters away from their families.”

As part of a TV broadcast, I once spoke to the daughter of a man who’d killed 13 sex workers. She visited him in prison and believed he was sincerely remorseful (although he said a “disorder” prevented him from feeling said remorse). This made it possible for her to feel close to him as a daughter and believe he was still a good man.

In contrast, the three daughters of Michelle “Shelly” Knotek turned her in. Using beauty and sex to deflect suspicion, Knotek subjected her children and tenants to torment. Using a caretaker’s persona to hide her sadistic cruelty, she manipulated her third husband, David, into covering up her crimes and even killing for her. Knotek was convicted in two deaths and her husband a third.

The nightmares for such offspring often continue. Whether they accept or reject, they’ve been emotionally damaged. Some find solace in religion, community, and family. Some become victim advocates, as if their work can neutralize their parents’ crimes.

So, I had plenty to work with to form my character, Vaughn Ryder. I just had to decide what she’d be like as the result of this jarring change to her life and whether she’d have a relationship with her criminal dad. She decides not only that he’s innocent but also that she must advocate for him. Is it denial, or does she have proof that the real killer is still out there? When my investigative team encounters her, she’s a force to be reckoned with. Non one tells her no, not even her dad.

So, an idea that sat for years waiting to be popped added significant momentum to my crime story. Vaughn was headstrong, determined, and unpredictable but also the key to propelling the plot. To add some twists, I even included that cursed property from Dead-Handed.

Keep track of your kernels! You never know when they’ll become exactly what you need to pop your plot.

With her Nut Cracker Investigations series, Katherine Ramsland injects her expertise in forensic psychology into her fiction. She consults for coroners, trains homicide investigators, and has appeared as an expert on more than 250 crime documentaries. She was an executive producer on Murder House Flip, A&E’s Confession of a Serial Killer: BTK, and ID’s The Serial Killer’s Apprentice. The author of more than 2,000 articles and 74 books, including I Scream Man and How to Catch a Killer, she also has a Substack and pens a blog for Psychology Today. 

​I never intended to write a series. The thought of going to the well too often was off-putting, and I feared getting stale. I wanted to write standalones; I believed they would test the limits of my creativity.
 
Then I wrote PUBLIC MORALS. Loosely based on a real-life corruption scandal in the New York City Police Department, it's told in two parts. In the first part, set in 1982, a crooked cop named Terence Devine is convicted for killing a sex worker. In the second part, which occurs forty years later, his daughter, Sheila, a documentary filmmaker, investigates the crimes that he and other people committed -- in the process unearthing startling new evidence.
 
As I put the novel through multiple drafts, I discovered that I really liked Sheila Devine (I do not always feel this way about my characters; in reviewing my novel MIAMI TWILIGHT, the mystery impresario Otto Penzler said that "Coffey has a genius for creating antiheroes"), and I wanted to extend her journey. For a number of years, I've also kicked around the idea of writing a book based on the Central Park Jogger case. I wouldn't say that I had a "Eureka!" moment, but after finishing PUBLIC MORALS, and not wanting to let Sheila go, I decided that she could be the vehicle that would allow me to write about the jogger case. The result is SPECIAL VICTIM, the second novel in what I am immodestly calling The Devine Trilogy.
 
Thirty-five years after it happened, the Central Park Jogger case still resonates in New York. I got a sense of that on Nov. 2 when I read from the book at a Mystery Writers of America event at a library in midtown Manhattan. Perhaps it's my imagination, but as soon as I began reading I felt I had the rapt attention of the two dozen people in attendance, all of whom were familiar with the story. The air seemed to leave the room, in a good way. When I was done, and the moderator Hal Glatzer asked for questions or comments, instead of the typical non-responses from the audience, many people waded in with pointed questions and comments. I was happy for the strong reactions, both pro and con, and after the session, I talked to a retired NYPD detective who had taken part in the interrogations of the five young men who were first convicted, and then exonerated, in the assault. It turns out that some of the people close to the investigation had doubts about their guilt from the start -- doubts that were memorably aired by Joan Didion in an essay in The New York Review of Books two years after the attack -- but groupthink prevailed, both in law enforcement and the news media.
 
Much as I'd like to pin the blame for this miscarriage of justice on police and prosecutors, I cannot. I was a journalist in New York City for many years, and this was one of my former profession's worst moments. The presumption of innocence may seem like a quaint and no-longer-relevant idea, but it was established for a reason. In this case, as soon as the young men who became known as the Central Park Five were arrested, they were convicted in the court of public opinion. Blaring headlines in the tabloid press assumed the defendants' guilt and wondered why they hadn't been put in prison for life already, placing an incredible amount of pressure on the police to arrest somebody, anybody, really didn't matter who it was. The overwhelming desire in New York was for vengeance, not justice, and inconvenient facts were ignored. Even after DNA established the identity of the real attacker, many people who were involved in the investigation, and who wrote stories about it, refused to admit that they had made mistakes, or had gotten anything wrong. As a result, many people in New York City still believe that the members of the Central Park Five were involved in the attack. (To be fair, some of those guys were in the park that night, and they weren't doing outreach to the homeless; they were beating up the homeless.)
 
Now I'm on to the third book of my trilogy, which I hope will complete the journey of Sheila Devine and her family. The book is tentatively titled STOP AND FRISK, and I'm reluctant to say anything about it because I haven't finished writing it yet. While it's not based on a specific event, it does deal with the all-too-frequent deadly encounters in this country between the police and young men of color. And in writing this trilogy, rather than writing each novel as a standalone, I've discovered that I've been able to delve even more deeply into story, into character, and into the state of the human condition.
 
Which means, I guess, that I may have to start another series.