Writings - True crime author tells tales

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April 1, 1993

Chatting with murderers and psychopaths may not be everybody's idea of a dream job, but to true-crime author Lowell Cauffiel it's all in a day's work.

Cauffiel described his line of work in detail earlier this month at the 10th annual Friends of Northville Public library dinner at Genitti's Hole-ln-the-Wall Restaurant. And if what the sellout crowd of 80 wanted was a taste of the macabre, they got their fill.

The nationally published author has built a career around in-depth explorations of brutal crimes and the psyches of the people capable of committing such acts. His first work, "Masquerade A True Story of Seduction , Compulsion and Murder," focused on the double life and grisly death of Detroit psychologist Alan Canty. It became a national bestseller and is now being developed into a made-for-television movie by ABC.

He followed that success with "Forever and Five Days," the chilling account of two Grand Rapids nursing aides who suffocated five of their elderly patients while trying to spell out the word "murder" with the patients' names.

Cauffiel noted Monday that his literary tastes have often run to the grotesque, starting with the first book he checked out of the bookmobile that stopped by his hometown of Temperance, Mich. The book was titled "A Complete World History of Torture," he said.

Working 15 years for The Detroit News and Detroit Monthly magazine honed his investigative skills and gave him an extended glimpse into the criminal mind, as he covered police investigations and authored a string of cover stories for the newspaper's Michigan Magazine and Detroit Monthly.

Cauffiel, an animated speaker with an appropriately twisted sense of humor, told Monday's audience that his brand of writing often lands him on murderers' Christmas card lists and makes for strange pen-pals.

He read excerpts of several polite letters from one convicted killer serving a life term without parole. The killer hoped all was well with Cauffiel and noted that his own situation was unlikely to change soon.

One thing that amazed Cauffiel when he was researching his books was how open even the worst criminals could be in interviews.

"I've found once you've established some trust, people want to tell you their stories,". he said. The subjects of media accounts of murder and mayhem can often feel slighted by the previous coverage of their crimes in headlines and news briefs, and look forward to telling the whole story, he said.

Cauffiel admitted that the market for the so-called true crime story has become glutted in recent years with quick ripoffs that are rushed into print or onto television screens within weeks or months of the story.

"It seems like America can't get enough of it," he said.

His own works, on the other hand, can take more than a year to research after a suspect has been convicted. Cauffiel notes he can spend between six and nine months simply researching a story, recording hundreds of hours of interviews and compiling thousands of pages of documents in the process.

The research also includes interviewing forensic psychologists who examined the suspects and conducting his own psychological tests using standardized forms.

"With murderers involved, I research the stories very, very carefully," he said.

Cauffiel compared his true-life tales to morality plays in which, though a dreadful crime Is committed, the criminal Is eventually brought to justice. After luring readers in with the gruesomeness of the crime or the bizarreness of its perpetrators, he said, "I try to tell you a story that actually has some redeeming value."

Why tell such grisly tales at all? Cauffiel argued that they set things in perspective for those of us who choose not to act on our darker impulses. "They really explore the darkest recesses of the human spirit," he said. "They let us know where we are on the scale."

The stories also give Cauffiel a chance to touch on greater themes.

"Masquerade," for example, "is about the Me Decade. It s about an '80s couple that have all the right things," he said.

"Forever and Five Days," with its depiction of a nursing home where patients' fears were ignored by the unsuspecting staff, also works as a cautionary tale about the warehousing of the elderly.

Cauffiel, with two works scheduled for television, puts little faith in theories that televised violence begets real violence, noting that he's become as desensitized as anyone through his work but has no desire to kill.

Instead, he attributes the brutal crimes and serial killings that are at the heart of his works to a culture that allows situational ethics and relative morality, and gives people an excuse for nearly everything.

"We've managed to negotiate around just about every one of the 10 commandments," he said. "'Thou shalt not kill,' that's one thing we can all still stand behind."

Still, one question about the subjects in his stories remains unanswered in Cauffiel's mind.

"I still haven't decided," he said. "Is it a psychological aberration or is it just plain evil?"