RESPONSE: The Thing About Sondra London

Hello, it's me! Yes, The Real Sondra London (tm). I enjoyed today's post found at http://thiswasathingthathappened.blogspot.com/2010/08/thing-about-sondra-london.html; the style is entertaining, though the piece is marred by the usual inaccuracies. Now I'd like to make a couple of emendations to the record. I've written more characters than the 4,096 allowed for a comment in reply to a post, so I am just going to post this to my own blog.

Mine has been an example of a mythos that is much more widely known than my actual identity. Very few people (yourself, perhaps?) have actually read my books or the selected case studies I have posted to the web at sondralondon.com. My last three books were published by Feral House, and although FH has an excellent reputation for quality, you won't see them spending one dime on publicity, advertising, promotion. So within all the giddy hoopla there is actually something real that can be sought, found, and learned from; and yet, the silly stuff calling me a groupie and suggesting I get off on violence is what is bruited about, not without prurience on the part of das bruiters.

Schaefer was my boyfriend 1964-65 and he was a strikingly handsome boy from a prosperous family, attended mass every day, belonged to country club & yacht club. It took him about a year to confide in me his morbid urges. I was not afraid of him because he only showed me his presentable side. These episodes were breakdowns, and I was just a kid. Not a therapist. The term serial killer had yet to be coined and the very idea was unthinkable. I was uncomfortable spending my recreational time this way. I met a new guy and off I went.

I spent most of my life otherwise; fronted my own reggae band for 12 years, went from paralegal to technical writer, and by 1989 I had an office full of equipment that allowed me to do desktop publishing -- another term that was not yet coined. [When I started the Atlanta Desktop Publishers Assn. in 1985, there were a total of five of us. Within two years it was more like 200 and I had already dropped out.]

It was sort of a midlife crisis. Technical writing was boring and I didn't get to put my name on it. I'm like, SO! This is it? This is my life? If I do this really well, I'll get to do more of it! (Lather, rinse, repeat)

I started looking around for ideas of something I could write about so I could recalibrate the vector of this thing called a career: this opportunity to DO SOMETHING INTERESTING. I looked at the TV. I looked at the TV Guide. Then, as now, more than half of the words were about crime: killers & murder. Not illogically, I concluded that this was the subject that was of more interest to my culture than anything else.

I picked up the Ann Rule book about Ted Bundy and observed it was not very well written. (Ann later told me she spent 13 years writing before she could get published.) She claims in the book she knew Ted IRL. (Godfather of True Crime Jack Olsen later told me he had seen a copy of her book that Ted Himself (tm) had annotated, saying that he had NEVER met her; that they did work the same rape hotline but ON DIFFERENT SHIFTS). But I digress. [Hey. It happens. My life has not been a one-liner.]

"Shoot," I said. (Nice Southern Girl from a Good Family) "I can write better than that already, and I knew a serial killer a LOT more than she did!"

That was the reason I wrote to Schaefer in prison. So I could break out of technical writing and into being a "published author."

There was NO morbid fascination, NO "looking for love," NO real interest in crime or murder or prison, none of that. It was just my way of changing careers.

To drop back a bit for a moment: I graduated in the Charter Class of New College of Florida with a B.A. in literature. This was a unique intellectual environment in which we were challenged to think for ourselves. We learned how to structure our independent studies. The relevance of this background is that when I contacted Schaefer in 1989, I knew that to study any phenomenon, you could not just study one exemplar. You would have to go from the particular to the general in order to place your main case into context.

I also knew I had to master the literature, and I contacted the FBI asking for assistance in debriefing Schaefer. My query came before Silence of the Lambs made the Behavioral Science Unit famous. So it was my good fortune that Roy Hazelwood Himself (tm) became my personal mentor. He told me what to read. He sent me FBI monographs. He came to my house; he interviewed me and I interviewed him. (I will post that interview in a minute.)

So I read all the textbooks, I opened personal dialogs with the foremost experts, and I proceeded to learn much more than I ever wanted to, not just about the mind of the modern serial killer (my stated intention) but about law enforcement, the good, the bad & the corrupt; the judicial process; and the hypocrisy exemplified by mortality as a dramatic device. Perhaps because I am a bit of an Aspie, I didn't come from the same place as your neurotypicals who were doing this as a way of making money. I was all about studying and learning and publishing my research myself, sans redaction, sans commercialization. It was a revelation to me to learn about how the whole prurience thing drives the use of violence to heighten interest in a story. But like Bennet Cerf, by the time I learned that, I had already made quite a name for myself with this scary disgusting stuff and it was too late to quit.

The thing with Schaefer-the-Convict had nothing to do with romance. It was a case study, chosen and used as a way for me to become an author. It could have been anything. Sailing. Embroidery. Ancient history. But it was violence BECAUSE my analysis of the interests of my culture told me this is what "We the People" are more interested in than anything else.

Turns out Schaefer was scarcely your average SK. He was a graduate of college-level creative writing and criminal justice, graduate of police academy, and the very epitome of the modern "organized type" serial killer, according to Robert Ressler, who coined the phrase. [SEE: Whoever Fights Monsters.]

Schaefer's case was distinguished by his tendency to write about murder, and while working with him I encouraged him to develop his talents so that I could learn how his mind worked. Killer Fiction emerged from that process and the rest of that story is best learned by reading the book itself.

Schaefer turned me on to Ottis Toole, a cult killer, and I studied him for about five years. I recently posted a portion of my research on his case on my website. [You can find it.]

I did broaden my research to encompass correspondence with the likes of Gacy, Heirens, Bianchi, & others less well known. Again, this was not because I was a "groupie" or because I sought to strike up a romance with them, but because this was my self-assigned field of study. Everything I studied produced documentation (still a bit of the old techwriting nerd even now).

My work became the buzz on the Convict Hotline, and by the time the Gainesville Slasher was charged with five murders, I had written a screenplay called Escape from Death Row, which was shown to Danny Rolling. [NOT Rollings.]

He initiated contact with me and expressed admiration for my work. In his very first letter he offered me exclusive rights to his life story. And thus began my postgraduate-level education in Things I Never Wanted to Know.

Another digression here. Many SKs display a fractured identity; it's an occupational hazard. Studying multiple personality should have been just an academic exercise, but I immediately ran into all sorts of irrational hysteria surrounding its very existence. That too is "another story." But doing unauthorized groundbreaking research into that controversial topic was what gained me all my new unwanted attention, and it was those dedicated to protecting its secrets who were so busy at smearing my name, deconstructing my identity, and superimposing this whole "groupie" meme over my work. They did quite a professional job (ahem), didn't they?

What I have accomplished is in no way consistent with the meaning of the slur "groupie." I studied, I wrote, I published, and I cultivated an ability to withhold judgment to encourage extensive confidences from criminals nobody else could crack. [Including, notably, Robert Ressler.]

All this time the general public has been led to smirk and smarm over the distorted version of who I am, I continued to work closely with not only those guilty criminals who wanted to reveal their true stories via my good offices, but with members of law enforcement and academia who are not subject to such whimsical distractions.

This aspect of my work is hardly known, because I myself have not publicized it, and because there are no vested interests to benefit from giving me credit for my accomplishments.

Ann Rule is supposed to be the Queen of True Crime, but she only specializes in crowd-pleasers. She has never solved a case. There are no groupies anywhere who have worked with law enforcement to close unsolved cases.

It's well known that I was able to compile the ONLY complete, unabridged, accurate account of the five murders Rolling committed in Gainesville. Less well known is the voluminous Chronology I built to support my research. This too I have posted to sondralondon.com in the interests of setting the record straigh. This Chronology was so superior to that composed by The State that The Defense used it as their bottom-line reference in the case. Not only did I exclusively reveal what happened, but I persisted through an incredible complex of opposition [punitive penury, stalking, death threats, both in and out of court] to delve into WHY it happened. I published The Making of a Serial Killer despite being sued by the State and told that I would never collect one cent for the five years I spent on this case. The Son of Sam Laws had already been declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court, and the facts of my case did not conform to the purpose of these laws. Still, Florida is its own little fiefdom, especially North Florida, which has never had any legitimate industry and has thus been a cesspool of perpetual corruption. I was unable to finance my own defense and went toe-to-toe with The Powers That Be, full of confidence that the Constitution and Supreme Court law guaranteed that not only a writer, but a felon, would have full protection from being punished by the State for publishing the truth. Another opportunity to advance my education in Things I Never Wanted to Know.

Relatively unknown is the triple murder in Louisiana that I was able to document, and there's yet another story untold here, of how law enforcement concealed these unpublished confessions while continuing to lay the blame on Hal Carter, the hapless attorney who had been engaged to one of the victims.

I assisted law enforcement in closing two of Schaefer's unsolved murders, as well as two of Toole's.

There was a great wave of "attention" from the mass media during the time my books were on the shelves; this was part of the concerted effort to obscure the significance of my work and it was, again, quite a PROFESSIONAL job. (ahem, AHEM!) It seemed so spontaneous. This is not the place for me to reveal what is really going on with that, who is driving it, or what their charter might be.

Because Feral House was not about to lift a finger to promote my books it then became incumbent upon me to indulge these many attempts to get me to participate in ruining my own career, in the name of "publicizing my books." I have been accused of "just wanting attention," and being a "media whore," but that is far from the case. Nobody knows how many requests for interviews I have refused. Nor the multiple mega-Entities, like Paramount Pictures, who attempted to buy my life story.

People who imagine it is possible to seek such attention and get it are clueless about how The Media actually works.

When I first started with the Schaefer story, I asked some industry friends of mine for advice on what to do with it. I was told I needed to get with Errol Morris. But I didn't. [I just can't seem to get with that whole "hat-in-hand" thing. Every book I have done came to me, as did every appearance I have done.]

Instead, pages from my first book, Knockin on Joe: Voices from Death Row, published in minuscule quantities in England, were faxed to Errol by his friends, and ignited his interest in interviewing me. He employed a circuitous mechanism to contact me, and thus began another five-year involvement with a remarkable unique personality.

Eventually the biopic Errol made about me was released. It was not like the things done by NBC Dateline, ABC News, Larry King, et al. It was real.

It would be petty for me to cavil about the piece. I only want to place one item on the record. There was a remark I made about "the Danny side of me," that was presented out of context and I can see how people take it to mean that like the SK that existed on the other side of the Danny I knew, I got off on violence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The remark in context referred to how emotional Danny was compared to my own dispassionate nature, and how over the time I worked with him, he actually managed to bring out the emotional side of me that is so seldom seen. That's all I meant by "the Danny side of me."

It was a great privilege to work with the legendary Errol Morris, as well as the equally legendary Steve Dunleavy and the folks at A Current Affair, where I produced six exclusive stories, including one on the JFK Assassination. [SEE: Confession to Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK, on sondralondon.com.]

Well, look, folks, it's been fun but I really need to get back to work. I am still doing my research and writing, still solving cold cases, still taking confessions, but when my next books are released, they will be wholly owned by Sondra London (tm).

If you really want to learn about the kind of things I write about, I suggest you catch up on the Feral House books, so you will be ready to move to the next level when I am. Stay tuned, sportsfans. I'LL BE BACK.