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An Interview with Brendan Hamilton

1/15/2013

From:Cover of Snow
By
  Jenny
Milchman

You are different from many of the cops I have interviewed. Please tell us about yourself.
I never wanted to be a cop. How many guys do you know who want to be the same thing as their father? Well, maybe some do, guys who look up to the old man, want to be just like him. I wish I were one of them, but I’m not. Nobody looked up to my father, so how was I supposed to? I was all set to go to law school, but then I met Nora. And something in her called me home. I didn’t want the two of us to keep on living our big city life, her helping to put me through law school, and then me working seventy hours a week in an office and never even seeing her. It wasn’t exactly a conscious decision on my part to
return to Wedeskyull, or join the force where my dad served his twenty before he died. Like I said, something called me home.

How did you become involved in this case?
Here’s where things get weird. I’m not involved in this case. Because I’m dead. The case is what happened to me—and Nora, though she isn’t a cop, is the only person who has a chance to solve it, because she’s the only one who’s willing to face the truth.

Tell us about this case.
Something bad happened on January 16th , bad enough that I don’t think I ever really looked up after that again. The following week passed in a way I didn’t know time could go. Just—unnoticed. I must’ve eaten, I must’ve drank, dressed, breathed. But I don’t remember doing any of it. I can’t imagine what Nora thought. I felt like was wrapped up in blankets. I couldn’t figure out why everyone kept talking to me. Didn’t they know I was already gone?

I’m not sure if Nora’s going to be able to figure out what happened on the 16th. She’s still stumbling around a lot farther in the past than that, trying to learn a secret I was never able to tell her. If she can’t find out about what happened to me when I was eleven, she’ll never be able to figure out this more recent crime.

No one besides me knows the whole truth. And I’m dead.

Was there ever a time during this case that you doubted those that you normally trust?
I trust Nora more than I’ve ever trusted anyone else in my life. But the rest of them? I don’t trust a single one. And neither should you.

How dangerous was it to solve this case?
If I hadn’t died, I think they would’ve killed me.

Did working on this case affect you emotionally?
This case was all about emotion. See, I did something really bad when I was eleven years old. Something unforgivable. My own parents never forgave me for it—my mother anyway—so you know it must be as bad as anything could get. But I was able to get past it the way cops survive any bad day on the job. You take what happened and you put it in a box. You padlock that box and then you forget the combination. Any cop worth his salt has a hundred boxes like that. A thousand.

So that’s what I did. And I was surviving okay. I had a good life, in fact. I loved my wife, even if I couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted most. I was better on the job than I ever would’ve been doing something else.

And then something happened, on that January day, and it didn’t matter if I’d forgotten the combination, someone took a big ole hacksaw and split open the box. And what was inside killed me.

How did this case affect your personal life?
My personal life? My life you mean. My whole life. I lost it.

I appreciate you being with us today. I have one more question. (He leaves) Please come back. What was in the box?


Jenny Milchman is a suspense novelist from New Jersey whose short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine’s Department of First Stories, Adirondack Mysteries II, and in an e-published volume called Lunch Reads. Jenny is the founder of Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day, and the chair of International Thriller Writers’ Debut Authors Program. Her first novel, Cover of Snow, is published by Ballantine and
available everywhere books are sold. When Cover of Snow comes out, Jenny is embarking on a six month tour with her family, town-to-town, bookstore-to-bookstore, library-to-library, and other venues that readers will enjoy. Please check her website http://jennymilchman.com/tour/for places to come meet Jenny—and her cop.

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Meet Dave Everett, Santa Cruz Police Department Ombudsman

9/9/2011

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from The Widow’s Walk League by Nancy Lynn Jarvis.

Welcome, Officer Everett. Please tell us about yourself and your role with the Santa Cruz Police Department.
Well, I lost an eye in a shootout several years back--- dumb mistake, but there’s no point going into that. I convinced the Santa Cruz Police Department to keep me on in a desk job as the media interface, public relations guy for the force rather than just retiring me. I’m only in my mid-forties and too young to be completely sidelined. I didn’t like my job at first, too many cats up a tree and stuff like that, but I figured out ways to keep a finger in some crime pies.

Do you like your job now?
After a while I came up with my personal trademark Hawaiian shirt for TV interviews and realized how bad Santa Cruz, whose motto is "Keep Santa Cruz Weird" needed my interface between the force and the community. Eventually, I kind of started enjoying what I do.

You said you lost an eye in a shootout.
Oh, yeah, about my eye: we already have Jack O’Neill, the guy who invented wetsuits
as our local one-eyed-patch wearing celebrity, so my eye is a prosthetic. It matches my good eye perfectly, I’m told. I just can't wink very well because it mimics what my good eye does.

Officer Everett, can you tell us about this case?
We get some gang shootings and some one-shot personal murders, but this case, well,
Santa Cruz husbands started getting killed in some pretty public places. And then this little TV gal talked to some witnesses who said they saw somebody dressed like Death hanging around when the first guy bought it. The media went nuts. By the time of the second murder, everybody was seeing Death.

Did anyone outside of the police department help you solve this case?
You would ask that, wouldn’t you? See, I’ve got this gal-pal — my wife’s a friend of her husband’s, too, so that makes us kind of extra-tight — who’s become kind of a meddler. She’s a real estate agent, not exactly a job profile that makes her well-trained to solve murders, but she gets these ideas… It started a couple of years ago when a real estate buddy of hers was top of our list of suspects in a murder. We just didn’t have the personnel to pursue it instantly and she’s, well, she’s kind of nosey and impatient.

My train of thought is getting derailed here. Regan, that’s her name, Regan McHenry, well, she has a way of doing that to me; she gets me involved in the messes she makes with her amateur detecting. Sometimes she even gets me to tell her things about cases I probably shouldn’t. It’s irritating how she finds things out that she has no right to know. Ah, don't get me started. I worry about her, too. Like I said, she's a friend. She's gonna get herself seriously hurt one of these days even though I try to keep her out of trouble.

How did she help with this case?
Oh yeah, this case. All the widows of these dead guys started coming to her to sell their houses — and she realized they all knew one another because they belonged to this walking group called the Widow’s Walk League. She got all worked up, like she does, and thought the head of this group seemed suspicious, even had designs on her husband. The case got solved, not exactly because of her, but —don’t you dare tell her I said this because she already thinks she’s cleverer than she is — but because of some stuff she discovered and because she caught a few lucky breaks.

Thank you for being with us today. I wish you the best in helping to keep our streets safe and Regan out of messes.

Nancy Lynn Jarvis has been a Santa Cruz, California, Realtor® for more than twenty
years. She still owns a real estate company with her husband, but has been having so much fun killing people that she will probably never sell another house. The Widow’s Walk League, the fourth in her Regan McHenry Real Estate Mysteries, was released in July. For more information on her or her books visit her Amazon author page under Nancy Lynn Jarvis http://www.goodreadmysteries.com
and at http://www.facebook.com/ReganMcHenryRealEstateMysteries?ref=ts.

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An Interview With Jack--A Different Kind of Cop

8/12/2011

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From Smoky Mountain Meltdown by Sharleen Johnson

JACK, the Doberman Pinscher, is a member of the K-9 Division of the Gatlinburg Police Department.  He has been instrumental in solving many cases involving "search and rescue," "chase and take-down," and drug detection."

Jack, how did you get involved in this case?
I had been working with Chief of Police Max Lamont for a couple of years. Three months
ago he married my partner, Annie Murphy Malone, owner of The Tin Roof Cafe. Chief Lamont was working on a drug case out of Atlanta and was gunned down and killed in the parking lot behind the City Police Department building. Annie has been devastated, but has turned her sadness into a dogged—excuse the word—pursuit of Max's killer.

Why is this case so special to you?
It has hit too close to home.

What made the case hard for you to solve?
The fact that some of the undercover cops out of the Atlanta Narcotics Division have turned bad. Those guys are playing on both sides of the street.

Anything else?
We also have the problem of communication. Less than 99.9% of the human population can hear us. We have a facilitator, Charles Weaver, homeless, who Annie has befriended.  He suffered a devastating brain injury as a child.  We think he can hear us because of an anomaly in his frontal lobe.

Do you have any help with your investigation?
My pal, Jill, and of course, Annie.  A guy named Darrien Hatcher with the Atlanta Cops also helped. He was a good cop who turned bad, then back to good again.  The cartel didn't appreciate his defection and his name was placed on a hit list.

How has being a member of the K-9 Division affected your life?
I've had a very busy life.  From the moment I was born I was trained to be in service to human. I graduated from three of the top schools in Atlanta and Tampa for my particular line of work.  In fact, I just returned from Florida where I took a refresher course in
drug detection.

Thank you for being with us today, Jack. With such a busy and productive life we hope you are able to stay out of the "dog house." Thank you for your service.

SHARLEEN JOHNSON has been writing for several years and has published novels in three different genres. She lives with her husband in Ooltewah, TN, a growing suburb of Chattanooga. Smoky Mountain Meltdown, the third in the series is scheduled to be released in January. For more information on Sharleen or her books visit her at www.sharleenjohnson.com or sharleenjohnson.blogspot.com.

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Meet Sheriff Jeff Ramsey

7/30/2011

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from Button Hollow Chronicles #1: The Leaf Peeper Murders by Loni Emmert & P.I. Barrington

We have with us Sheriff Jeff Ramsey of the Button Hollow, New Hampshire Sheriff’s Department. Sheriff Ramsey joined the Button Hollow force as a deputy as a young man and has been serving the citizens of the village of Button Hollow for over twenty years.

Sheriff Ramsey, tell us about the recent crime spree in Button Hollow.
Button Hollow is a small village in central New Hampshire. It’s a small town where everyone knows everyone else, and I mean that literally. Most residents have lived their entire life in Button Hollow, so when we had two citizens found dead in a swamp looking like suicides I became suspicious. Sure, both were down on their luck, one a prostitute with a love for meth and the other a loud-mouthed drunk but I knew both of them for   years and neither one seemed to me to be a good candidate for suicide. The circumstances were off, and there were too many unanswered questions.

Some people say that things like that happen to people like the ones you described.
In their youth they were the same as you and me, they just made some bad decisions. That did not give anyone the right to kill them.

Why is this case so special to you?
Murder in Button Hollow, that’s what! We’d had some other strange activity go on in town, and something just didn’t sit right in my gut, you know what I mean? I know my town inside and out and I knew something unusual was going on.

Did anything make these murders hard to solve?
The Button Hollow Citizens’ Brigade made it damn hard to solve.

Citizens’ Brigade? What’s that?
Unfortunately, our town had established the Citizens’ Brigade which is a group of elderly residents that feel the need to stick their noses where they don’t belong and get involved in police business. Most of the time they get in my way and make my job more difficult,
which they definitely accomplished this time, but, I gotta admit they actually helped me solve the case. I gotta say that Button Hollow does produce some tough, upstanding citizens.

How has this case affected your personal life?
I hate to talk about my personal life but throughout this case my wife Sharon and I had been having some problems. We worked that all out now and hopefully things on the home front will remain calm.

And the Brigade, is it still around?
Yep. I conceded and let them stay together. After one of them willingly put their life on the line to help me prove that two of their neighbors were murdered what else could I do? So, they’re still around. Still annoying me and still getting in my way.


Thank you, Sheriff Ramsey. I hope that the Citizens’ Brigade helps you keep Button Hollow safe for all of your residents.

Loni Emmert lives in Southern California, works in entertainment, and loves to write murder mysteries. Button Hollow Chronicles #1: The Leaf Peeper Murders was released in August 2010. The Covered Bridge Murders, the second in the series is scheduled to be released soon. Button Hollow Chronicles #1: The Leaf Peeper Murders can be purchased through Amazon.com, Mainly Murder Press or the author’s website: http://thewordmistresses.com.

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An Interview with Brendan Hamilton

Meet Dave Everett, Santa Cruz Police Department Ombudsman

An Interview With Jack--A Different Kind of Cop

Meet Sheriff Jeff Ramsey

Paula's Coppers

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