From Page to Scream: Abominable Authors
These Criminals Took “Write What You Know” Way Too Literally
I recently found myself engrossed in “Hollywood Demons,” the new six-part docuseries from Investigation Discovery that spotlights scandals in showbiz. The first episode revisits the molestation accusations against “7th Heaven” star Stephen Collins, and I was utterly fascinated, despite never having watched any of his shows. What intrigued me most wasn’t his acting career, but the discovery that this seemingly wholesome, handsome TV dad wrote erotic thriller novels with scenes eerily mirroring his own sex crimes. Talk about a twisted form of method writing!
Collins admitted in a leaked 2012 therapy session to inappropriate sexual contact with three underage girls between 1973 and 1994. One victim, April Price, shares her story in the docuseries, recounting how Collins violated her more than once when she was just 13, leaving her “completely defenseless.” The irony deepens with Collins’ public criticism of Jessica Biel’s provocative Gear magazine photoshoot when she was 17, calling it “child pornography.” Nothing says “moral authority” quite like a Chester-the-molester denouncing someone else’s behavior!
Even more disturbing is how his fiction foreshadowed reality: his 1994 novel “Eye Contact” features a grown woman exposing herself to a teenage boy, while his 1998 book “Double Exposure” includes a character peeping at his neighbor’s younger sister—paralleling Price’s accusations. After slinking away from the spotlight with no charges filed, the 77-year-old Collins now lives with a woman 40 years his junior, a self-proclaimed “superfan.” Super fool, if you ask me.
Let’s explore other authors whose macabre imaginations weren’t just limited to the page:
Michael Peterson: The Staircase of Lies
Michael Peterson’s case reads like one of his own noir thrillers—if his thrillers were written by someone with a traumatic brain injury. The novelist was convicted in 2003 of murdering his wife Kathleen, whose body was found at the bottom of their staircase. Despite his insistence that her death was an accident (“Whoops!”), authorities connected the dots to another staircase death in Peterson’s orbit—family friend Elizabeth Ratliff, whose children subsequently became Peterson’s wards. What are the odds? About the same as winning the lottery twice, except instead of cash, you win an all-expenses paid trip to the pokey.
The most ridiculous twist was the infamous “Owl Theory,” proposed by attorney T. Lawrence Pollard at the trial. This flight of fancy suggested that Kathleen wasn’t murdered but was attacked by a wild owl outside their home, whose talons created the scalp lacerations. She then supposedly stumbled inside, attempted to climb the stairs while intoxicated, and fell to her death. Microscopic feather fragments were indeed found in her hair—though one has to wonder if Peterson’s defense team was simply grasping at wings and prayers. I mean, who hasn’t been attacked by a homicidal owl and then decided the best course of action was to climb a steep staircase? The owls are not what they seem, indeed! The case culminated in a 2017 Alford plea, allowing Peterson to maintain innocence while acknowledging prosecutors had enough evidence to convict him. Convenient! Almost as convenient as having two women in your life suffer identical “accidents” decades apart.
Anne Perry: The Heavenly Creatures of Crime
Anne Perry crafted immaculate Victorian murder mysteries for decades before the world discovered she had firsthand experience with homicide. In her previous life as teenager Juliet Hulme, Perry was convicted alongside friend Pauline Parker of murdering Parker’s mother in 1954 with a brick in a stocking—the most British murder weapon imaginable short of a deadly scone. Their story became the basis for Peter Jackson’s haunting film “Heavenly Creatures.” Unlike many on this list, Perry expressed genuine remorse, stating about her prison time, “I was guilty and it was the right place for me to be.” Her meticulous detail in the Thomas Pitt and William Monk detective series—featuring gruesome murders in proper Victorian society—came from firsthand experience. Nothing beats research like actual participation! Most crime authors just interview detectives; Perry went the extra mile and became the subject of an investigation herself.
Blake Leibel: The Graphic Novel of Torture
Blake Leibel’s case represents the most disturbing literal translation from page to crime scene. The Canadian comic book creator co-wrote the graphic novel “Syndrome” about a neuropathologist’s bold experiment. In 2018, Leibel was convicted of murdering and torturing his fiancée, Iana Kasian, just weeks after she gave birth to their daughter. That’s some postpartum depression—except it was Leibel who couldn’t handle the new addition. Prosecutors said Leibel used his graphic novel as “a blueprint for the gruesome slaying” and described it as “a case of life imitating art.” The novel featured extensive scenes of bloodletting, and when Kasian was found, nearly all of that red stuff had been drained from her organs. Apparently, Leibel took the phrase “putting yourself into your work” far too literally. His doomed spouse endured at least six hours of torture before death, with parts of her body later discovered in the trash—making Leibel possibly the only author whose work and cleanup methods were equally trashy. He now serves life without parole, ordered to pay Kasian’s family $41.6 million—proving once again that crime doesn’t pay, but civil judgments certainly try to make it expensive. (Judging by the royalties publishers are paying these days, the family has a wait longer than a CVS receipt ahead of them.)
Richard Klinkhamer: The Dog-Eat-Dog World of Murder
Dutch crime novelist Richard Klinkhamer seemed to think rejection from his publisher was more devastating than being caught for murder. After killing his wife Hanny in 1991, he buried her body beneath a shed and sealed it with concrete—practical skills he’d learned in the French Foreign Legion, where they teach you “how to kill somebody” and “how to dispose of a body properly.” Well, that’s applicable job training! With breathtaking audacity, Klinkhamer submitted a manuscript to his publisher a year later titled “Wednesday, Mince Day,” exploring seven ways he might have killed his wife, including pushing her flesh through a mincer and feeding it to pigeons. His publisher rejected the book as too gruesome, but it certainly caught police attention. Without a body, they could make no arrest—until new tenants uprooted the old shed nine years later, revealing Hanny’s skeleton. Lesson learned: if you’re going to murder your spouse, don’t write a book about it. Klinkhamer’s biggest crime might have been his hubris; his second biggest was the murder.
William S. Burroughs: The Beat of a Different Archer
William S. Burroughs’ grotesque novels helped establish him as a primary figure of the Beat Movement, but his most shocking act wasn’t on the page. In 1951, he accidentally shot and killed his second wife during a drunken “William Tell” prank. This wasn’t fiction; this was a real bullet through a real skull—proving that alcohol, firearms, and literary recreations are a combination deadlier than his drug cocktails. After fleeing Mexico, Burroughs continued his drug-addled wanderings across the world, publishing his first book under the pen name “William Lee.” Mexican authorities deemed the death accidental, and Burroughs served minimal time. His experiences with drugs and this horrific act informed his later works, including “Junky” and “Naked Lunch.” Unlike most on this list, Burroughs sought treatment for his addictions and continued writing until his death at 83—perhaps the only one here who found some semblance of redemption through his art, proving that in the 1950s, all you needed for a second chance was to be a white male author with friends in high places.
Issei Sagawa: The Celebrity Cannibal
Issei Sagawa takes “food writing” to horrifying extremes. In 1981, this Japanese student shot and killed his classmate Renee Hartevelt because “his urge to eat human meat was too strong.” With disturbing candor, Sagawa later claimed, “Nobody believes me, but my ultimate intention was to eat her, not necessarily to kill her”—as if that’s somehow better? “I didn’t want to murder her, I just wanted to consume her flesh” isn’t exactly the moral high ground he seems to think it is. After freezing portions of her body, he attempted to dispose of her remains but was caught when witnesses noticed blood dripping from his suitcase—a rookie mistake that would make Dexter Morgan cringe.
Due to a bizarre legal loophole—being found legally insane in France but then having sealed court documents preventing prosecution in Japan—Sagawa walks free today as the “Celebrity Cannibal.” He’s published books, articles, and even restaurant reviews for magazines. Yes, restaurant reviews. I’ll never look at a food critic’s “This meat melts in your mouth” statement the same way again. Sometimes truth is more grotesque than fiction could ever be.
Krystian Bala: The Amok of Murder
Polish author Krystian Bala thought he’d written the perfect crime novel—until police realized it was actually a confession. In 2003, Bala published “Amok,” which became a bestseller in Poland, describing the torture and murder of a young woman. Two years later, an anonymous tip led police to notice striking similarities between the book and the unsolved 2000 murder of Dariusz Janiszewski. In 2007, Bala received a 25-year sentence for killing the small business owner who was dating Bala’s ex-wife. His case was featured on Investigation Discovery’s “True Nightmares,” proving once again that authors should probably keep their homicidal fantasies strictly fictional—or at least change enough details to avoid prison. The moral of the story: if you’re going to commit murder, don’t publish the evidence and expect royalties.
James Tiptree Jr.: The Secret Life (And Death)
Alice B. Sheldon wrote disturbing sci-fi short stories about love, death, and gender under the pen name James Tiptree Jr., winning Hugo and Nebula awards while maintaining the fiction of being a male author who “understood women.” The revelation of her true identity in 1976 didn’t stop her success, but her personal demons eventually won out. In 1987, suffering from depression, she shot her ailing husband while he slept before turning the gun on herself—giving piquant meaning to the phrase “till death do us part.” Her award-winning stories like “The Screwfly Solution” explored themes of extinction and violence, but her final chapter proved darker than any fiction she created. Apparently, she understood plot resolution all too well, providing her own life with the most definitive ending possible.
Kouri Richins: The Little Golden Book of Grief and Greed
Kouri Richins represents perhaps the most cynical exploitation of tragedy on this list. After allegedly poisoning her husband Eric with fentanyl, she published a children’s book titled “Are You With Me?” about navigating grief after losing a loved one. The audacity is breathtaking—prosecutors claim she was motivated by financial distress and sought to profit from his life insurance policies. Evidence included internet searches for lethal fentanyl doses, insurance payouts, and how to delete information from an iPhone. Her search history was more incriminating than her prose! Her case was profiled on 20/20, revealing how she weaponized sympathy through her writing while allegedly orchestrating her husband’s murder. Her defense claims innocence, but the chilling calculation required to murder one’s spouse and then exploit that death through a children’s book suggests a story arc too twisted even for fiction. If convicted, perhaps she can write a sequel from prison: “Where Are You Now? Navigating Your Parent’s Murder Trial.”
In each case, the blurred line between imagination and action raises disturbing questions. Do these authors write about violence because it already exists within them, or does the act of writing such scenes somehow normalize these impulses? Either way, their stories remind us that sometimes the monsters aren’t just in the books—they’re the ones writing them. And while most writers claim to kill only their darlings, this gruesome group took editing to a whole new level.
Have I left anyone out? Tell me about them in the comments!
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BONUS BOOK
“Deliberate Cruelty: Truman Capote, the Millionaire's Wife, and the Murder of the Century” by Roseanne Montillo
This tome explores the darkly intertwined fates of infamous socialite Ann Woodward and literary icon Truman Capote, sweeping us to the upper echelons of Manhattan’s high society—where falls from grace are all the more shocking.
When Ann Woodward shot her husband, banking heir Billy Woodward, in the middle of the night in 1955, her life changed forever. Though she claimed she thought he was a prowler, few believed the woman who had risen from charismatic showgirl to popular socialite. Everyone had something to say about the scorching scandal afflicting one of the most rich and famous families of New York City, but no one was more obsessed with the tale than Truman Capote. He decided the story of Ann’s turbulent marriage would be the basis of his next masterpiece—a novel about the dysfunction and sordid secrets revealed to him by his high society “swans”—never thinking that it would eventually lead to Ann’s suicide and his own scandalous downfall.
I can’t wait to read it… but I’ll have to; I’ve got a few in the queue ahead of it.
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StaciLayneWilson.com
Great article, did not know about Stephen Collins writing career