Author Archives: Garry Rodgers

About Garry Rodgers

After three decades as a Royal Canadian Mounted Police homicide detective and British Columbia coroner, International Best Selling author and blogger Garry Rodgers has an expertise in death and the craft of writing on it. Now retired, he wants to provoke your thoughts about death and help authors give life to their words.

COLIN PITCHFORK MURDERS — THE BIRTH OF DNA FORENSIC EVIDENCE

Colin Pitchfork. Just the name conjures up a devilish image—an evil monster—a story-villain of homicidal psychopathy. But Colin Pitchfork wasn’t a fictional work, though, like Hannibal Lecter. Pitchfork was a real serial murderer and sexual deviant who raped and strangled at least two teen girls in England in the mid-1980s as well as committing countless sexual offenses. And he was the first killer in the world to be convicted through DNA forensic evidence.

Four decades later, DNA forensic evidence is commonplace. So commonplace, in fact, that juries expect it. Through a phenomenon called the CSI Effect, clever defense counsels can plant doubtful seeds in jurors’ minds where they’ll wrongfully acquit a perfectly guilty person if there’s no DNA evidence linking the accused to the crime.

That wasn’t the case with Colin Pitchfork. He was perfectly guilty of murder, and DNA evidence proved it. We’ll look at the Pitchfork case facts in a moment and then do a DNA Forensic Evidence 101 crash course, but first let me tell you a bit of my police investigation background and why I have the authority to write this piece on the birth of DNA forensic evidence.

In the 1990s, when DNA evidence was under development, I was an active homicide detective with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Serious Crimes Section. I was peripherally involved in surreptitiously collecting a biological sample from a suspect (later convicted) in the first DNA evidence trial in Canadian courts. Ryan Jason Love was taken down solely through DNA evidence for the 1990 murder of Lucie Turmel, a female cab driver who Love stabbed to death in the resort town of Banff, Alberta.

I was in the right place at the right time (DNA career-wise) in 1995 when Canada passed Bill C-104 Forensic DNA Analysis, a federal law. This legislation authorized search warrants for DNA sample collection on uncooperative suspects. The day the bill passed senate assent, I investigated a violent sexual assault where a police dog tracked and not-so-gently tackled a fleeing suspect. I executed the first DNA search warrant in Canada that resulted in convicting serial rapist Rodney John Camp.

Enough about me and my DNA exploits. Let’s take a quick look at the Colin Pitchfork murders and then try to make simple sense of this complicated business called DNA forensic evidence.

The Colin Pitchfork Murders

In November 1983, 15-year-old Lynda Mann’s body was found in the Narborough area of England, approximately one hundred miles northwest of London. She’d been beaten, raped, and murdered along a deserted pathway known as the Black Pad. Forensic evidence, at that time, determined semen on her was from a relatively common blood type that matched ten percent of males. The case fell cold after months of extensive investigation.

A second girl, 15-year-old Dawn Ashworth was found dead in July 1986. She’d also been beaten, raped, and strangled in a secluded Narborough footpath called Ten Pound Lane. As with Lynda Mann, the same semen type was on and in her body.

The Ashworth investigation revitalized the Mann file and the two cases became the Narborough Enquiry. Famed American crime writer Joseph Wambaugh would later write his book The Blooding about the phenomenal effort British authorities put into the investigations. Homicide detectives knew they had a serial killer—the similar blood types, the locations, and the modus operandis (MOs) were too strikingly similar to suggest otherwise.

The question was who donated the semen and how police could conclusively prove it.

Enter Alec Jefferys and his scientific team at the British Forensic Science Service. They’d been hard at work identifying Deoxyribonucleic Acid—the DNA double-helix molecule that provides a genetic fingerprint that’s unique to an individual except for identical twins. Jefferys & Company knew they were onto a world-changing forensic evidence breakthrough, and they used the Narborough Enquiry as a test case.

Initially in the Ashworth file, a strong suspect developed. He was a developmentally challenged youth named Richard Buckland who confessed under duress to the Dawn Ashworth murder. However, Buckland strongly denied the Lynda Mann slaying.

Alec Jefferys

By late 1986, Alec Jefferys’ team had their DNA identification process to the point where they were confident it could withstand courtroom scrutiny. The police took a blood sample from Richard Buckland and delivered it to the Jefferys lab. Conclusively, the lab results said, Buckland was not the semen donor in either the Mann or Ashworth killings. However, the DNA profile conclusively proved the Narborough killer was the same man.

Richard Buckland was a first—the first wrongfully accused person to be exonerated by DNA forensic evidence. Relying on a false confession is a law enforcement lesson harshly learned by detectives, but the British investigators moved on to find the real killer. The question was how?

The answer was a process of elimination.

The Narborough Enquirers took on the monumental task of getting blood samples for DNA analysis from as many late teen and adult males in the Narborough region as possible. This became known as “blooding” suspects and, after over 4,500 bloodings, it paid off.

Colin Pitchfork

In August 1987, police got a tip that one Ian Kelly had fraudulently submitted his blood sample to cover up for a friend, Colin Pitchfork. Both men worked as bakers in Narborough, and the plan backfired. Police took blood from Pitchfork under a court order. It matched the semen DNA profile in the Mann and Ashworth murders.

Colin Pitchfork confessed and got a life sentence. He also admitted to performing around 1,000 indecent exposure acts as well as other violent sexual assaults. Pitchfork’s motive for killing Lynda and Dawn, he said, was not for sexual gratification. He did it because the girls could identify him.

Since the first blooding that led to DNA forensic being soundly based in worldwide courtrooms, and even compounding the frustrating CSI Effect problem, DNA extraction and processing science has advanced leaps and bounds. Today, processing DNA for forensic evidence is mostly routine. Here’s a brief look—call it a crash course—in DNA Forensic Evidence 101.

DNA Forensic Evidence 101

Scientists have studied genetics since the early 1800s when Gregor Mendel suggested his theory that all living organisms had genetic blueprints that described and allowed their physical structure. Mendel also theorized all living organisms shared basic hereditary traits. Mr. Mendel did an interesting experiment with peas and proved that dominant and recessive genes got passed from parent to offspring. It’s a principle applying to peas and humans alike.

In the 1860s, Friedrich Meischer was the first to identify DNA in human blood white cells. (Note: DNA molecules do not appear in red blood cells because red cells are not really cells—they don’t have a nucleus which DNA needs to build a cell—DNA being the building blocks of cells.) By the 1920s, mainstream science widely accepted the DNA theory of genetics and inherited traits. And in the 1950s, famed genetic scientists James Watson and Francis Crick accurately described and isolated chemical structure in the double helix molecule.

Knowledge of this structure, the double helix, allowed Alec Jeffreys and his team to develop extraction, multiplication, and comparison techniques of DNA signatures within all species. DNA blueprints are present in the smallest of life’s creatures like gastropod mollusks to the largest like blue whales and are around 99.9% similar in every living species known to science. It’s that small 0.1% difference that makes species, and specimens within each species, entirely unique.

Your human body produces around 230 billion new cells each day. Nature programmed you for cell division where, uncontrolled by your conscious actions, your cells will divide into two with the new half receiving behavioral instructions from the old half. People being people and nature being nature, there are always small errors or slight changes to the genetic blueprint. Over time and through trillions of cell splits, we all become slightly different. Except, of course, for monozygotic or identical twins. (Science now finds tiny differences in monozygotic DNA structures at the mitochondrial level, but that’s for DNA 301.)

Genetic mistakes, or unintended differences, are where forensic scientists capitalize for evidence. Variances in DNA replication or sequences are called Single Nucleotide Polymorphism or SNPs. These variances normally go unnoticed, health-wise, but they’re the reasons things like hair and eye color vary, metabolisms aren’t the same in family members, and possibly why some seem to have God-given talents.

There really isn’t a lot known about why some relatives have two left feet and why some are Olympic athletes, but one thing that can be taken to the evidentiary bank is each human (save for those pesky twins) have tiny DNA blueprint variances, and that’s where the forensic folks go when examining DNA evidence.

Without stepping into DNA Forensic Evidence 201 or beyond, what’s needed for this crash course is knowing about markers and loci. DNA scientists break down the individual biological sample they’re examining and give it a barcode snapshot similar to a binary code. They have highlights called markers and loci which show unique traits of the sample. Quite simply, they make a graph of the markers and loci then compare the sample they’re questioning against the “known” one. If the markers and loci match, it’s an identification.

Caution! Spoiler Alert: DNA forensic evidence matching isn’t an exact science. It’s a complicated and precise process but, unlike fingerprinting with ridges, valleys, whorls, deltas, and accents which are 100% physically conclusive—to the elimination of all other humans in the world—DNA matches rely on conclusions based on statistical probabilities. However, the statistical matching models return such enormously large matching probabilities of 1:13 billion and such, that this circumstantial opinion or viewpoint is regularly accepted by juries as cold, hard fact.

DNA Forensic Evidence 101 isn’t the place to examine specific processing techniques like Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (RFLP), Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), Short Tandem Repeats (STR), or Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (ALFP). It’s not the place to touch on Touch DNA (Low Level DNA), Mixtures, Rapid DNA, CODIS, or Southern Blot analysis. But it’s worthwhile knowing the DNA evidentiary processing chain from crime scene to courtroom. It goes like this:

Collection — where a biological sample is found at a crime scene.

Extraction — where DNA is released from the cell at the lab.

Quantification — where the lab determines how much DNA they have to work with.

Amplification — where the lab copies the DNA to characterize it.

Separation — where the lab separates amplified DNA for identification.

Analysis and Interpretation — where the lab compares DNA to other known profiles.

Statistical Computation — where the lab calculates a match’s probability.

Quality Assurance — where the lab triple checks process accuracy.

Evidence Delivery — where the lab testifies about their conclusion(s).

In 1987, the birth of Colin Pitchfork’s DNA evidence process was slow, labor extensive, and extremely expensive. It might have even been painful. That’s no longer the case, as four decades has taken this science—originally deemed pseudoscience—and molded it into fast, economical, and highly reliable forensic evidence used around the world. Now, if science could find a permanent remedy for the CSI Effect, that’d be a real breakthrough.

So, you’ve graduated from the DyingWords crash course in DNA Forensic Evidence 101 and your certificate is in the mail. If there’s enough interest, I may run crash courses 201 and 301 where I’ll invite some expert DNA guest lecturers to explain the differences between loci and markers and why the Southern Blot is so slow compared to Rapid and maybe talk fun stuff like Touch DNA, Mixtures, CODIS, and Dirty. In the meantime, if you’d like to continue with this third-degree program, here are five Forensic DNA websites well worth checking out:

http://www.forensicsciencesimplified.org/dna/DNA.pdf

https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/bc000657.pdf

https://wyndhamforensic.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/WyndhamForensic_Presentation_DNAAnalysis.pdf

https://www.fbi.gov/services/laboratory

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3561883/

NEW CRIME BOOK – *AT THE CABIN* by GARRY RODGERS

Crime pays. That’s what I’ve learned as I publish Book 8 in my based-on-true-crime series — At The Cabin. This follows In The Attic (which was #1 on Amazon’s Crime Thriller Bestselling list), Under The Ground, From The Shadows, Beside The Road, On The Floor, Between The Bikers, and Beyond The Limits. 4 more are planned in this series, but they’ve suddenly braked while I explore an intriguing opportunity with the film industry — a net-streaming project titled City Of Danger. In the mean time, here’s the product description / blurb / jacket copy for At The Cabin.

——

What monstrous savage viciously attacked Bea Bonnell—inflicting fractures, burns, and excruciating torture on her? And why did he do it? Bea was seventy-four years old, for God’s sake, when this true crime story occurred.

Beatrice Bonnell and her husband, Stan Bonnell, spend their winters at the cabin they own on De Courcy Island in the mild southwest coast of British Columbia. Their De Courcy cabin is far south of their second home near Atlin, an equally small place in the cold goldfields of northern Canada’s Yukon Territory. And it’s always safe and secure at the De Courcy cabin—until a masked and armed stranger arrives with a depraved demand and the brutal intent of getting back something extremely valuable. Bea resists, and the barbaric beast works Bea over—breaking her fingers and ribs, repeatedly singeing her side with a red-hot knife, then setting the cabin on fire with Bea blindfolded and hogtied inside.

Is there a link between the two cabins—Atlin and De Courcy—bringing on this atrocious assault and putting Bea Bonnell into a life-threatening state where she’ll succumb to horrific wounds? That’s the complex case facing the Serious Crimes Section. Their intricate investigation takes detectives from the wintery waters of the Pacific Northwest to the snow-packed roads of the Klondike where they prove two fundamentals found in solving all crimes. One: Occam’s razor—when faced with two hypotheses, the simpler one is always correct. Two: The stranger the circumstances, the closer the answer is to home.

At The Cabin is Book 8 in the Based-On-True-Crime Series by Garry Rodgers, a retired homicide detective with a second career as a coroner—now reincarnated into an international bestselling crime writer. Get At The Cabin in eBook format at Amazon, Kobo, and Nook.

Here are the First Two Chapters of At The Cabin

WARNING!

At The Cabin is based on a true crime story. Explicit descriptions of the crime scenes, factual dialogue, real forensic procedures, and actual police investigation, interview and interrogation techniques are portrayed. Some names, times, and locations have been changed for privacy concerns and commercial purposes.

Chapter One — Thursday, March 11th – 8:35 a.m.

“She’s lucky she’s still alive.” The detective from our Green Timbers Serious Crimes Section stopped. She swallowed. She was on the other end of my phone, calling from the Burn Unit at Vancouver General Hospital. “I’ve never seen such injuries… deliberate injuries. The viciousness of this attack is fu… appalling! Sheer cruelty and excruciating torture.”

“What’s the lady’s name again?” I had my notebook open, pen in hand, and a dark roast on my workstation desk.

“Beatrice Bonnell. She goes by Bea.” The Vancouver detective paused. She swallowed again. “Bea’s seventy-four years old, for God’s sake. This assault is just… excuse the language… fucking abhorrent!”

“Where did you say this happened?” I heard her say the place when she called to report one of the most despicable and savage offenses I’d ever investigate.

“At the cabin they own. It’s on De Courcy Island. Our map indicates it’s in your territory. Nanaimo Regional District.”

——

De Courcy Island was in my policing area. De Courcy was one of many chunks of rocky land jutting from the Pacific Ocean off the southeast side of Vancouver Island in British Columbia at Canada’s west coast. Officially, this water-bound and tree-filled region was known as the Southern Gulf Islands in the Salish Sea. Unofficially, the area was the “Big Island” and a bunch of little ones—over a hundred of them, depending on how you classified islands.

I was at my desk at the Nanaimo Serious Crimes Section when my colleague from Vancouver phoned. She’d been notified by hospital authorities when Bea Bonnell arrived by Helijet ambulance the previous evening. Because Bea’s attacked occurred outside the City of Vancouver, investigation responsibility fell to the local area holding jurisdiction for the spot.

That spot, on De Courcy, was just south of Nanaimo, which is a small city of 100,000 on the Big Island. Nanaimo was a hub of activity being straight across from Vancouver proper which was one of the most exotic, erotic, and expensive paces on the planet. Nanaimo also had an active crime rate exceeding Vancouver’s when measured on a per capita base. And the crime against Bea Bonnell rated at the top of atrocities one human being can inflict upon another.

——

“Give me what you got so far.” I was ready to write more besides Bea Bonnell and At The Cabin.

“I don’t know much, to be honest.” The detective’s voice was overtight, like a wound watch spring read to snap. “She was admitted here at eight-forty p.m. last night. Airlifted from Nanaimo to VGH, and they put her directly in the burn unit. It’s questionable if she’ll make it. She’s in critical condition suffering not only from multiple third-degree burns but also from fractured ribs and broken fingers. Whoever did this really worked her over.”

“Any suspects or motive?”

“No suspects by name. Just a lone male. Unknown male. Masked male armed with a handgun. Robbery on the surface, but I think there’s more going on here that’s not being told.”

“Like what?”

“It’s just the vibe I’m getting. What I’m told, and this is third-hand, is that the victim was alone at the cabin she and her husband Stanley Bonnell have on De Courcy Island. He goes by Stan. Stan Bonnell. Little older than her. Seventy-six.”

“Stan and Bea Bonnell? Seventy-four and seventy-six? When did the attack happen?”

“Yesterday afternoon. The best I can get is that it was after one p.m. when Stan left Bea alone at the cabin while he went to town. Nanaimo. They live at an isolated spot on De Courcy and have to take a boat off and on. Do you know the place? De Courcy, I mean. Not necessarily the cabin itself.”

“Yup. I’ve been in Nanaimo over thirty years, and I’m a boater. I’m familiar with De Courcy’s location and coastline but not the island by land. It’s like a lot of these small Gulf Islands. Sparsely populated and private.”

“Right. I Googled it. I also have GPS coordinates for the cabin location.”

“What else do you have?” I asked this as I wrote the GPS numbers in my book. “What was this guy after?”

“Well, this is where I’m having trouble. Bea is sedated so she can’t talk. The only one she’s told is Stan and he’s… I don’t know how to put it… vague. Not… I can’t say evasive. Maybe a touch of dementia, or maybe just the stress of this whole thing.”

“I can understand the stress. What’s the extent of Bea’s injuries?”

“Most of her fingers and some of her ribs are broken. Then she has a series of thirteen individual burns along her left side. Directly on her skin from her hip up to her mid-chest area. They look like what she says happened. First, he tied her hands behind her back. Then he broke or dislocated her thumbs and fingers and he threw her on the floor and began kicking her in the ribs. Then it got worse. He heated up a knife on the stove and began burning her again and again along the side until he got frustrated and left but not before setting the cabin on fire with her hog-tied with a pillowcase over her head.”

“Hog-tied? Pillowcase? Set the cabin on fire with her in it?” I’d never heard anything like it. “How the fuck did she survive?”

“She must be one tough old bird.” The detective was tenser now than when she’d started talking. “This is what I got from Stan and the medical staff he talked to. Stan left Bea alone at the cabin while he took his boat and left De Courcy to get something. He was gone four hours and got back just before dark. He found Bea lying on the ground outside the cabin door. She was still bound and hooded. She was in terrible pain and nearly delirious as well as hypothermic.

“I can’t imagine. It was so cold and wet here yesterday.”

“The best I know of what Bea told Stan, and this is hearsay, is that after Stan left, this masked man showed up at the cabin holding a handgun and threatened to kill her, Bea, if she didn’t give him what he wanted. Bea refused, so the guy wrapped her hands behind her back and took a pillowcase, I don’t know, from the bed maybe, and pulled it over her head. He told her he was going to work her over till she gave in. She told him she didn’t have anything to give him. Then he started bending and snapping her fingers, put the boots to her ribs, and then went into the burning.”

“This is just fuckin’ sick.”

“No better word to describe it.” The detective’s voice was like someone had turned her volume down.

“Then he set the cabin on fire? How’d she get out of being hooded and hog-tied?”

“I’m not that clear about this. The cabin didn’t burn down. He, the bad guy, told her since she didn’t give up what he wanted, she could die in there. So he took a bunch of papers and placed them around the stove. They caught fire and he left, closing the door behind him. Bea could see flames through the pillowcase, so she wiggled her way to the stove and managed to knock a pot of water off the top and that drenched the papers.”

“Wow!”

“Then she wormed her way to the door, forced it open, and rolled outside. Bea lay there on the wet and cold ground until Stan got back. Oh! And her feet, ankles, were tied too.”

“Just wow!”

“Like I first said, she’s fucking lucky to still be alive.”

“What’s her medical prognosis?”

“Not good. She’s in critical condition. They’re afraid she’s going to develop complications and pass away. The severity of her injuries and her age are so stacked against her.”

“What was this guy after? Like, to go to this extent, there must be something extremely valuable he wanted.”

“This is where I’m having a hard time.” The detective took a long pause. She quietly said, “I don’t think Stan is being truthful with me.”

Chapter Two — Thursday, March 11th – 9:40 a.m.

I sat in Leaky Lewis’s office. Harry was with me. We talked about the report I’d received on Bea and Stan Bonnell from the Green Timbers detective.

Leaky was in charge of support services in our police department. His real name was Jim Lewis, and he got the nickname because of a chronic condition. Leaky suffered from urinary incontinence which made him well suited to occupy the corner office equipped with a private washroom.

Our Nanaimo force had a complement of around 140 regular police officers with an additional sixty civilians working in various roles. The backbone of any police force is the uniform or patrol officers who handle front-line complaints and emergencies. I spent very little time in uniform as I quickly realized where the backbone ends up so I made a play for criminal investigations. Now, I had well over thirty years of detective experience and was a leading candidate to be put out to pasture—cop-speak for retirement.

The support services Leaky commanded included our Serious Crimes Section. We had three teams of two detectives, each of whom were mandated to solve violent offenses against people. Mostly, we did murder cases but serious assaults like the one on Bea Bonnell fell into our hands, especially since Bea’s prognosis wasn’t good. This had every shadow of a murder file developing as the time passed and clues came to light.

Besides our overworked Serious Crime Section, Leaky looked after our Forensic Identification Section, which was the CSI department, Drug Squad, Criminal Intelligence, Commercial Crime, Street Crew, Property Crimes, and one poor prick plagued with frauds and bad plastic.

Harry was my detective partner. Her real name was Sheryl Henderson. Sheryl was a large lady with large hair and an even larger personality. She got the name Harry after the Bigfoot or Sasquatch in the movie Harry and the Hendersons.

——

“I think Stan’s hiding something.” Harry was the first to speak. She’d listened in to the phone call with the Vancouver detective. “I don’t buy Stan’s statement. Like, some armed and masked stranger shows up while he’s away and does this to his wife and Stan doesn’t know what the guy was after? Give me a fucking break.”

Harry was never one to suppress her opinion. She was usually right, but tact and diplomacy weren’t strong character traits with Harry. Still, I loved her as my partner of three years, and I knew the number one strength holding Harry together—her loyalty.

We played the audio-recorded statement the detective took from Stan Bonnell and shipped to us as an email attachment.

——

“Please state your full name and address, Mister Bonnell.”

“Right. I’m Stanley Edgar Bonnell. That’s Bonnell with two n’s and two l’s. I go by Stan. Stan Bonnell. We have two places. That’s me ’n Bea, my wife. Beatrice June Bonnell. The winter we spend down at the cabin on De Courcy Island. Summers, me ’n Bea are up at the cabin at Surprise Lake ’bout twenty miles due east of Atlin. Atlin, if you know where it is, is in the northwest corner of British Columbia. Closest big town or trading center up there is Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory. We come down to De Courcy in November when things start to freeze up in the north, and we head back up in late April when things start to thaw out again and the frost is gone enough so we can work the ground.”

“Very well. Please tell me what happened at the cabin on De Courcy Island that led to you and your wife Bea to be here at Vancouver General Hospital where we’re recording your statement today.”

“Right. So I don’t know exactly what happened at the cabin ’cause I wasn’t there when it happened. I can only go by what Bea managed to tell me, and what I saw musta gone on. I was away in town. At Nanaimo. I left just after noon to conduct business and get supplies and I took the boat we moor at De Courcy at Gunderson’s dock. Bea was fine and everything was good when I left. However, when I come back approaching dark, I arrived to find a hell of a mess. Here was poor Bea all wrapped up on the ground outside the door and she was terrified and in terrible pain from her injuries. I pulls up in the truck. We got an old truck we use to get around on the island as the cabin is not down by the dock. It’s a bit inland. Anyway, I sees Bea on the ground with her hands tied behind her and her feet cinched at the ankles and this soaking wet cloth hood over her head and I says, ‘Land’s sakes woman. What have you gone and done to yourself?’ And she says the best she can ’cause she’s now terribly cold and shaking and really in pain, ‘He tried to rob me and he smashed-up my hands and my ribs and burnt me all over with a hot knife.’ And I says, ‘Who? Who done this?’ I untied her. Actually, I cut the rope off her hands and feet, ankles, and I yanked the hood off and I got her up and into the truck where what we got left of a heater was on. Bea says, ‘I don’t know who done this. I got no idea at all. You got to get me to the hospital.’ She was in bad shape. Real bad shape and the medical folks here don’t know if she’s gonna make it. Gonna pull through.”

“Did she describe her attacker?”

“Masked man with a gun. Handgun. That’s all she said. She got no idea who done this.”

“Did your wife say what he wanted? What he was after that made him do this?”

“She didn’t get into that much detail. She also told me he tried to set fire to the cabin with her in there. I looked and I saw where the papers on the floor were burnt and where she kicked the hot water pot over to douse them out.”

‘She was able to give you this detail, but not the reason the masked man with the gun came to your cabin and did these horrific acts to her?”

“Nope. I mean yes. Yes, Bea said what happened. As in who it was and what he did to her. She didn’t exactly go into all what was said. Like I said, Bea was in awful pain and terribly cold. All she wanted, and all I could think of, was getting her warmed up and to a place where her injuries could be treated. I took her by boat to Nanaimo where an ambulance met us at the dock. Seeing how bad she was, they flew her straight over here to the burn ward.”

“Excuse me for a sec. You said Bea knew who it was. She knew who it was that attacked her?”

“No. No. She knew it was a masked man with a gun who done this. A loner. She didn’t know who the guy was as in his identity. I got no clue who done this.”

“Do you know why he attacked Bea? What exactly he was after?”

“He might have been after something. Something real valuable enough to go to this stretch.”

“Stan, this is an extremely vicious attack. Whoever is behind this must have been desperate for something. What’s your suspicion?”

“I can’t really say.”

Chapter Three — Thursday, March 11th – 9:55 a.m.

“He can’t really say.” Harry scoffed. She clicked her pen. “Bullshit.”

——

Get At The Cabin on Amazon, Kobo, or Nook.

HOW TO BE A SUCCESSFUL DIGITAL AGE WRITER

When I started this DyingWords blog nearly 10 years ago, I formed the tagline Provoking Thoughts on Life, Death, and Writing. I’m well past the 400 thought-provoking-post mark now, and I have around 20 indie-published books on the commercial market with over 30,000 eBook downloads in the past 12 months throughout 66 different countries. This decade-long blog and book writing experience includes 2 years I spent getting well-paid to write commercial web content targeting digital age readers. Looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing in my tagline, and my unfolding success as a digital age writer keeps improving.

Something I’ve learned about successful writing (commercially selling & getting paid) in the digital age is you must know the rules of the game. First, you write. You park your ass in the chair, get your fingers on your keys, and you produce work. You have a brand, and you know the audience you’re writing to. Patience—you’re in this for the long haul—so you keep producing. You have confidence in your work, and you put your work out in public.

But you have to kill your darlings, as Stephen King says, and cut what doesn’t matter to the story no matter how much you love your suckling little bitches. You develop multiple voices, and you write to what your intended audience (ideal reader) wants to hear. You economize. And you balance your artistic aloofness with your entrepreneurial energy and your ego.

Commercial writing is a tough business—especially in this digital age where online readers really don’t read (they skim) and you’re competing with Youtube cat video grabs at attention. I was going to write a provoking thought on today’s digital writing world, but then I found this piece by Nicholas Cole. He’s an outstanding digital age writer who summed up what it takes to be commercially successful in this crazy day of online content production. This article by Nicholas Cole originally appeared in INC magazine (online) and is approved to share for your enjoyment.

Beware—Nicholas Cole is brutally honest about what it takes to be a successful (money-making) digital age writer. Trust me. I know.

——

7 Skills You Need to Practice to Become a Successful Writer in the Digital Age
by Nicholas Cole

“When people see what I’ve built for myself as a writer, they think it’s the result of my degree in creative writing. It’s not. I tell everyone that my college education was great for two reasons: it taught me how (and what) to read, and it taught me how to read my work aloud–a skill that reveals more about your writing than any amount of silent reading ever will.

But my college education did not teach me about the underlying business model of the writing world. It didn’t explain to me how blogs and major websites make money through digital advertising–and how writers can earn money by driving page views. I didn’t take a class called Personal Branding 101, and I definitely didn’t learn about email marketing funnels and lead magnets and landing pages in my class on Russian literature.

Nobody walked me through the formal publishing process, explained what a typical royalty contract looked like, and certainly didn’t compare that old-world approach with the possibilities of self-publishing through Amazon. And most of all, there was no class for the fast-paced writing styles that drive, quite literally, every single viral piece of writing on the internet.

These were all parts of the “digital writer” path I had to teach myself–and all ended up being more valuable than the hours I spent notating Crime and Punishment.

Becoming a successful writer in the digital age is not just about writing. That’s the foundation, of course, but in today’s world–just as musicians have had to become their own marketing managers and creative directors, and even play the role of entrepreneur–writers have to do more than just write.

Here are the 7 skills you need to practice if you want to become a successful writer in the digital age:

1. The habit of writing.

If you want to be a writer, you have to write. There is no simpler way to say it.

If you want to be a painter, you have to paint. If you want to be a cook, you have to cook. If you want to be X, you have to practice X–far more than you “think” about how badly you want to be X.

All through college, I watched the majority of my peers wait to write. They were waiting to feel inspired, waiting to see what the teacher thought of their last piece, waiting for some outside nod of approval instead of just getting on with it and putting pencil to paper (or fingers to keys).

I’m here to tell you that unless you can establish the simple practice of writing into your daily schedule, you will never succeed. Period. Stop reading here, because nothing else I tell you will matter–unless you can first firmly establish this habit into your everyday life.

If you want to become a writer, you have to write. Every single day.

2. The art of personal branding.

People don’t buy writing. They buy you.

In the digital age, the single most valuable thing you can create for yourself is a brand around who you are and whatever it is you write about.

You could be the most incredible wordsmith the world has ever seen, but unless you have an audience, nobody will read it–and even if you want to go the conventional publishing route, a publisher will see you and your work as a gamble. You don’t have a following on the internet. You don’t have an e-mail list of people ready to read your next piece of work.

Nobody knows who you are, and that’s a problem.

I attribute a lot of my success as a writer to my working knowledge of branding, positioning, marketing, and social storytelling. And as much as we writers would love to hide away and not have to “put ourselves out there,” we don’t have that luxury anymore. We are now competing against YouTubers, Instagram stars, and viral cat videos. People are either reading our work, or they’re watching two cats swing from a ceiling lamp.

To attract (and keep) people’s attention, you have to give them something to feel loyal to–and that’s you.

3. The patience to play the long game.

There are two types of writing: the kind you share, and the kind you sell.

Ninety-nine percent of artists–whether you’re a writer, a musician, a filmmaker, a painter–want to come out of the gate and have someone (they’re not quite sure who, but someone) pay them to create whatever it is they want to create.

As an independent writer, I’ve learned that consumers buy only two things: things they like, and things they need. Everything else, we ignore–no matter how “brilliant” someone else says it is. Which means, as creators, it’s our job to adopt a similar mentality: here are the things I create for myself (that someone else might like), and here are the things I create to solve a consumer need (and turn a nice profit, which allows me to spend more time creating things I enjoy).

The poetry I keep in my journal? There’s probably a very small market for that. A book that teaches aspiring writers how to become successful in the digital age? Much larger market.

Now, this doesn’t mean I should never write poetry. But this also doesn’t mean I should only write poetry and expect to make a fortune.

4. The confidence to practice in public.

Nothing has done my writing more good than regularly sharing my work on the internet.

When you publish something out in the open, when you “practice in public” (as I like to call it), you receive immediate feedback. You feel vulnerable. You fear judgment. You see your work and read your sentences with a heightened awareness (“I can’t believe I didn’t catch that before …”). And most of all, you practice the most important underlying habit of all: the confidence to admit, “This is what I wrote today–in all its imperfection.”

I mentor a lot of aspiring writers. Some of the most frequent emails I receive come from those who want to turn writing into their career–but are afraid to share anything they’ve written: “I just feel like I’m not there yet. I want to make my debut when I’m ready.”

Can I give you a brutal truth?

Nobody is waiting for you. And you will never be ready.

All artists have this fear that what they made today isn’t good enough–and if they share it, what will happen five, 10 years later when they look back? Won’t everyone laugh at how bad it is? Won’t it be a disgrace?

That’s certainly one way to look at it. But in all honesty, I don’t see it that way at all.

In fact, there’s nothing I enjoy more than looking back at something I wrote years ago and seeing where my writing style was at, at that time. It’s like witnessing a younger version of myself–and I can, with infinite more clarity, see how I’ve improved since then.

5. The humility to cut what wastes the reader’s time.

I had someone reach out to me recently who described my writing style as “minimalistic.” I’d never thought about it that way–but that’s an accurate word for it.

Some writers love description. They want you to see every blade of grass, every leaf on the tree, every long and winding grain in the tree trunk turned kitchen table. Other writers love dialogue. They want you to hear their characters talk, and talk, as if their voices were lined with gold and a pleasure to listen to indefinitely. Some writers live by the facts, and color their paragraphs with statistics and footnotes and miscellaneous information intended to add further depth to the topic at hand. And some writers just want to float on their stream of consciousness, letting their words guide the way without ever intervening and making a conscious decision to stop and move on to the next point or moment in time.

To each their own, but from my experience (and I’ve written close to 2,000 pieces online), readers in the digital world have only so much patience. They just want you to get to the point–Netflix shows do this addictingly well.

Part of writing in the digital age means understanding your audience–and today’s readers barely have the patience to sit through a two-sentence tweet or a seven-second Snapchat video.

Paragraphs and paragraphs of static description is a lot to ask of today’s readers, and a good many writers fail because they refuse to adjust.

6. The mastery of multiple voices.

As an independent writer, the ability to write with a range of voices will be your most valuable (and easiest to monetize) skill.

There are dozens of different voices a writer should hone throughout his or her career–including all the writing voices that need to be deployed to effectively market yourself as a writer.

There is an art to writing sales copy, an art to writing e-mail sequences, an art to writing social media posts that can leave an impact on a reader in three or four sentences. There is an art to writing articles that subtly promote your work, an art to writing e-books that readers will want to download. And the reason why it’s so important to nurture these business-focused voices is because either you’re going to learn how to do it for yourself, or you’re going to have to hire someone (like me) to do it for you.

Part of being a successful writer in the digital age means being more than just a writer. You have to be the creative director, the marketer, and the social media strategist too.

7. The willingness to be both an artist and an entrepreneur.

I really do believe that every artist today has to also become an entrepreneur–if he or she wants to be successful independently.

This dual-specialization is probably the hardest skill for an artist to acquire. They are two opposing forces, both striving toward very different goals. As an artist, you want to express yourself and write what feels most truthful. As an entrepreneur, you are always searching for what’s going to perform well, resonate with readers, and ultimately sell.

As someone who spent years facilitating imaginary conversations between both sides of myself–the artist and the entrepreneur–in search of balance, it took me a long time to fully understand that you can’t have one without the other. You cannot become a successful writer (or artist period) in the digital age without some sense of awareness of how the business world works.

The entrepreneur in you is the part you want showing up to meetings. The entrepreneur is the one you want negotiating deals, contracts, opportunities, and more. The entrepreneur is the one you want to empower to protect your inner artist, and to have the working knowledge of the business world so you don’t find yourself giving up 80 percent ownership over your work–or worse, writing for minimum wage.

I am a writer, through and through. It’s who I am in my heart. I couldn’t imagine going a single day without finding a quiet place to write something, anything, that I feel. But had I not honed my skills as an entrepreneur, I might still be scouring Craigslist for the next opportunity to write articles for $25 a pop.

It’s not about being one or the other–an artist or an entrepreneur.

Becoming successful, period, is about understanding the rules of the game so that you can do what it is you love, on your own terms, for the rest of your life.”

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Nicholas Cole knows the rules of the game. Nicholas is a top digital age writer and entrepreneur who’s one of the most-read online scribes and a motivated mover & shaker. His pieces have over 100 million post views.

Fortune 500 companies and leading publishers like Time, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes have paid Nicholas Cole well to produce web content that resonates with digital readers. Besides being an indie writer in his Digital Press company, Nicholas also spearheads Ship 30 for 30 where he mentors emerging writers. Check out Nicholas Cole’s recent book, The Art & Business of Online Writing: How to Beat the Game of Capturing and Keeping Attention.

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