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.

FENTANYL—HEROIN’S DEADLY LITTLE SISTER

Imagine a serial killer causing 256 deaths in your town—within the first four months of this year. Your place would panic. Your doors would be locked. Windows barred. Your streets would be bare with the cops falling flat-out to find the fiend. Does this sound like a far-fetched plot for the next best-seller? Nope. It’s real. It’s happening right here at home and the killer is known. Her name is Fentanyl. She’s heroin’s deadly little sister.

British Columbians, in Canada, are among the world’s most prolific illicit drug consumers and the B.C. Coroners Service just released some figures. They’re projecting over 800 drug overdose deaths for 2016. Maybe a thousand. Most will involve fentanyl.

Who is this lethal lady? Where does she come from? And why is she suddenly so popular?

Fentanyl is a high-potency, rapid-onset synthetic opioid drug prescribed for the treatment of chronic pain. It was developed in the 1950’s as an intravenous anesthetic for surgery and evolved into a breakthrough cancer pain treatment in the form of tablets, lozenges, lollipops, and patches. It’s legal and readily available with a prescription and is listed on the U.S., Canadian, and U.K. Schedules as a controlled drug.

Like heroin and morphine, fentanyl works by binding to the body’s opiate receptors and driving up dopamine levels in the brain’s reward areas, producing a state of euphoria and intense relaxation. That’s all and well when used in moderation and highly effective when properly prescribed.

But fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times stronger than pharmaceutical grade, 100% pure heroin. It’s also far more available on the street than heroin and the reason is profit. One kilogram of heroin sells in Vancouver for $60,000—if you could find one. One kilo of fentanyl powder goes for $125,000 and is readily available. Not hard to figure out what’s going on.

But with fentanyl being so powerful, the inevitable deaths tag along. The mechanism of death by fentanyl overdose is the same as heroin in that the central nervous system is depressed and respiratory failure occurs. Fentanyl is much quicker than heroin, though. One street source was quoted, “With fentanyl you just hit the ground. Light’s out, that’s it. They don’t know there’s fentanyl in their fix till it’s too late.”

The toxicity of all drugs is rated on an LD50 scale, whereas the Lethal Dose of 50 percent of humans occurs at a certain scale which is proportionate to body mass. Fentanyl’s LD50 rating is .03 mcg/kg (micrograms per kilogram). Given that a microgram is .001 of a milligram, this equals an average 70 kilogram (155 pound) person requiring 2.1 mgs of fentanyl to kill them. Some, already tolerant to opioids, require more. Some, with no tolerance, require less. Especially if mixed with other drugs or alcohol.

So why the sudden rise in the availability of fentanyl?

There’ll always be the demand. The answer’s in the supply and the reason’s found on the internet. The digital drug highway. The internet has done to drugs what Amazon has done for books.

Ten years ago, when heroin was so popular, it was available from a natural product through a complex delivery system which requires a chain from the country of source—China, Afghanistan, and Vietnam to name a few—through international couriers, middle-men, and street dealers before it ever reached the end-user. The junkie in the alley.

The process of profit required “stepping-on” or “cutting” at every level and, by the time the drug reached the consumer, it was of low purity and the chances of an accidental overdose were slim.

Today’s plentiful purity is what’s killing the customers and it’s not about to change.

Now you can go online and order any amount of fentanyl—a synthetic and easily mass-produced opioid—you want, as long as your money goes through. Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, and Bitcoin are fine and UPS will deliver it right to your door. Presto, you’re in the illicit drug business.

Don’t believe me?

Well, I tried it out.

I started Google-searching “where to buy fentanyl online without a prescription” and snooped around. Then I hooked-up with a few shadowy and shady, sinister people through email. It’s easy to get information when you’re anonymous and they think you have money. They steered me to the Silk Road Online Pharmacy—the Walmart of internet black market pharmaceuticals. It’s in Karachi, Pakistan. Click here.

I paged through a menu of everything from Molly to Ecstacy to Pure MDMA to Phentermine to LSD to Viagara to Pregnyl to Humatrope. The site is nicely organized in departments with pretty much everything you could be surreptitiously looking for—men’s & women’s health, weight loss, pain-killers, things for ADD/ADHD, stuff for highs, shit for lows, a great selection of steroids, plus lots and lots of research chemicals and powders.

Then I found what I wanted.

Abstral.

Abstral is a brand name for a formulation of fentanyl citrate (the salt produced by combining the chemical base for fentanyl with citric acid) and is available as a sublingual tablet—one you dissolve under your tongue and is absorbed in your buccal mucosa to provide rapid analgesia. And it comes with this warning:

Silk Road Pharmacy sells Abstral in two strengths: 400 mcg and 800 mcg. I chose the stronger. There’s more bang for the buck.

They also have a minimum order of 50 tablets so, being a first-time customer, I selected the lesser and clicked “Buy” on my cart. That took me to the checkout page where, for $300.00 plus fifty bucks for shipping and handling, the deal was done through my Mastercard. A client-needs agent by the name of Asha Ali guaranteed delivery to North America within two weeks. He even gave me his email at contact@silkroad.pharmacy.com if there’s a problem.

So, getting back to the not-so-hypothetical Fentanyl serial killer, this is what I’ve calculated. I have 50 – 800 microgram tabs of Abstral on the way. That’s a total of 40 milligrams. If it takes 2.1 mg to kill the average person, then I’ve got enough to do in nineteen people. Fifteen to be sure. Ten at the absolute least.

Now, I don’t have anything against anyone in particular so I propose to do this randomly.

What I’ve got in mind is cruising the coffee shops downtown. There’s Starbucks at the mall. The Vault on the corner. Serious Coffee in the conference center. Perkins up the street. And there’s got to be twenty restaurants with three blocks. It’ll be so easy to grind up my e-mail pills and sprinkle the fentanyl powder into momentarily unattended lattes. I might even lace sugar packets.

Hey! Imagine the bars where they’re drinking.

Talk about a return on the dollar. That’s under twenty-five bucks a death—the price of five coffees at Starbucks—three beers and a burger at The Palace. The chances of getting caught are practically nil. Random stranger-to-stranger killings are the hardest to solve and the easiest to get away with. Just ask the Chicago Tylenol Poisoner.

Anyway, I have a couple weeks before my precious pills get here—a couple weeks plotting serial kills with fentanyl poisoning. It’s my next novel.

And I’m planning a plot with a random twist that you’ll never see coming… in Deadly Little Sister.

FIFTEEN FAMOUS AX-MURDER CASES

There’s something terrifying—absolutely horrific—about being axed to death. Hollywood’s made a killing off movies like The Shining, American Psycho, and So I Married An Ax-Murderer, not to mention Lord Of The Rings where Gimley, the ginger-bearded psycho-dwarf, double-blades dozens of ornery Orks. But movies aren’t real—not real life, that is. In reality, ax-murder victims don’t get up to act another day. I’ve investigated a few real-life ax-murders in my time, including one gruesome and grotesque axing scene that tops anything Hollywood has yet to script.

In fact, I’m just about finished the manuscript for In The Attic. It’s based on a true double ax-murder story and I’ll tell you what happened in that bedroom… eight feet below the attic. But first, let’s look at some other famous ax-murders that compete with my case.

15. The Axman of New Orleans

Between May, 1918 and October, 1919 six men and six women were attacked in their Lower Ward homes and hacked to death with an ax. The MO was consistent. The killer knew when the victims were vulnerable. Entry was made through the back door. There were no sexual overtones, no evidence of robbery, and a common denominator was that all victims were Caucasian and mostly from Italian-American heritage. The series of killings stopped as abruptly as they started and no viable suspect was ever developed.

14. The Servant Girl Annihilator

A series of eight ax-murders occurred in Austin, Texas in 1885 where the victims were young ladies who worked as servants to wealthy employers. All were chopped in their sleep in their detached quarters. Six victims were black. Two were white. No one was arrested in the cases and they also ended abruptly. In 2014, an investigative report for PBS identified a strong suspect as Nathan Elgin, a 19-year-old African-American cook who was known to many victims. Elgin was shot by police after attacking a similar servant girl with an ax. No other Austin ax-murders took place in this string after his death.

13. Frances Stewart Silver

“Frankie” Silver was hanged in 1833 for the ax-murder of her husband, Charles Silver. His dismembered body was found distributed around the family’s North Carolina farm. Frankie never confessed and, despite weak evidence, a jury convicted her. No motive was established. Prior to her execution, she was sprung from jail through a well-planned break and was disguised as a man. She was caught attempting to flee the state and returned to the gallows.

12. The Crazed Captain

William Stewart was the skipper of the Mary Russell, a trading boat returning to England from Barbados. He suffered paranoid delusions and accused seven crew members of conspiring to mutiny. One by one, he lured the innocent men to the ship’s salon and enlisted three other young crew members to overpower the innocent men, binding them hand and foot then pinioning them to the floor. Once all seven were restrained, Captain Stewart took the ship’s fire-ax and systematically split their skulls. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity. The Mary Russell became known as the ship of seven murders.

11. Karl Denke

By day, this guy was an organ player at a church in the Kingdom of Prussia. By night, he chopped people up with his ax and stored their flesh in huge vats of pickling salt. He was caught axing a man to death at Christmas in 1924. When police searched Denke’s home, they found his business ledger documenting 42 other humans Denke killed and commercially processed. He was selling the meat at the market labeled as salt-pork. Two days after his arrest, Dehke hung himself in jail.

10. The Tokoloshe

Elifasi Msomi was called The Ax Killer in his village in South Africa. He started an 18-month killing spree in 1953 where he raped and murdered six children by hacking them apart and disposing of their parts in a valley. When caught, he claimed to be possessed by an evil spirit called the Tokoloshe. Superstitious Zulu elders bought his claim and freed Msomi after exorcising the entity. When Msomi went back to business, higher authorities stepped in and re-arrested him. A psychological assessment found Msomi to be of very high intelligence, near brilliant, however derived sexual pleasure from inflicting pain and death upon young children. He got hung.

9. The Greenough Family Massacre

This took place in Greenough, Western Australia. In 1993, Karen MacKenzie and her three children Daniel (16), Amara (7), and Katrina (5) were so savagely ax-murdered on their remote rural farm that the trial judge ordered the details of the killings sealed, stating they were too gruesome for public knowledge. Bill Mitchell, their 24-year-old farmhand, was convicted in the murders as well as for performing sexual assaults on the dead bodies. He’s serving life sentences and was recently eligible for parole. It was denied.

8. The Hexing Axer

Jake Bird, also known as the Tacoma Ax-Killer, was convicted in the 1947 murders of a mother and daughter in Tacoma, Washington. He got caught fleeing the scene, barefoot, after police were called to reports of horrific screams coming from the house. Bird had the victims’ blood and brain matter on his hands, feet, and clothes as well as his bloody fingerprints on the ax found by the bodies.

At his sentencing to hang, Bird stated to the courtroom, “I’m putting the Jake Bird hex on all of you who had anything to do with my being punished. Mark my words, you will die before I do.”

Allegedly, six of these people died before Bird was hung in 1949; the judge, the officer who interrogated Bird’s primary confession, the officer who interrogated a secondary confession to other murders, the court clerk, an attending guard, and Bird’s own defense lawyer. Bird progressively confessed to 46 other murders, saying he liked to use an ax because it did the job very well.

7. The Police Corruption Ax-Murder

Daniel Morgan was a private investigator who was digging into allegations of drug-related police corruption in the southeast section of London. In 1987, Morgan was found dead in a park with a massive ax-wound to the back of his head. This opened up a massive investigation into police corruption that resulted in five public inquiries. A number of officers have been charged with many offenses such as drug trafficking, extortion, conspiracy, and cover-ups, but who axed Daniel Morgan remains a secret. The investigation is ongoing.

6. Joseph Ntshongwana

Here’s another South African who was good with an ax. He was also good at sports, being a professional rugby player. But something wasn’t playing right in Joseph’s head. He convinced himself that four men gang-raped his daughter and gave her an HIV infection. He hunted and hacked the men, holding their heads as hostages. At his arraignment, Joe spoke in tongues and called to deities. The court called it faking insanity and declared him fit to stand trial. Joseph Ntshongwana’s now serving life… in maximum security.

5. Victor Licata

This guy did-in five members of his own family back in 1933. The Tampa, Flordia man was 21 when he went on a psychotic rampage and axed his way around the house. His mother, father, two brothers, a sister, and the family dog were slaughtered in their sleep. When arrested, Licata was dressed in clean clothes while his body underneath was covered with dried blood. Prior to the murders, his parents were trying to have him committed to a mental institute. They were too late. Licata eventually hung himself in a hospital for the criminally insane.

4. The Black Widow Ax-Murderer

Eva Dugan was convicted of killing her fifth husband, Charlie, in Arizona back in the 1920’s. She, like others in this article, used an ax. Eva dismembered Charlie, then buried him in the desert. She was caught—I’m not sure how—and sentenced to hang. Eva became more famous in death because the hangman miscalculated and she was decapitated. They said Eva’s head came to a rolling stop in front of the witnesses, some of which fainted. The error led to Arizona adopting the gas chamber. The noose used to kill Eva Dugan is now on display at the Pinal County Historical Museum in Florence, Arizona.

3. Lizzie Borden

As the song goes, “Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.” This occurred in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1892. Lizzie Borden was acquitted of her parents’ murders, though history gives every indication she was dirty as a tree root. The motive appeared financial and Lizzie was perfectly sane. The house where the Borden murders took place is now a Bed & Breakfast / Museum and even has a giftshop where you can buy a Lizzie Borden Bobble Head doll. It’s blood-spattered and holding an ax. Now how cool is that? Click Here to visit or book a night.

2. The Villisca Ax-Murders

Probably the most famous ax-murder case… still unsolved… was in June of 1912. Six Moore family members and two child guests were savagely axed in a house in Villisca, Iowa. Evidence showed the killer hid in the attic and crept down while they slept, dispatching them one… by… one… a number of suspects… were identified… no one charged…. let alone convicted… motive unknown… crimes unsolved… the house is also a museum…

1. In The Attic

Now it’s my turn. I’m writing my next novel titled In The Attic. It’s based on the true double-ax-murders I investigated when I was a cop. Maria Dersch, the complainant/victim, came to my police office seeking protection from her ex-boyfriend, Billy Ray Shaughnessy. He’d just raped Maria at knife point, promised to kill her if caught with another man, then snuck back and sliced-up Maria’s clothes.

I’m the poor bastard who got handed the file.

So, I took an audio-recorded statement from Maria. It opened “I’m so terrified that psycho’s going to kill me.” I went to Maria’s house to find Billy Ray. To arrest Billy Ray. To photo Maria’s clothes as evidence. He was nowhere to be found. I took this serious. I arranged for others to stay with Maria until Billy Ray could be caught… even arranged for the locks to be changed on Maria’s doors.

Two and a half days later, Maria and a male friend—Earl Barker, who stayed to protect Maria—were savagely slaughtered in their sleep. Billy Ray climbed down from the attic at 3 am with an ax. The scene looked like a bomb blasted a barrel of blood. He’d been in the attic… the whole fucking time… while I photographed the clothes… changed the locks… protected Maria…

In The Attic’s point of view tells in first-person with me, the nameless detective, narrating the investigation. Uniquely, it’s also told from Billy Ray’s perspective—his thoughts told to me about lurking above. In The Attic is nearly complete and I’m looking for potential victims who’d like ARC’s, Advance Reading Copies in exchange for reviews. In The Attic is available about mid-June in ePub, Mobi/Kindle, and PDF if anyone wants dibs.

Please leave a comment or email me at garry.rodgers@shaw.ca and I’ll ship you a copy of…

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CREATIVITY

Creativity is the phenomenon of finding imaginative ideas and turning them into reality. It’s the process of bringing something new and original into existence. The results can be intangible products, like theories and songs, or tangible products such as inventions and the new crime-thriller novel I’m struggling to create. Creativity appears to come easier to some folks than others and we tend to see high achievers as gifted, natural creators rather than nurtured normals.

But is that so? Are there a chosen few, born with greater creative ability? Or can creativity be learned—a skill that can be taught, practiced, and mastered?

Back in the Greek and Roman days, creativity was seen as facilitated by a muse who connected individual human minds to the gods. Daemons were the Greek equivalent of guardian angels. They accompanied a soul from birth to death, some being highly creative which manifested themselves in outstanding and intuitive people like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Romans saw these paranormal intermediaries as Geniuses—disembodied messengers from a heavenly intelligence, delivering divine wishes to mortals.

The Renaissance era disagreed. Creative individuals were enlightened, they posed. Creativity came from within the self and gifted ones—DaVinci, Beethoven, and Shakespere—were born intellectually superior with unique abilities to create. They were the geniuses; being able to connect directly with a plane of higher intelligence rather than having an imaginary genius translate for them.

Today’s neuroscience has another view on this. It sees creativity as a complex psychological process that occurs via the brain’s ventral striatum and amygdala and can be enhanced through neuroplasticity, or rewiring the brain through practiced behavior.

In other words, a planned and continual workout program for your brain can definitely improve your creativity.

Improving creativity starts with a foundation of subject knowledge, learning a discipline, and mastering a proper way of thinking. You build on your creative ability by experimenting, exploring, questioning assumptions, using imagination, and synthesizing information. Learning to be creative is like learning a sport. You need a desire to improve, develop the right muscles, and be in a supportive environment.

You need to view creativity as a practice and understand five key behaviors:

1. Associating—drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields.

2. Questioning—posing queries that challenge common wisdom.

3. Observing—scrutinizing the behavior of others in, around, and outside your sphere.

4. Networking—meeting people with both common and different perspectives.

5. Experimenting—constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge.

Read this as — listen, watch, ask, mingle, and stir. Sir Richard Branson has a mantra that’s bred into the corporate DNA of his Virgin staff — A-B-C-D — Always Be Connecting Dots. Branson swears that creativity is a practice and if you practice these five behaviors every day, you will improve your skills in creativity and innovation.

Now, if these five behaviors put you in the right direction for improving creativity, then there must be behaviors to avoid. I found eight:

1. Lack of courage—being fearful of taking chances, scared of venturing down new roads, and timid about taking the road less traveled. Fear is the biggest enemy of creativity. You need to be courageous and take chances.

2. Premature judgement—second-guessing and early judgment of outcome severely restrict your ability to generate ideas and freely innovate. Let your initial path expand and follow it to its inevitable destination.

3. Avoidance of failure—you can’t be bold and creative if you fear failure. Creativity requires risk and making mistakes. They’re part of the process.

4. Comparing with others—this robs your unique innovation and imagination. Set your own standards. Be different. Something new is always different.

5. Discomfort with uncertainty—creativity requires letting go and the process doesn’t always behave rationally. Accept that there’s something akin to paranormal in real creativity.

6. Taking criticism personally—feedback is healthy, even if it’s blunt and harsh like 1&2-Star Amazon reviews. Ignore ridicule. Have thick skin, a tough hide, and don’t let criticism get to you.

7. Lack of confidence—a certain level of uncertainty comes with any new venture. Some self-doubt is normal but if it becomes overwhelming and long-lasting, it will shut down your creative abilities. The best way to create is to first connect with your self-confidence.

8. Analysis paralysis—overthinking renders you unable to make a decision because of information overload. “Go with your gut” is the answer to analysis paralysis.

Aside from positive and negative behaviors, there is one overall and outstanding quality that drives successfully creative people.

Passion…

Passion is the secret to creativity. It’s the underlying feature that’s laced the successes of all prominent creators in history.

Passion is a term we’ve heard over and over again. Chase you passion, not your pension. But few understand what passion implies. The word comes from the Latin root “pati“ which means “to suffer“. Passion is what perseveres in getting to your goal despite fear, discomfort, unhappiness, and pain. It’s the determination—the motivation—to push through suffering for the sake of the end result. And this passionate feeling of motivation has its source in your brain.

A study released in the Journal of Neuroscience identified the ventral striatum, in connection with the amygdala, as the brain’s emotional center that controls the motivation feeling—the higher degree of motivation you feel, the higher the activation will be in this part of your brain. So that intense feeling of motivation you feel when you are in a creative state—that feeling of euphoria when engaging in something you feel truly worthwhile and meaningful to you—is real and is something physiological occurring in your brain. It’s one of the least researched areas of psychology, yet has the biggest impact on your creativity.

I sense you’re wondering if there’s a trick—a method to stimulate your ventral striatum and amygdala—in improving your creativity. Well, yes there is. It’s long been known and practiced by the greats:

Relaxation, along with definite purpose.

Relax. Put your thoughts and desires out to the ether. Relax and wait. Creative ideas will come.

I’m a life-long student of the Napoleon Hill Philosophy of Personal Achievement which is the psychology behind the world’s best self-help book, Think and Grow Rich. Hill clearly outlines the path to unlimited creativity which he postulates comes from the source of Infinite Intelligence that we all can tap. In order to get creative ideas from Infinite Intelligence, first you must know what you want, then you must relax and let Infinite Intelligence deliver ideas or answers to you.

Relaxation can be done in many ways. Meditation. Workout. Vacation. Change of environment. Retail therapy. Long showers. Reading. Music. Deep breathing. Long walks in nature. Maybe a stiff drink or two. The methods are varied but whatever you choose, it needs to put you in a headspace receptive to creative ideas.

Napoleon Hill didn’t have the anatomical knowledge of how the ventral striatum and amygdala worked, but he sure understood that definite purpose, motivation, and relaxation opened the doors of creativity. Hill described this part of the brain as being like a radio transmitter and receiver which exchanged creative thought with Infinite Intelligence.

So, if I can give one single piece of advice on how to improve your creativity it’s to read, understand, and practice the seventeen principles of success Napoleon Hill outlined in Think and Grow Rich.

Click Here for a previous blog post I wrote on the Napoleon Hill’s science of personal achievement.

* * *

A post script to this DyingWords article—while I was researching this piece, I came across a TED Talk with well-known author, Elizabeth Gilbert. Her presentation on creativity for writers is a fascinating look at the process. Click Here to watch it.