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.

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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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KIM WALL — THE SUBMARINE SNUFF FILM VICTIM

When it comes to bizarre crimes with a demented mindset and a disgusting motive, it doesn’t get much worse than this. Most people around the world have heard something of the Scandinavian case where inventor Peter Madsen murdered journalist Kim Wall on board his home-built submarine and then dismembered her body and dumped it in the sea. Parts of Kim were found in intervals during a massive search by the Danish police. Madsen was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. It’s only now, after a highly-rated miniseries called The Investigation was released, that the motive has publically surfaced. It appears Peter Madsen made a snuff film using Kim Wall as the star.

This murder case has a history to it and a blind coincidence that allowed it to happen. Before going into details of who Kim Wall and Peter Madsen were, as well as the strand of fate putting them together—alone—and on that fateful submersible boat, it’s necessary to do a quick case-fact review. Here’s what happened.

Kim Wall was a top-notch journalist who interviewed Peter Madsen, an eccentric entrepreneur, for a peculiar story. On August 10, 2017, Madsen invited Kim onboard his midget submarine, UC3 Nautilus, in Koge Bugt on the south side of Copenhagen, Denmark. Kim arrived at 7:00 p.m. for a scheduled two-hour ride and talk. She was never seen in one piece again.

By 1:40 a.m. on August 11, Kim’s boyfriend and partner reported her overdue and missing. So were Peter Madsen and the Nautilus. The police started an air and water search when light broke. At 11:00, searchers spotted the Nautilus surfacing near Koge Bugt. When they approached, Madsen scuttled the ship and it went to the bottom in minutes.

Peter Madsen swam free and a rescue boat fished him out. Madsen claimed that he’d dropped Kim Wall off on shore the previous evening and he kept cruising alone until a mechanical problem caused him to surface at which time a ballast tank failed and flooded the sub’s inside. The police didn’t believe it. Not a word.

In this Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2017 photo, a private submarine sits on a pier in Copenhagen harbor, Denmark. Danish police say a DNA test from a headless torso found in the Baltic Sea matches with missing Swedish journalist Kim Wall, who is believed to have died on the private submarine. (Jens Dresling/Ritzau Foto via AP)

They filed an involuntary manslaughter charge which, under Danish law, allowed the authorities to keep Madsen in custody while they investigated. A salvage crew raised the sub and searched it. Kim Wall was not inside, and there was clear evidence the sub had been intentionally sunk.

While searchers combed the shore and divers covered the bottom, the police looked into who Peter Madsen was. He was well-known in Denmark, and the worst-kept secret was he belonged to the sub-culture (excuse the pun) of the underground fetish scene of B.D.S.&M. Bondage-Dominance-Sadism-Masochism.

Kim Wall’s torso washed up at an Amager, Denmark, beach on August 21. She’d been stabbed 15 times in the genitals and ribs. Her legs and arms had been cut off. So had Kim’s head.

Once confronted with the body evidence, Peter Madsen changed his story. He claimed Kim was accidentally killed when a heavy hatch cover fell on her head. Madsen said he panicked and choose to get rid of her body. He explained the bodily mutilation was necessary to remove her from the boat as it was impossible for him to drag her lifeless form up the ladder and through the conning tower. So, he said, he dismembered Kim Wall to make it efficient.

An incredible performance by Danish divers located Kim’s remaining pieces. This took continual underwater grid searching that lasted into November. When Kim’s head was located in a weighted bag, like each of the other parts had been sunken, there was no blunt force trauma evidence. One of the bags contained a saw. Another a knife. And all had metal pipes in them.

Again, Peter Madsen changed his story. Now he said Kim had been accidentally gassed by the diesel engine fumes, and she died of carbon monoxide poisoning. No, the pathologist differed, her torso contained intact lungs and there was no CO evidence in them.

Peter Madsen shut up and remained mute while the police put a painstaking case together. Part of the package that prosecutors presented to a judge (not a jury) involved the backgrounds of Kim Wall and Peter Madsen. This included the strange strand of fate that put Kim on Peter Madsen’s boat.

Who Was Kim Wall?

Kim Isabela Fredrika Wall was a thirty-year-old Swedish woman. She was a high achiever, a world traveler, and a terrifically talented journalist—a professional freelance writer. Kim was single but attached to a long-term boyfriend, and she was also tightly attached to her family—a younger brother and her parents, Ingrid and Joachim Wall.

Kim Wall was a straight-A student who went on to earn double Masters Degrees at the London School of Economics and Columbia University in New York City. One was in journalism. The other was in international relations. As in grade school, Kim Wall was an honors student and at the top of her class.

Besides being intelligent, Kim was sympathetic. She was a champion of the underdog and always looked for the human side of the story within the story. And in search of the story, Kim Wall traveled to far reaches like Uganda, Kenya, Cuba, Cambodia, and even into Russia and North Korea. She wrote about smuggled Beatles recordings in to communist countries, feminism in China, Idi Amin’s despot reign, and nuclear waste in the Marshall Islands.

Kim looked for eccentric stories with quirky interests. Her freelance work appeared in TIME, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Wired. It was a Wired commission that aligned her with Peter Madsen.

Who Was Peter Madsen?

Peter Langkjær Madsen was a forty-five-year-old Dane. He. too, was well-traveled. But unlike Kim Wall’s natural and well-balanced smarts, Masen was the fine line between genius and nutjob. He also had sexual kinks and a ferocious temper.

Madsen was a bit of a Danish celebrity. His narcissism played right to the crowd and his psychopathy gave him absolutely no remorse if he abused people as he went about getting what he wanted. Madsen had no formal post-secondary education, and he was self-taught in engineering skills.

Peter Madsen called himself an “inventrepreneur”. He was opportunistic and enthusiastic—a dog with a bone when on a new venture. He pursued two main interests, underwater exploration and space travel. He did design and personally build the Nautilus. However, he used other people’s money to crowdfund it.

By 2017, Madsen tired of the ocean. He’d done enough and now turned to the stars. With a financial partner, they formed Copenhagen Orbitals which was a rocket design-build company. Madsen, however, was impossible to work with so they split up and Madsen started a competitor called Rocket Madsen’s Space Laboratory, again using investor capital.

The Strand of Fate

The Copenhagen Orbitals-Rocket Madsen’s Space Laboratory rift became a publicized feud. It caught media attention because of the high-profile space ventures these two intended under the Danish flag and for the eccentric personalities of the fighting pair. Tragically, it caught Kim Wall’s attention, too.

Wired Magazine is an American emerging technology monthly publication owned by Conde Nast. An editor at Wired was familiar with Peter Madsen and his self-taught submarine expertise. Now the editor got wind that Madsen was into rockets and space. Kim Wall got the commission to go find Peter Madsen and see what all the fuss was about, including the fuss between Madsen and Copenhagen Orbitals.

Kim Wall had a hard time connecting with Peter Madsen. He pretty much ignored her emails and calls. Kim did interview the ex-partner and research the new Danish aerospace emergence, but Madsen remained elusive.

That was until late in the afternoon of August 10, 2017. Kim Wall had given up on contacting Peter Madsen. She’d taken on a new assignment in China and had full plans to leave for the Orient on August 11’s morning. In fact, her boyfriend had arranged a large going-away party for her that evening.

At around 4:00 p.m., Kim Wall received a text from Peter Madsen. He’d agreed to an interview and asked her to stop by his laboratory. She did. They had a quick chat. And then Madsen invited Kim to the Nautilus for a two-hour exclusive. Not turning down the scoop, Kim bowed out of her party and, at 7:00 p.m., she boarded the ship—never to be seen alive again.

The Trial Evidence

The Danish police and prosecutors did an incredibly thorough job in sourcing evidence and securing a murder conviction. They were able to forensically link Kim Wall to the ship and Peter Madsen to Kim. They used Madsen’s conflicting statements to turn the tables when he took the witness stand and showed his instability by testifying on his own behalf in first and third-party viewpoints.

The prosecutors built a vivid image of Peter Madsen’s mindset. They called witness upon witness who knew Madsen and his unusual history. That included people from his sex life and people from his business world. Slowly—witness by witness and evidence piece by evidence piece—the prosecution sculpted a man with a mindset capable of luring an innocent woman to her fate of dismemberment.

Most damaging of all was what Peter Madsen did to himself. On his computer, retrieved from the hard drive, was a jamb-packed album of smut. He’d downloaded archives of violence against women, torture, and even snuff. The night before Kim’s murder, his search engine history contained “throat-slitting”, “beheading”, “girl”, and “execution murders”.

If that didn’t sink him, this did. Four different women testified that Peter Madsen contacted them during the day of August 10, 2017. He invited each of them to a 7:00 p.m. meeting on board the Nautilus. Each of the four declined. Kim Wall was the fifth Madsen called. She accepted.

As for the coup de gras, a witness described seeing Peter Madsen enter the Nautilus on August 10. In one hand, Madsen held a knife and a saw. In his other—a video camera.

The Danish judge accepted all the evidence proving Peter Madsen had planned and deliberately set out to murder a woman on the evening of August 10, 2017. By a strand of fate, that woman was Kim Wall.

The video camera was never found, so we’ll never know exactly what went down on film. But there’s no reasonable doubt about it. Kim Wall was a submarine snuff film victim.

THE MANIAC MURDERS AT LOVERS LANE

You’d think you’d know all the best crime stories of your hometown, especially when you were a police officer there and spent most of your service on the Serious Crimes Section—being a murder cop. Specifically, true crime stories of this magnitude which turned out to be one of the most complex double homicide investigations in your city’s history. But, no, I’d never heard of this case until I was sitting in my barber’s chair the other day and Dave told me about the maniac murders at Lovers Lane.

Dave Lawrence is Nanaimo’s downtown barber. Dave runs a one-man show at That 50s Barber Shop on Victoria Crescent where multi-millionaires push past shopping cart vagrants to get the best haircut in town. Also to find out what’s going on in town because, if you want to know, Dave’s the go-to guy for knowing what’s going on around town.

Nanaimo, by the way, is a city of 100,000 on the southeast side of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. It’s right across the water from the City of Vancouver which is one of the most exotic, erotic, and expensive places on our planet. Nanaimo is laid back in many ways, but it has an abnormally high per capita murder rate. And it’s been my home for the past thirty-four years.

I went into Dave’s shop last Saturday to get all four sides trimmed. We got talking, as we always do, and he goes, “Garry, you were a cop for a lot of years here in Nanaimo. Ever hear about the maniac murders at Lovers Lane?” I says, “No, Dave. You been smoking crack again like that guy who just tweaked by your window?” So Dave goes, “Seriously, dude. This really happened, and it’s the best true crime story I ever heard of.” Then Dave tells me about the maniac murders at Lovers Lane.

This true crime story doesn’t start with the cold-blooded executions of two young lovers. It starts fourteen years earlier on May 31, 1948, with a railroad washout near Kamloops in British Columbia’s interior. That spring, flooding was intense and the rushing water undermined a trestle pier holding up a bridge section where the Canadian National Railroad crossed the Thompson River. The bridge collapse took with it the telegraph lines connecting communications between western Canada and the east.

Losing a bridge section was one thing. Destroying communications was another. The only thing holding the main telegraph line from snapping under the weight of a sagging bridge was a small wooden bracket holding a glass insulator that the wire held fast to.

Leave it to railroader ingenuity. One sectionman got the idea to shoot the wire free. He borrowed the station agent’s .22 rifle, lay on the bank, and plinked away until he broke the bracket and saved the day. The rifle went back to the station agent’s house and was forgotten.

Until October 16, 1962. That’s when pretty nineteen-year-old Diane Phipps went on a date with her handsome boyfriend of six months, nineteen-year-old Leslie Dixon. That evening, the pair drove about downtown Nanaimo—then a city of around 20,000—stopping at the drive-in, gabbing with friends, and generally being young people in love. After dark, Diane and Leslie drove way out to Pipers Lagoon which the youths of Nanaimo called Lovers Lane. They parked and began to make out and were never seen alive again.

Pipers Lagoon is about eight miles from downtown Nanaimo. It’s in the Hammond Bay area which is now full of upscale homes but, thankfully, the city wisdom at the time foresaw the value of Pipers Lagoon and preserved it as parkland. It’s a strikingly beautiful spot, even though it has this history.

Diane Phipps and Leslie Dixon’s families became concerned—very concerned—when the two lovers didn’t come home by morning. Friends knew they’d likely gone to Lovers Lane, so that was the first place they searched. They found Leslie’s car. It was parked in the lane. He was slumped inside behind the wheel, dead, with two .22 bullets to the back of his head. Dianne was nowhere in sight.

This started the biggest criminal investigation in Nanaimo’s history. How I never heard about it, I don’t know, but Dave steered me to a website that documented the case as well as archives in the Vancouver Sun that covered the story. Here’s what happened.

Crime scene investigators found Leslie had been shot at close range. They surmised that the killer surprised the pair and shot him through an open driver’s side window, leaving his body in place. Leslie’s wallet with money was still in his pocket which indicated robbery was not a motive. There was no blood or evidence of Dianne being shot while sitting on the front passenger side seat, so the police officers surmised she’d been abducted at gunpoint.

The Nanaimo detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) called in extra resources. A large search of the surrounding area found no trace of anything connected with the crime, including Dianne Phipps. Officers went door to door and investigated the pair’s trail the previous evening. They were baffled and quickly involved the media, asking for public help.

At 2:00 p.m. on the day after Leslie Dixon was found murdered, a Nanaimo resident was rummaging through a rural garbage dump five miles south of Nanaimo in a semi-rural area called Harewood. He saw a pair of feet sticking out from under some old car parts. It was Dianne Phipps. She’d been shot once between the eyes and her head had been bashed-in with a rock. Her time of death was consistent with the early morning hours of October 17.

Dianne wasn’t sexually assaulted. She was fully clothed and her purse, containing money, was beside her. With robbery and sexual overtones ruled out, and no one in the couple’s entire history posing a threat, the RCMP suspected they had a murderous maniac on their hands.

More public appeals went out. Police got a call from a woman who lived on Harewood Road, not far from where Dianne’s body was found. She related that at 1:00 a.m. on the night of the murders she got a knock on her door. A very strange man was there and said his car was stuck in a nearby ditch. He asked if she would take her pickup and pull him out.

She did so. He posed no threat to her, but she found his actions so bizarre that she thought he’d done something else. Now hearing of Dianne’s body being found close to where she towed this stranger, she suspected the incidents were related.

The witness lady gave the police an excellent description of the man and his sedan. She did not get a name, nor did she record the license number. This suspect and vehicle information was widely broadcast and developed hundreds of tips.

Week by week and month by month, the police investigation team put their hearts into the case of the Lovers Lane murders. The City of Nanaimo posted a $5,000 reward which was equivalent to a year’s wages back then. More tips came in, but not the right ones.

The weather turned as cold as the case. Vancouver Island is normally Canada’s winter hot spot. It rarely freezes on the south island and only snows occasionally. The winter of 1962/1963 was far colder than normal. The local lakes froze to the point where people could walk on the ice which is what a young boy did on Long Lake which is in north Nanaimo miles away from Lovers Lane and the Harewood dump.

The boy saw something through the ice. It was a rifle—a rather unusual rifle. The boy called his father, and they smashed through the ice and retrieved a Winchester Model 63 semi-automatic .22 with serial number 41649A stamped on it.

The father was suspicious as to why someone would throw a valuable firearm in the lake. He took it to the police who sent it to the crime lab. This firearm found in Long Lake matched the .22 bullets taken from Dianne Phipps and Leslie Dixon at their autopsies. It was the murder weapon.

The police held back this information while they pursued other leads. They traced the .22 as being manufactured on October 5, 1940, and was sold by a Kamloops sporting goods store in 1942. However, back then in the Second World War years, purchaser records weren’t kept. The trail again grew cold.

On Saturday, April 18, 1964—almost a year and a half after the murder weapon was found—the Vancouver Sun ran a front-page story and, with police permission, released the holdback information on the unusual firearm along with its photo. This started the tips again.

The sectionman who shot the telegraph bracket and saved the communication day back in 1948 saw the rifle’s photo and strongly suspected it was the one he used that belonged to the station agent, one Robert Ralph Dillabough of Kamloops. There was a problem with that. Mr. Dillabough had died ten years earlier. However, his estate had recorded the rifle as an asset, including it having the serial number 41649A. It was the same piece, for sure.

Diligent detective work took place. Police tracked Dillabough’s estate through a law firm of Mr. D.T. Rogers of Kamloops. They recorded that the murderous .22 was sold at an auction in Kamloops on February 19, 1955. The auctioneer was named George Shelline who they found had been killed in an automobile accident a year earlier. Shelline’s estate had no records of who purchased this puzzling and deadly firearm. Once again, the case went cold.

Over time, the police followed over five thousand tips taking hundreds and hundreds of statements. They checked 60,000 vehicle registrations for the suspicious car that was towed from the ditch along Harewood Road and they checked over 2,000 firearms sales invoices. The RCMP got help from the FBI and from Scotland Yard and from Interpol. They amassed what was the largest murder file in the history of British Columbia and they got nowhere.

Not until the Vancouver Sun ran another front-page story, again displaying the .22’s photo. On August 7, 1965—pushing three years after Dianne and Leslie’s murders—a tipster who requested confidentiality came forward and fingered Ronald Eugene Ingram as the owner of Winchester Model 63 .22 with serial number 41649A.

Ronald Ingram was now living in North Vancouver and worked as a baker. The police learned that in October of 1962, Ingram had resided in Nanaimo along with his wife and three children where he co-owned the Parklane Bakery on Harewood Road. He moved from Nanaimo to North Vancouver shortly after the Lovers Lane murders occurred.

Ingram and his vehicle were dead ringers for the strange man who got his auto stuck on Harewood Road. The police seized his vehicle. Even though a lot of time had passed, they found dried bloodstains in it that matched Dianne Phipps’s blood type.

The police also got information that Ronald Ingram had used the now-notorious .22 to shoot rats in his bakery’s storeroom. Armed with a warrant and a chainsaw, the police recovered bullets from the storeroom wall that matched the .22’s unique firing signature and the ones that killed Dianne and Leslie.

They arrested Ronald Ingram and charged him with capital murder. To this point, no one in the legal circles ever heard of him. He had no criminal record and his name never surfaced in the intense investigation—until he was linked to the murder weapon.

The medical and psychiatric circles had certainly heard of Ronald Ingram, though. He had a lengthy history of mental illness including having maniacal episodes. Ingram confessed to murdering Dianne Phipps and Leslie Dixon, claiming he was in a maniacal state at the time. In one of the speediest trials I’ve ever heard of, Ingram was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He was ordered locked up under the authority of Section 545 of the Canadian Criminal Code and held “until the pleasure of the Lieutenant Governor was known“.

Ronald Ingram was incarcerated at the maximum-security Forensic Psychiatric Institute at Riverview Hospital in the Greater Vancouver area. Over time, Ingram’s classification was lowered to medium-security and he was consecutively placed in a less restrictive psychiatric environments. In 1976—fourteen years after these truly horrific crimes by a homicidal maniac—Ronald Eugene Ingram simply walked out the front door of his mental hospital. He was never heard of again.

And that’s the true story Dave told me about the maniac murders at Lovers Lane.