Obsessive sleuthing
Today: Arwa Mahdawi, Guardian columnist and the author of Strong Female Lead.
Issue No. 251
How to Solve a Murder: A Five-Part Guide
Arwa Mahdawi
How to Solve a Murder: A Five-Part Guide
by Arwa Mahdawi
Part One: Start digging
You don’t write true crime, you steal it. It doesn’t matter how well it’s told, or how thoroughly it’s investigated, every tale of true crime is someone else’s story. This one begins on a summer day in New Jersey in 1996 when a woman called Susan Walsh went out to make a phone call. She left her house around noon and she never came back.
Susan was 36 when she disappeared, the same age I was when I first learned about her. Like me, she was also a freelance journalist, and I became intrigued by her writing; she’d been building a name for herself at the Village Voice, where she’d broken a front-page story about the Russian mob trafficking go-go dancers to New Jersey. When she went missing she’d also been working on a piece about people in the vampire fetish scene who were stealing blood from New York hospitals.
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