That's Some Research!

Subject: That's Some Research! September 11th 2009, 4:53 am

I thought this was an interesting story to share. Your thoughts?

Quote :: Crime novelist accused of attempted murder starring in own drama

FRANCIS X. DONNELLY
The Detroit News

Ann Arbor -- The circumstances surrounding the shooting sound like something from a story by local novelist Lisa Reardon.

A family feud. A nervous breakdown. Attempted murder. An unburied pet cat.

But Reardon isn't writing this family drama. She's starring in it, charged with shooting her father with a 20-gauge shotgun on Aug. 21.

Police say she planned the shooting and escape, filling the trunk of her Subaru Impreza with books to read while on the lam.

When an injured George Hicks fled into his home, Reardon tried to follow by shooting the locked door three times, said police. She later told a sister she was sorry she hadn't killed him.

"I just cannot believe I missed. I will never get another chance," she told Angie Hicks, who then told police.

Reardon, 47, who was quickly captured, is being held at Washtenaw County Jail on a $500,000 bond. She faces up to life in prison.

Like her novels, the shooting carries an abiding mystery: Why did she do it?

She didn't respond to a request for an interview. The prosecutor and public defender declined to discuss the case.

And Hicks, 68, who was walking around his yard last week, had no comment.

But those who know the novelist said the answer may lie somewhere within her three books, which give a harrowing description of blue-collar life in Michigan's small towns.

Reardon, who grew up in tiny Milan south of Ann Arbor, writes about child abuse, wife beating, adultery, alcoholism and depression. Family violence is never more than a few pages away.

"It's a shame. She's so talented," said Lauren Kingsley, 54, a Dexter artist. "To do something like that, it has to be coming from a painful place."

'Drawn to dark stuff'

As a child, Reardon's view of the world was shaped by a wine glass.

Whenever her dad left the house, her mom made him take little Lisa with him, thinking it would stop him from going to a bar.

Her mom was wrong.

Much of Reardon's childhood was spent at a seedy Ypsilanti bar where the only window was in the shape of a wine glass, she said in earlier interviews.

Waitresses fetched her french fries and customers gave her quarters for pinball and the jukebox as she watched her dad drink and play pool.

"People just make a big fuss over you because you're cute, you're a kid, you're in a bar -- how funny," she told an audience after a reading at an Iowa City bookstore in 2004.

After high school, Reardon worked a series of menial jobs for five years: factory worker, motel night clerk, truck stop cashier.

She enrolled at the University of Michigan, receiving a bachelor's in English. She got a master's in playwriting from Yale, wrote several plays for off-off Broadway, and began writing novels.

Friends describe her as blunt, smart and funny.

"She has a good heart," said Eileen Favorite, 44, a Chicago novelist. "She has a great passion for helping people."

Reviews of the three books have been favorable but sales have been tepid. Hollywood optioned the first two but never turned them into movies.

The novels are grim mysteries that feature freakish families dealing with all manner of violence.

Fathers fare poorly. They're depicted as alcoholics who abuse their children physically and sexually. They beat and cheat on their wives.

She has said the books aren't autobiographical.

"My mom always asks me, 'Lisa, why can't you just write a nice romantic comedy?' " Reardon had said in an interview. "I don't know. I'm just drawn to this dark stuff."

Novelist suffered breakdown

While many novelists teach at colleges, Reardon went in the other direction.

Until her arrest, she was a night guard at a juvenile detention center run by Holy Cross Children's Services. She also began a writing group for the teens at the Clinton facility.

Earlier, she had taught creative writing at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center in Chicago and at the adolescent psychiatrist division of St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York.

Reardon said she helps troubled youths because several teachers and mentors had helped her when she was young and "a mess."

"There's a quote in my first book where one of the characters says: Once you've been rescued from the horribleness, it's really too easy to forget about the ones you've left behind," she said during the Iowa City appearance.

"I try not to forget the ones who are still there."

She didn't say what she meant by "a mess" or "horribleness."

Reardon, who has been seeing a psychiatrist for several years, suffered a breakdown the week before the shooting, her attorney said in court papers.

The reason for the breakdown wasn't given.

In a court filing, prosecutors gave the following account of the shooting:

Earlier in the day, Reardon withdrew all $2,000 from her savings account, bought the shotgun from a pawn shop and called her dad to set up a visit "to clear the air."

Relations between father and daughter have been strained for several years. The source of the friction wasn't identified.

Reardon arrived to find her dad watering the flowers at his Dexter home.

"We're going to settle this right now," she said, loading the shotgun as she left the car.

She shot him in the buttocks and left leg before he fled into the house.

Afterwards, she told her sister in a phone call that she was sorry, not about hurting her dad, but for failing to bury her cat.

Godfrey, who was her pet for 17 years, died before the shooting. It wasn't known how long he had been dead.

Source: http://detnews.com/article/20090911/METRO/909110360

I read this, this morning and thought if she would write what she's been living she might have another best seller on her hands.

Subject: Re: That's Some Research! September 11th 2009, 7:48 am

Sounds like she did write what she'd been living. She just wouldn't admit it and maybe that's what caused all this. She obviously had some stuff she needed to get out, but for whatever reason wouldn't "go there" with her writing. It's sad really. The dad sort of comes off as someone who might have needed to be shot.

Subject: Re: That's Some Research! September 11th 2009, 11:21 am

Wow....

I was planning on saying something like "Never underestimate the value of shooting someone to get them to change their ways" but, somehow, I just don't feel it.

"Write what you know"

Kinda painful really....

Subject: Reply September 11th 2009, 1:10 pm

The true horror would be to now have her books become best sellers and she becomes a major celebrity. Might be an idea for my own books. Let me see, who do I want to kill? My father is safe, as that excuse has already been tried. Maybe my mother. My brother gets on my nerves at times. Hmmm. Let me think.

Subject: Re: That's Some Research! September 11th 2009, 10:42 pm

No, she won't become a major celebrity off of this. She's not even the first published novelist to try and off a family member. I don't recall his name, but there was a novelist here in North Carolina a couple of years back who killed his wife. I think Dateline did a show on him, but I haven't heard much about him or his books since.

Subject: Re: That's Some Research! September 11th 2009, 11:09 pm

It depends.

If their work was truly great but just unknown, then they could become famous off killing someone because that gets their name out.

If they are "so-so" they attract nitch groupies, mainly people would read any "Killer Author"

Anything less and they rot away in Jail for life, unless they also did a porn video and had rich family members to embarrass.

Subject: Re: That's Some Research! September 23rd 2009, 6:45 pm

What always amazes me that although the story is sad and (by the way I agree Hydra, the dad sounds like an arrogant asshole.) based on her life; if it does become a best seller I would actually want to read it, just to get the details of her life.