I’ve had my name and photo in the local, national and even international press thousands of times due to my former job. (One time, a town car drove me to and from a live interview on a national morning news show at 5 a.m.; let me tell you, that was wild!) But when I left my job a year ago, the Google news hits stopped.
However, yesterday I was in a newspaper. Tonight I’m on national TV. And I will soon be in a national magazine (as of a few days ago, they wanted me in a photograph, though I’m trying to keep the focus off me). It’s strange to be on the interviewee side of things. In one case, I got pretty annoyed with the reporter. In another case, I was impressed by their thoroughness.
Tonight’s TV show will air at 10 p.m. on the Investigation Discovery channel. The show is called “Deadly Women,” and the episode is called “Love to Death.” NO, I am not the subject of the show! The only things I kill are spiders, unlike the murder case I talked about, in which the main killer was dubbed a “black widow.”
In mid-March, an Australia-based film crew came to my apartment. They set up big lights, ran cords across the floor, and rearranged my whole living room — including the bookshelves. They work on the show “Mythbusters,” so I figured that made them cool enough to move my furniture. Then they interviewed me for an hour, during which time I stammered my way through a bunch of answers about a case I’d covered years earlier. This is what the spectacle looked like:
Each hour-long episode of “Deadly Women” features several crime stories. Once you factor in commercials and the fact that I’m sure two other interviewees performed much better than I did, I’ll probably be on TV for about 30 seconds total. The show airs regularly in re-runs, and I’ve been a bit surprised to hear from many acquaintances who know the show. I have no idea how many people will watch the episode, but I know the case still gets a lot of interest when it’s re-run on another TV network and the Lifetime movie re-airs. My dormant website has a whole section on the case (which I wish I’d had time to update and fix the dead links), and I can always tell from the traffic that the case was on TV again. I’m off to a wedding this weekend, or else I’d spend part of Saturday updating that website.
I wasn’t paid for any of this publicity, and I even took time off work for the TV interview. But the crew did leave me with this little guy, who now hangs out at my desk:
