Wyoming Cold Cases Solved

As Wyoming lies beneath a thick blanket of snow, two chilling cold case murder mysteries have allegedly been solved. An elderly married couple accused of killing four people more than thirty years ago have admitted murdering their former spouses as well as two young boys.
 

I recall hearing about the disappearances of Virginia Uden and her two young sons, Reagan and Richard, while I was driving alone in Wyoming during the early 1980s, interviewing residents for my first book. I thought at the time that a serial killer was roaming the state’s highways because a fellow photojournalist also disappeared during that time period, his car found still running with the driver’s door open and one of his socks on the ground. As far as I know, that case has not been solved. 

The couple was arrested this week in rural Missouri, where Gerald Uden confessed that he had shot and killed his former wife and her two sons when his current wife, Alice Holtz-Uden, was arrested for the murder of her 25-year-old former husband. She allegedly tossed his body down an abandoned gold mine shaft during the mid-1970s after filing for divorce a few months after the wedding. Shooting him in the back of his head while he slept, she reportedly hid the body in a barrel until she later disposed of it in the mine.  

The two killers apparently didn’t know each other when they committed their crimes but later met and married. They then moved from Wyoming to Missouri where they raised two children and were respected members of the community.  Members of their local church, they’ve been described by neighbors as good people, “the kind of neighbors you leaned over the fence and talked about your chickens with," Allen Bishop said. “They were just the old neighbors next door."

Another neighbor told a local TV station: “I was in disbelief. They are old people. They don't do things like that." 

Now in their 70s, the couple is in custody in the Chadwick, Missouri jail, awaiting extradition to Wyoming. According to a law enforcement source, someone Alice Holtz had confided in 30 years ago about her husband’s death finally came forward to tell what had happened, Ronald Holtz’s remains were subsequently found. However, the whereabouts of the bodies of Virginia Uden and her sons has not been revealed.

This gruesome story may sound like a work of fiction but the truth is definitely stranger. And in this case, much colder than the average murder mystery.

~Jean Henry Mead

A COLOURFUL DEATH now in paperback

by Carola

My second Cornish mystery comes out in a paperback edition in the US on October 10th.

The Cornish mysteries are set in the late '60s/early '70s, in Cornwall, one of the most picturesque areas of Britain.

The coast is indented with rocky, cliff-bound coves providing harbours over the centuries for fishermen and smugglers alike. With small towns, built of local granite and roofed with local slate, and glorious scenery, Cornwall has long been a haunt of holiday-makers--and artists.

Large print

One such painter, Nick Gresham, is the next-door neighbour of my protagonist, Eleanor Trewynn, a widow in her 60s. Thanks to an introduction from Eleanor, Nick succeeds in placing a couple of paintings in a London art gallery. He returns triumphant from London only to find the pictures in his shop have been slashed to ribbons.

Nick is sure he knows the culprit, Geoffrey Monmouth, an envious fellow-painter. Vowing vengeance, he sets off to confront him, while Eleanor, hoping to avert violence, accompanies him to Padstow.

They arrive at Monmouth's gallery to find him lying dead, stabbed in the back, surrounded by a crimson pool...

Nick is arrested for murder. Eleanor is determined to exonerate him, and very soon finds that a great many people had good reason to hate Geoffrey Monmouth.

Reviews:

Bolstered by strong characters, the fast-moving plot builds to a satisfying conclusion. --Publishers Weekly on A Colourful Death

Eleanor is a wonderful, multifaceted heroine and Manna from Hades [first in the series] is a first-rate story.... Carola Dunn demonstrates the same smooth writing and seasoned storytelling that readers have come to expect from her. --Mystery News

UK edition

Seattle Mystery Bookshop
Mysterious Galaxy
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Colourful-Death-Cornish-Mystery/
http://www.amazon.com/Colourful-Death-Cornish-Mystery-Mysteries
Barnes&Noble
Waterstones

Freebie Book Promotion Followup

By Chester Campbell

It has been two weeks since my second Greg McKenzie mystery, Designed to Kill, had a three-day freebie book promotion with BookBub. The results are a mixed bag. There were 49,287 free downloads on Amazon. Bill Kirton said he didn't have such large numbers but sold 9,000 books. He's obviously in a different league from me. I've never sold 9,000 books under any circumstance.

I was disappointed with the sales of Designed to Kill, which have only numbered 35, plus six borrows, which pay about the same. But on the whole my books have sold much better than normally. The first and third books have each reached 111sales or borrows, while the fourth and fifth books in the series registered 47 and 30. In all, my ten books totaled 366 sales and 20 borrows. For a relatively unknown micropress author, that's not bad for a month.

Of course, the total result was no bonanza. I paid BookBub $240 for the promotion, which should leave a net return of about $435. If I did that every month for a year, it would be more than $5,000. Not a bad sum for somebody who doesn't depend on book revenue for his bread and butter. As I become better known with the publicity brought by the freebie promotions, hopefully sales will pick up for all my books.

One benefit of the recent BookBub coverage was a noticeable pickup in reviews on Amazon. Designed to Kill had 23 reviews before the promotion. Now it has 43 reviews, including 22 five stars and 12 four stars.

If I keep at it and learn more about the ways of ebook promotion, maybe I'll achieve the success of writers like Jinx Schwartz, author of the Hetta Coffey series. She knows how to do it right. Check out her article on the subject at the Blood Red Pencil blog at this link: http://bit.ly/18Ig8L4.

Visit  my website ChesterDCampbell.com

Re-releasing a Book

By June Shaw

Getting a book published is exciting, especially when it's your first one. Getting it published again adds more excitement, mainly when it's a new edition with additional editing and a different cover.

I've had so much fun to finally be selling one and then another and so on of books I write. It been amazing to watch the various editions of the same book. For example, Five Star published RELATIVE DANGER, first book in my series of humorous mysteries, in hardcover with one cover. Harlequin put it out in paperback with a totally different cover. I had it published as an ebook and used a unique cover. It came out as an audiobook, again with a new look, and Untreed Reads recently re-released it as an e-book with a new cover again. (I just remembered RELATIVE DANGER came out in large print, too, but don't recall the cover on that edition.)

Getting to sell a book and then seeing how various editors envision my work has been a joy I never expected when I chose to become a writer.

I'm having a great time seeing the new editions of my mystery series with brand new covers. Untreed Reads just finished re-releasing all three of them. I hope you'll take a look and check them out. Thanks!

http://www.juneshaw.com

Doctor, There Is No Minor Surgery

By Jackie King

Writers share the same problems as the rest of the population, but we have the advantage of recycling our misery. We even have the audacity to call this “research.” The truth is anything we novelists experience, sooner or later turns up in our books.

I’ve been writing about the complications of aging. And believe it or not, I'm doing this in order to cheer myself up. (This sentence sounds dumb even to me, but it’s the truth.)

On September 16, I had a pacemaker implant. It seems that I had developed something called AFib. (Medical abbreviation for atrial fibrillation.) Listed among several causes are high blood pressure and sleep apnea; and I have both.

My first thought was that AFib was what old men got, not middle aged women like me. Then I remembered my actual age (which always comes as a shock to me) and had to admit that I had joined this rather large club. (And I do know that it’s better than the alternative, but I still like to gripe.)

AFib can cause strokes, so the doctor ordered me to stop driving until I had a pace maker implant. “This is a simple procedure and easy to recover from,” said the good doctor.

He lied!

No doubt it’s simple compared to open-heart surgery or having a brain transplant, but it has been no walk in the park. One of the inconveniences I’ve suffered has been the necessity of carrying my left arm in a sling so I don’t raise it over my shoulder. Have you ever tried to style your hair with one hand? So I spend all of my time explaining to all and sundry how I broke (or didn’t) break my arm.

As a writer I’m tempted to make up exciting stories about farfetched adventures instead of telling the boring truth, but so far I’ve resisted the urge. I don’t dare risking one of my friends breaking my right arm.

I’d love to hear your similar stories. And to repay you, next time I post you’ll hear about how I learned to live with a mask and bi-pap machine to control the sleep apnea.

I’m falling apart…God help me.

Hugs,

Jackie

Danger – MMORPGs

I think role playing games are fun. They call for the same sort of commitment readers make when they get involved in a story and suspend disbelief, feeling the fictional characters to be at least as real as they are themselves. My novella, Alternative Dimension, is about the attractions and the dangers of playing games and entering a virtual reality. For me, being part of a fantastical online community was a source of humour, a chance to indulge in some gentle satire, as well as a place where I met and got to know people I’d never have come across otherwise.

People are surprisingly unguarded there, revealing intimate secrets to others, even though they’re only interacting with an avatar and they have no idea of who the person behind it is. The risks in that are obvious, and the whole business of grooming and manipulation is very sinister and very real. And, of course, as someone unloads their childhood traumas onto you, you’ve no idea whether they’re true, whether the person’s male, female, Aryan supremacist or Jehovah’s Witness. (It could even be your partner on a laptop in another room – which is an even scarier thought.)

But games are making legitimate claims to be a separate art form in their own right. They’re like movies, they’re like books, but they have dimensions of interactivity which go beyond the traditional. The immersive atmosphere they create, the power of their music, which now has mainstream respectability (the London Philharmonic has recorded several of the best-known themes), the fact that you, as a player, actually inhabit the story and the settings – all of this makes different demands on the creative input of designers but also of players.

So the BBC radio programme I heard about the whole subject made for fascinating listening. One interviewee talked interestingly about how increases in computing power and the refinements in the disciplines involved in creating all aspects of a game meant that today’s ‘best’ experiences were constantly being superseded. Whereas Dickens, Hardy, Shakespeare and the rest continue to be read and performed, old computer games seem limp and passé.

As I said, all of this was very informative and interesting. But, as she continued to enthuse about the excitement and value of getting immersed in games, she made one throwaway remark which I found very chilling and which made me rethink the values she was ascribing to them. To make her point about how games do have an afterlife in the memories of those who’ve played them, she described a night she’d spent escaping from some captors, gathering weapons, fighting her way along and eventually dragging her boy friend’s body from where he’d been held captive. There was a smile in her voice as she described it all, and the residual excitement was obvious. But then, after all these ordeals, she said ‘God, I felt like I’d gone through Vietnam’.

And there, it seems to me, you have a hidden danger. Not just treating war as a game but diminishing reality itself. It’s a paradox. This isn't a criticism of her and I don't mean to imply thoughtlessness or insensitivity on her part. She was interesting, enthusiastic and very knowledgeable. The experience for her was real, draining, even traumatic, but its ‘reality’ was immediately put into perspective by the inappropriate parallel she implied with true stress and horror. OK, it wasn’t a considered remark but, in a way, that makes it worse. As I said, I'm not condemning her, I'm asking whether our priorities and sensitivities are shifting.

Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Conference 2013

I just got back from three days at the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Conference in Denver. This is the twelfth year I’ve added, and I always get great ideas and end up with a huge to-do list of follow up action items. This is an excellent conference for improving writing craft, honing pitch skills, learning more about book promotion and catching up on the latest trends in the publishing world.  

Some of the highlights:

-          Author Jeff Shelby taught a number of workshops on the emerging independently published world describing his journey from traditionally published to self-published. After ups and down in his publishing career, he has now gained traction with eighteen self-published books. He equated self-publishing to being a small business owner. It’s not traditional versus self-published; it’s traditional and self-published.

-          Dinner speaker Margaret George entertained us with stories of her career in publishing historical novels.

-          Lunch speaker Ronald Malfi inspired us with a message on perseverance and tenacity.

-          Cate Rowan cited e-book growth with the following statistics: in 2010 e-books represented 2% of dollars spent. In 2010 this increased to 7% with 14 % of book units. In 2012 e-books represented 11% of dollars and 22% of units.

Pictures show Margaret George and Ronald Malfi.

I’m now ready to dive into my to-do list.

 Mike Befeler