One spring day in 1990, nervous to the point of nausea, I signed on the dotted line to produce a true-crime book on the Guy Paul Morin murder case. My first writerly act was to scurry home to compile a reggae tape for a man I had barely met -- Jack Pinkofsky, Morin's lawyer and a noted Caribbean music enthusiast.
An embarrassing display of sycophancy, perhaps. But when someone has the power to open up or shut down a key character -- Morin, in this case -- tape-making ranks quite low on the scale of craven acts worth committing.
I never did give him the damned tape. Pinkofsky -- media-wary, old lion of the defence bar that he was -- simply presented too intimidating a figure. Still, it was a fitting dress rehearsal for what lay ahead.
Rule #1 became clear. The stakes involved in the genre -- life, death and prison bars -- make for a uniquely thrilling ride, but once aboard the true-crime express, abandon all hope of retaining leisure time, inner peace or personal dignity.
Over the next 27 months, I was to play endless mind-games with police officers, negotiate with victims, placate lawyers and romance witnesses. At the end of it all would be Redrum the Innocent -- the story behind the murder of Christine Jessop and murder prosecution of Morin, her next-door neighbour.
There are a couple of distinguishing points about true crime. First, the field is overpopulated. In my case, I was so petrified about a quickie author appearing on the horizon that I told virtually no one what I was working on until I had a six-month jump.
The second hallmark is the venomous hostility that marks these cases. You instantly find yourself steering a shoal-strewn course between characters who cannot abide one another. They have one thing in common: One way or another, they all believe they are victims.
I'd be hard-pressed to say which family was cagier, the Morins or the Jessops. After resolutely dancing away from my advances for months, the Morins summoned me to their domain one day in late 1990 for the third degree.
I knew full well that to make any promises would be to sound the death knell for my book's credibility. So, on the way up to the hamlet where they lived, I kept thinking about Rule #2: Regardless of the temptation, make no commitments beyond an open-minded search for the truth.
Agitated like a first-time skydiver, I sat down in the Morins' dining room and watched in amazement as fists thumped into tables and voices rose to an ear-splitting pitch. It was the venting of many years of vitriol toward a host of tormenters -- police, the Jessops, the justice system and the press.
To my horror, the family continued to hinge their co-operation on being allowed to inspect and change my eventual manuscript. Only after months of candour and cajoling did I get them to trust that if the mild-mannered Morin was truly innocent, I would see it.
Things were no less volatile across the fenceline. Police and prosecutors had firmly warned Janet Jessop not to be led by my sweet blandishments into a cunning literary trap. Accordingly, she created no end of tricks, psychological tripwires and loyalty tests to smoke out my true motives.
One of her informants -- a close friend who fancied herself a psychic -- grilled me thoroughly as we drove through the countryside one day in search of the missing knife used to kill Christine. When not divulging absurd details of my past incarnations (a Danish prince! an archbishop!), she emitted occasional yelps to turn right or left so we could stay on the trail of the killer's "vibrations."
We never did locate that knife; she concluded conveniently that it was at the bottom of a lake.
For his part, Christine's father simply wasn't talking. In fact, Bob Jessop sullenly ignored my existence altogether -- until the day he learned through the ever-helpful Durham Regional Police that I had optioned the film rights to my coming book.
The tongue-lashing I got that afternoon was stinging and profane beyond belief. What kind of #$&%*#! monster could exploit a dead child for filthy money? (Not a completely unreasonable question.) Was I stupid enough to think Morin might really be innocent? (Yes, potentially.) How would I like to be cut off from every last $%&*@! cop, prosecutor and Jessop family member? (Not at all, frankly.)
In a completely unexpected twist, Jessop would later became a confidant, one whose rough candour was a decided boon to my research, and whose devotion to his dead daughter was absolute and touching. He told me many poignant stories about the dissolution of his family, reinforcing how vital that sort of elaborative information was to a complete book.
Rule #3, then was this: Characters and visual, visceral images are as important as hard data.
Dutifully pursuing said colour, I found myself trudging robotically around a rural field in a beekeeper's outfit with Guy Paul Morin one day. Quelling my panic at the hundreds of bees sinking their stingers into my zootsuit, I planted the sort of sly questions I hoped might trip up a potential killer.
I also put in far too many acutely uncomfortable nights with the prosecution team -- drinking beer, attempting to make jolly despite their obvious and all-consuming distrust of me, and watching them apply psychological war-paint for the upcoming Morin trial.
There were also days spent cold-calling Morin's old school friends, or knocking on farm doors near the murder site to chat with a strange local brew of relocated yuppies and hillbillies.
And there was the murder scene. I've lingered at quite a few of these in my time, and they are invariably chilling, but none more so than the spot where Christine laid, decomposing, for three months. I came to know that rural copse intimately, and can instantly summon up the off-putting hum of the crickets and the mental pictures of a nine-year-old struggling against a sex-crazed creature.
Equally vivid is the memory of a summer night in 1992, when three helpers accompanied me to the site -- two to simulate yells for help and two to listen at a nearby farm. The screams came through loud and horrifyingly clear, instantly putting the lie to a critical police finding that neighbours couldn't possibly have heard Christine in her final moments.
As the project progressed, it sank in that every true-crime story needs some kind of conclusion.
To be sure, the jury at Morin's forthcoming trial would provide one. But what if they were to acquit him after I had already concluded that he was actually the killer?
More mortifying still, what if they convicted him but I believed him to be innocent, leaving me in the ugly position of having to contradict 12 jurors? The cops and Crowns would make mincemeat of me.
Most horrifying of all, what if I concluded that Morin was innocent, only to have definitive evidence of his guilt pop up a year or two after my book was published? Books, after all, have a nasty habit of sticking around a lot longer than yesterday's newspaper. There would be no hiding.
A feeling of utter solitariness, such as I had never previous experienced, set in, a gut-ache that created Lesson #4: Be very, very afraid. Follow up every outlandish or contradictory lead. And remember that none of those cajoling me toward a particular conclusion would be there to help wipe the egg off.
Happily, despite being convicted of the murder in 1992, Morin was exonerated two years later thanks to DNA testing. For me, it was a ride well worth taking. Once. Kirk Makin is The Globe and Mail's justice reporter, and the author of Redrum the Innocent.