From Josef Fritzl to Jimmy Savile,
shocking real-life crimes provide rich inspiration for authors. But how heavily
should novelists rely on true cases, and when does fiction go from entertainment
to exploitation?
Thirty years later, Laura Lippman heard about the plight of the sisters and the story provided the inspiration for her debut novel What The Dead Know.
In Lippman's version, 11- and 15-year-old sisters Sunny and Heather Bethany went missing from a mall in 1975. Then, 30 years on, a woman claiming to be Heather Bethany appeared and police had to solve the puzzle of what really happened.
Lippman, who was a crime reporter on the Baltimore Sun
for 12 years, says: "I've been mining the past for stories that aren't famous.
I'm interested in these stories that haunt me."
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