But, once I get into the rythem of these things going on and after I get my house strait (I had to move out, but have since moved back in when I got my job back), I will get back to blogging at least once a week.

This was just a note to let you all know that I haven’t forgot about you or my blog or my book…it’s just going to take a bit more time than anticipated to adjust and get back to writing.

In the mean time, go out a catch up with Kristen Lamb’s blog and purchase her new book, not at all because yours truly has a snippet of writing in it!

I should also say that since I’m back, I’ve realized a couple of things about this here website:

1. I’ve owned this site for several years now and it’s gotten away from what I started it for (more on that later)
2. This site needs some improvement and optimization

Digging in a little more into number 1 up there, I realized that I needed to get things back to the way they were, or at least somewhat – you see, I used to write with my best friend Steve here and we have discussed getting back to it. He’s working on his Masters in sociology and I’m still – well - a lazy ass writer so things should get interesting for the blog…

As far as optimization and improvement go, I need to updates the projects section and add a few things so getting to the actual downloads is easier and I need to add some of the old MSF.com archive posts, so be sure to look out for that.

Anywho - after Steve and I discuss the new format, it shouldn’t be long before I’m posting at least weekly again. Until next time…

Peter Saint-Clair:

Fielding M. McGehee III: My wife and I became really involved in Peoples Temple starting on November 19, 1978, the day after the deaths in Jonestown, because my wife had two sisters and a nephew who died there. From the start, the information that came out just didn’t fit with the type of people in Peoples Temple that my wife had known. We’ve tried to dig to find out what really happened in Jonestown and who the people were and to present them to the rest of the world as people, rather than as 918 bodies of rotting flesh lying in the jungle sun. So that’s pretty much how we got started.

PSC: Your father-in-law, John Moore, preached a sermon about the humanizing of the victims. Can you tell me a little about that?

FMMIII: At the end of the first week, my father-in-law preached a sermon which was reproduced around the world. His sermon was really the first sermon that tried giving humanity to the people who died in Jonestown. One of the things that he said in that sermon for example was “If I were to try to describe the people who joined who joined Peoples Temple, you would think they were members of this congregation and you would be right because those were the types of people who joined Peoples Temple. They were religious, very many of them were concerned about human suffering, about trying to make a better world and to help the people who needed it in our society.”

PSC: You and your wife, Dr. Rebecca Moore, work for the Jonestown Institute. Is that something you guys created?

FMMIII: Yes, the Jonestown Institute exists mainly in our heads. We do have stationary and stuff like that, but basically the office consists of a home office, inside our house in San Diego. My wife is the chair of the Department of Religious Studies at San Diego State University and we run the website through that, so it really is just us. We do get a lot of help, though, from people like you, people who volunteer to transcribe tapes or to digitize the tapes, and people who have helped us locate and to transcribe some of the primary sources that appear on our website.

PSC: And that includes former members, survivors and people like that?

FMMIII: I think probably the strongest part of the website is the section we have on the website called “Personal Reflections.” That’s the place where former members of Peoples Temple can come to talk about their experiences in Peoples Temple. And it really is a forum for anyone to come and say what it is that they have to say. They can be critical, they can set things straight, we are open to all comers. The only thing that we really request and actually insist upon is that the people who write for us are respectful of the people who died and also of the other survivors.

PSC: The FBI recovered more than 1000 tapes from Jonestown. Can you tell me a little bit about what is contained in those tapes?

FMMIII: The actual number of audio tapes was closer to about 950, and to give you a little bit of an idea of what the tapes contained, 50 of them are blank which they picked up. Another 150 are recorded music; in other words if someone picked up a cassette that somebody had just made of Rock ‘n’ Roll or R&B or soul music, and if it was lying on the ground and they didn’t know what it was, they just considered it part of the Jonestown tape. There are about 700-750 tapes that have some kind of conversation on them or otherwise have something besides music. Those are the tapes that we’re most interested in because they give an audio history of Peoples Temple. As you get closer to the end of Peoples Temple history on November 18, 1978, the more complete the history is because what happened was they recorded over old tape. You’ll have a tape was a sermon back in the 1970s and if it was just lying around or not being used for anything, they would stick it in the recorder for Jim Jones to read the daily news which he did a lot, especially towards the end of the time in Jonestown. But going backwards in time, just as recently as this week I transcribed a tape that was from 1966, which is about 12 years before the deaths in Jonestown. It was one of the earliest tapes that had been recovered from the Temples years in California and actually one of the earliest tapes all together. There are only two or three tapes from Indiana that we’ve been able to identify so far.

PSC: Have all the tapes been released under the FOIA? I ask because I know for a while there were some you couldn’t get because of Larry Layton’s trial.

FMMIII: Initially, most of the tapes were available for release. The FBI had to process and go through and listen to the tapes before they would release any of them, but there were 53 tapes that were withheld for a while. One tape that was initially withheld was called the “death tape,” and that’s the tape that Jim Jones recorded on November 18^th as the deaths in Jonestown were occurring. It’s a 45 minute tape and it’s heavily edited, but edited by Jim Jones himself and it records some of the things he’s saying and the one lone voice of dissent, Christine Miller, and of the other people in Jonestown. But yeah, there were 53 that were initially withheld, but they’re all out now. The other thing to mention is that the FBI reviewed all of the tapes with one thing in mind. All they were really interested in was finding the stuff that could be used in the trial against Larry Layton.

The term “serial killer” goes back to at least the 1930s when German police chief Ernst Gennat is said to have coined the term, but was reintroduced into the main stream in 1970s by former FBI Special Agent Robert Ressler. A serial killer is typically defined as someone who has killed 3 or more people, usually in a similar fashion, over a period of more than a month with a “cooling off” period. This type of killer differs from a mass murderer in that a mass murderer kills a group of people all at once, and differs from spree killers in that spree killers kill without any type of break in between killings. The FBI states that in addition to sexual gratification, serial killers kill because of anger, for thrills, financial gain or a sick form of attention seeking.

The typical serial killer is usually an Anglo male that posses a higher than normal IQ. They tend to work in menial jobs, probably as an attempt to seem “normal”. They were most likely abused emotionally, sexually or physically by a family member and as a result begin interests in voyeurism, fetishism and sadomasochistic pornography at an early age. They tend to be bullied at school and are involved in some sort of sadistic activity including the torture animals. More often than not, serial killers tend to develop a fantasy world to cope with all the bad things going on around them until the line between fantasy and reality is blurred to the point that they begin to act out whatever fantasy they have created for themselves.

Of course, those things aren’t always the case. Take Ted Bundy (the Campus Killer) and Jeffery Dahmer (The Milwaukee Monster) who described their childhoods as more or less normal, with no history of abuse. Even though it’s not often talked about much, around 22% of all serial killers are of African descent – like LA’s most prolific serial killer, Chester Turner, who killed 10 women and an unborn baby. You then have the extremely rare female serial killer – like serial killer Aileen Wuornos, the prostitute who killed 7 of her “johns”.

There are several theories that try to explain why people engage in serial killing. In one camp you have the “born, not made” theory which basically states that serial killers are born with the predisposition to kill, i.e., they are born sociopathic and can’t learn to operate within societal norms.

Another theory is Fractured Identity Syndrome which suggests that a social event, or series of events, during one’s childhood is the reason serial killers do what they do.

You then have the “military theory” which suggests that being in the military is the catalyst for serial killing. Jeffery Dahmer was actually in the Army for a short time where he served as a combat medic. It should be noted here that only 6% of all serial killers have a military background.

And even still, the Social process theory suggests that serial killers may turn to crime because of an inability to deal with peer pressure from family and friends.

So where do you stand on all of this? Why do you think serial killers kill? Throw me a comment down there and let me know what you think!

From the Pale Writer of the Apocalypse Piper Bayard – The Bayard & Holmes Free Speech Peace Initiative where her and her writing partner Holmes tells us just what we should do with the likes of the Westboro Baptist Church and Rev. Terry Jones.

Nancy Curteman shares the finer points of the level of detail you put into your mystery novel – Questions to Ask Before Adding Details to Your Mystery Novel.

Paranormal Author Jami Gold asks Do You Have A Muse? She does.

Are you a writer that doesn’t blog, but you still want to maintain a presence on the web? Social Media expert Kristen Lamb has an idea – Be A Blog Booster.

I’m a fat ass so I should take to heart more of her posts, but this past Tuesday I was featured on M.E. Anders Fit Mystique talking about the books I like and other writerly things. If you’re a fan of cults and/or fitness (yes, she is a master of blending those two topics) poke around for more great posts by M.E. She also did a guest spot for this blog a while back – check it out here.

Over at Maggie Madly Writing, she talks about being idle vs being busy and how we might need to slow down.

Manon Eileen wants to know how you feel about losing your emotions. Would you fight to get them back?

My writing partner Terrell Mims talks about the Glee villan Sue Sylvester over at his blog Terrell Mims University.

Lisa Killian’s blog just turned 6 months old. Go congratulate her and become eligible to receive:

• A critique on ANYTHING (blog post, pitch, story, poem) not to exceed 10,000 words
• A free evaluation of your blog and how [she] might be able to make it MORE AWESOME
• A guest post on [her] blog

And how about you check out these music selections that I’ve been digging this past week:

Check out Julie-O by Mark Summers – but played by the beat-boxing celloist Kevin Olusola. Beat-boxing aside, I like the way he plays it versus the actual composer…

And for something completely different Peach Plum Pear by Joanna Newsom. If you like that, pick up her album The Milk-Eyed Member. Her voice isn’t conventional, but I can dig it, can you?

Spontaneous human combustion, or SHC, is essentially what happens when a person bursts into flames for no clear reason, usually while sleeping. Upon further investigation no external heat source can be found, nor is there any evidence of an accelerant. The grisly scene afterwards is somewhat puzzling and is characterized by a noticeable lack of fire or smoke damage outside the small vicinity of the victim. The body itself, is usually reduced to mere bone fragments and ashes (with the exception of the feet and legs in cases where the victim was sitting in a chair).

There are many theories as to how this happens including the paranormal as well as natural phenomenon that is unknown to us.

What does this mean for the mystery writer looking for a way to dispose of a body?

The Wick Effect is one theory for SHC, which is the slow destruction of a body via the victim’s clothing and body fat. What that means is that the clothing, or bed sheets, acts as a wick and the body fat acts as a candle. Due to the long strings of hydrocarbons in fat cells, there is actually a lot of potential energy stored there, but it does need an external heat source to start, though. A match or a cigarette is usually enough to start this reaction. The flames during the wick effect are very hot and intense, but stay very close to the body, thus preventing a larger scale fire.

This effect has been tested and verified under lab circumstances using pigs as analogues and produces almost the same things you’d expect to see in an SHC case. It should be noted, however, that taking a match to someone’s clothing doesn’t always have a contained burn area. Occasionally during experiments, the fire would roar way out of control and consume the room or building it was being conducted in.

I presume that if one were trying to cover up a murder, short of totally cremating a body, this would work in a pinch to get rid of evidence, including the match and/or the cigarette used to start the fire. Because this effect can take a day or two to fully destroy a body, make sure your killer has enough time in a secluded area to dispose of the body in this fashion.

There are some important questions that need to be answered when you sit down to write out a bio for your victim.

How are the killer and victim connected?

Were they family, friends or otherwise?

Where did they meet?

These are just a few of the things that you, the writer, need to be aware of.

Another aspect to the victim that you might want to know about ahead of time is where and how they lived. This information could help show readers why the victim may have ended up as a victim in the first place as well as plant some clues as to who their killer is.

As far as the rest of the bio, it might help to know their hopes and dreams, stressors and fears and goals. Knowing these things could help lay some of the groundwork for clues, red herrings and plot devices. I’m not saying that you need to go über in-depth with a victim character, at least not the first victim. I also don’t think it’ll be totally necessary to know what kind of childhood they had or how their parents treated them, unless of course all of that pertains to your story.

What are some other things that might help in shaping the victim? Hell, do you even think it’s necessary to put this much effort into a character that’ll be dead at or near page 1? Why or why not?

Oh and no one has solved the Weekend Mystery yet. The winner will receive 2 hours of my time in helping set up a WordPress blog either on WordPress.com or your own domain – or even still, if you already have one of those, I’ll help you optimize it and offer a consult. I’m doing this to create some interest in the NF book I’m currently working on that has to do with that very thing. Until next time…