South Dakota author Jim Reese's "Coming to a Neighborhood Near You" is part memoir and part deeply researched exploration into the impacts of crime and punishment.
He draws from his experiences growing up in Omaha in the shadow of a serial killer and losing a high school friend to intimate partner violence.
He also discusses his time teaching writing workshops in prison, including students who committed murder.
"Coming to a Neighborhood Near You" is coming out in September 2025.
Read the essay that inspired the book below.
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How to Become a True-Crime Writer
—for Lorrie Moore
by Jim Reese
It’s 1984. You are only eleven years old. You haven’t left the block in over a year. In fact, you’ll be grounded if you get out of earshot of your father’s high-pitched whistle to come home when the streetlights turn on. You know not to pedal too far down your sunny street. You have been told to Never talk to strangers! over and over. This is all part of growing up, right? You don’t know you are a victim of crime. You don’t even understand how to articulate this thing—these voices that consume thoughts and dreams. So, forget. Life wasn’t always like this. Trying to forget is important. Fearing can be important, too, but you won’t understand why for quite some time.
Two years ago, safety never seemed to be a concern. If a stranger appeared on Chandler Street, he was usually selling something. No one made it from Harrison all the way up Highland Boulevard and pretended to be lost. Your home is where the sidewalk ends. Aside from trucker horns on I-80, or an occasional kid on some YZ-80 burning tracks in dirt fields, there was a real sense of peace and normalcy. People turned their porch lights on at night. There were summer block parties—rows of lawn chairs—cheer. This was middle-class life; it was picturesque. Then, the shadow of American serial killer John Joubert, was cast across your bright and luxurious life.
For two years, you have feared this thing—a caricature you’ve seen on the news. None of us can forget the police crime sketch in the newspapers, missing children’s pictures on milk cartons. This gruesome cartoon profile of a man with his blue skull-cap tight around his head—his flannel shirt. It was your neck of the city he did this in, and the neighborhood wanted it back.
John Joubert is apprehended for kidnapping and killing two kids in the same part of Omaha where you live. Joubert will be executed for his crimes in twelve more years. You’ve been silently talking to him for a while now. Questioning him. What possesses a man to mutilate young boys? You scream at him—although no one can hear you. He got into your head and never left. Why do you keep doing this to yourself? Just forget it. Remember—forgetting is important.
One of his twelve-year-old victims was found in his undershorts, stabbed, throat slashed on Giles Road, which runs behind your house. Court records would later report the gruesome details on one of his victim’s body—“the full length and breadth of his chest and abdomen was covered with what looked like a representation of a large plant, including the stem and seven leaves. This figure appeared to have been rather carefully and deliberately carved into the skin and flesh with a sharp knife.”[i]
Joubert was stationed at Offutt Air Force base and worked as a radar technician. The mutilated bodies of Danny Joe Eberle and Christopher Walden were found in Sarpy County. In the article, “Inside the Chilling Crimes Of John Joubert, The Eagle Scout Who Became A Serial Killer” author Marco Margaritoff writes, “When asked if he would kill again, Joubert stated quite plainly that he was grateful to have been caught as he undoubtedly would have. ‘That’s my big worry,’ said Joubert. ‘It’s scaring me quite a bit, yes.’ Charged with two counts of first-degree murder on Jan. 12, 1984, he pleaded not guilty before changing his mind.”[ii]
Joubert volunteered as a Boy Scout troop leader and used his position to lure and torture young boys. You are the same age as the victims. If you stand on the same 12’x12’ wooden deck that all the neighbors have, you can see Giles Road, which is a tiny gravel ribbon you can make out through the weeping willow tree in your backyard. At the yard’s edge, the rows of the manicured lawn disappear into a cornfield—a place where you used to run and hide. Now you only travel to the edge of the deck. Out there, over the field, south of the interstate, somewhere on that road, is where they found the mutilated bodies. Your friends used to come over and play football in the backyard. Now the games have moved a block away.
Some nights, thirty years later, you still see him so clearly with your eyes closed tight. You curl in a fetal position and stare at your bedroom window shades. All the fears you never knew how to speak about or articulate back then have manifested in behaviors other people might find neurotic or at least strange. You are very aware of evil. You check around corners, underneath beds, double-check bolt locks, alarms. You circle the interior of the house, check on the girls. It has become a natural act—routine. There’s not a three-hour window that goes by that you are not up listening. You are ready for any intruder. John Joubert is the first real life monster you fear.
Six years after Joubert is taken off the streets of Omaha, a second horror blooms, suffocates a space in your mind. Christina O’Day, a high-school friend, is raped and murdered by a classmate who used to help you with your math homework in middle-school. Her killer X’s actions somehow become a part of you, a part of so many others who knew her, who danced with her, and whose lives were touched by her. You can’t stop re-watching him pick her up from school. Over and over, you’ve imagined stopping his low-riding Camero and helping her get out. But sounding an alarm at sixteen is lame man—mind you own business. You keep wishing you had warned her.
Terror like this is like a red-hot branding iron—it scalds safety, sizzles beneath the skin, to the bone—it casts an over-exposed film of “what if’ onto forever—into the unknown. It claims a part of you—names you—but you will never be certain what to call it. Fear and evil will never be the right words. What is this guilt you fear? Guilt of emotions and rage? You can barely speak to your friends about Christina’s murder. No one knows what to say. And it’s not cool anyway to show your emotions—so keep them to yourself. Write ‘em down if you have to. Or just let it go. She wasn’t your girlfriend. She was just a friend. And now you know, friends can be murdered. What kind of thinking is any of this?
The newspaper reported over 700 people at her funeral. You have to sit in some hall by the church and watch it all on a teleprompter. You get up at the end and walk past the stilled, zoned-out and tear-stained faces of classmates. Look across the parking lot at the sea of mourners. Spot some of the guys X hung out with before he dropped out. They are trying to act cool, smoking their cigarettes, flicking ashes, glancing up at the church and away again. They are smiling. One of them pinches his cigarette, takes a drag and blows smoke rings. You know they know where X is hiding. She has been brutally murdered and they are more worried about their image. Worried about their little clique.
Leave the funeral with one of your good friends. You want desperately to get revenge—confront those who are blowing smoke rings. “All of this is wrong. They know where he is. They know,” you say.
X has been questioned by police and released. He will disappear for weeks and then will finally be arrested. You can’t think of the right words to describe the tension and sorrow you feel today and weeks to come. It is all so strange. Christina’s death seems to tamper any immediate violence down; however, you and your classmates are all frightened. Who could be next? And for what? Dating the wrong person?
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Christina is driving to go dance. You joke—know how much she likes your company at the club because you are experienced; you gave break dancing lessons in fifth grade for fifty cents. Hip Hop Don’t Stop! You laugh and smile. Every ounce of you aches to be Kevin Bacon and you dream of Hollywood endings. She isn’t talking of her soon-to-be murderer as ex-boyfriend, or even mentioning his name. No point. These high school flings. How you learn a little bit about yourself and what you want in life from all your relationships. How to improve your flaws. How to know what to avoid. She is driving on 108th Street. This you are certain about. You think. You question it all because years later your memory paints a maroon two-door hatchback, but on the news, in the footage of Christina’s car being pulled out of the river, it is green.
Both of you have on matching Z Cavaricci pants. Your shirts button to the neck. Long wavy hair. You are not afraid to be yourself in a large cement room in Omaha. The DJ plays your requests. The coolness of youth, trying hard to find identities with an even larger group of strangers. Is it the lust of others? That you want to find love for the first time? Or, is it that you can just be yourself? New Order’s “Blue Monday”, The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven”—the beginning of club techno’s bombastic urge. With grunge on your horizon all of this will consume your life, but not hers. It’s dusk. That urgency to be free from parental constraint—rules—real jobs that are coming whether you want them or not—your heavy and gorgeous life. You look over at Christina with what? Admiration? Infatuation? You are more confident—sitting shotgun in a car, not in the backseat on the hump. Perfume in the air. Too much Polo cologne. There’s no pretending to be anyone else—a helpless romantic, a ball of hard-wired nerves.
You are friends. Maybe the first time you realize a guy and girl can be. What are the facts of Christina’s life? You know very little outside this dance club and your conversations in the hall at school. You’ve seen her getting in X’s low-riding Camaro. Both of them in the front seats, all wrong. Christina is a year older and makes you feel a year older, too. You sing along to your favorite songs.
Keep asking yourself, do you have the authority to write Christina’s story? Doubt if you are good enough to tell it. Tamper it down. Feel it rise. Push it back down. You aren’t good enough. You didn’t know her enough. You aren’t hurt enough. Not like the little girl in the house who Christina was babysitting—who was trapped in a room listening and living through the hours of Christina’s rape, torture and murder by two men. You will never understand her father’s hurt. Her mother’s hurt. You were just a friend she went dancing with. You are way down on that list. Learn to doubt your own loss and question the authenticity of your own grief and feelings over all of it. Feel guilty for having these feelings. Run from them. Forget about them. Remember, forgetting is important. But you can’t forget how someone takes her life. How you miss all the things you knew about Christina. How her murder changed everyone. How you will never feel safe again.
You are cruising. Christina driving. Singing along to the songs on the mix tape: You, Strange as angels…You’re just like a dream… You are looking over—that smile—the right dimple—the sun bright in your eyes, casting a glow around a silhouette—bear-claw bangs—the last spotlight. You look out the passenger window, turn back and you are both gone. This is where the memory stops.
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You pluck away at your acoustic Alvarez. It’s a means of escape—a way to dream. You write a song called Little Miss Miranda with a chorus refrain, “Anything you say can and will be used against you.” Isn’t that clever? The criminality of love already piercing into your psyche. You’ve had your heart stolen and broken already. But don’t kid yourself, you’ve broken hearts, too. Deep down inside, you’d love to write a poem for someone special. You will ache for it the next few years—fall in and out of relationships. You’ve heard love is a crime. What is it with metaphors? Your friend was murdered. No one speaks about it. You don’t know how to speak about it. You are starting to realize how people are a part of your life and then they vanish—they quit calling your teen-line or are gone forever. Loss is something that begins to manifest in your life. As an only child, you attach yourself so easily to people. You trust them although trust—good and evil—are already shards of broken glass in your life. It’s hard to make sense of any of it. You are only seventeen, you think you know everything, but you don’t. What you have decided is you will move away as soon as you are able. College anywhere away from this city will be your escape. You’ve daydreamed about community and the safety of small towns that you’ve seen on TV and read about in books. You wind up in one with a population less than 10,000 people. No matter how far you run, it’s not far enough. Joubert—X—they’re still lurking in your head.
In college you become a criminal justice major. This sounds fascinating. Maybe you can become a detective. You can finally learn why criminals do what they do. You can’t forget these crimes; so quietly obsess how these things could happen. Keep asking why? Is everyone capable of murder? Were these men born evil? Could you have stopped any of this? In 1992 the psychological thriller Silence of the Lambs will win the Big Five Academy Awards for producing, directing, screenwriting, best actor and best actress. The movie is a fictional portrayal—an amalgamation of serial killers. There have been several times since its release that you and your friends have said, “It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it’s told.”—and other memorable lines from the flick. It becomes so much of the culture—these character monologues, as gruesome as they are, become jokes. You need laughter to compensate for the horrendous one-liners. It eases the terror that lingers long after credits roll.
It is a movie you re-watch time and time again and one that you never forget. All criminals are comparable to Hannibal Lecter, to Joubert, to the delinquent in high school who raped and killed Christina, your friend, whom you won’t be going dancing with ever again. Jodi Foster reminds you of Christina. They even look similar. Jodi Foster who tries to save these women who have been mutilated and murdered. You know it’s a movie, but you are so naïve. The facts of your life and the fictions of film weave themselves into an internal dialogue and chatter that seldom turns off.
Second semester, where the retired cop turned instructor locks the door if you aren’t on time at 8:00AM—the class you begin to measure blood-splatter in—seems a bit much. You don’t have the stomach for it. Not yet. Change majors. A few times. Wind up in a college newsroom. In time, you become co-editor-in-chief, along with a much brighter and more articulate writer. Your curiosity is far more infectious, unconventional and daring depending on your focus.
As a novice writer you are picking up pieces here and there but aren’t putting in the work. You spend a lot of time talking about what you want to do. Gonzo journalism is what you are learning, reading about and trying to mimic as you begin your college career as a newspaper editor. Idolize Hunter S. Thompson. You search out his work in Rolling Stone. You re-read and dog-ear Fear and Loathing. “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Live this motto. Live the story. You want to write about tattoos? Go get one and report firsthand how it feels instead of just observing someone drawing on someone else’s skin. Where does the gonzo—the immersion into the story—end? This is a bigger question you will continue to ask yourself for years to come.
Your journalism professor gives you a lot of free rein, encouragement, and answers innumerable phone calls from administrators when you and the other staff investigate and write about serious issues in a small conservative town in Nebraska. You and the staff write about progressive issues. He defends you because you are seeking the truth. He encourages your excitement and intensity to dig deeper. With this support the idea of gonzo and your shameless self-promotion heightens. You equate gonzo to mean “me, me, me”. You are recognized on campus—not because of your guitar or the band you play in but because you have written words that make people feel something. Just you. You aren’t relying on others to get your message across. You fall for it. You love it. You abandon the story’s focus and tailor it to tell your story. You like to have your picture taken with the subjects you are interviewing. You meet the famous people that come to campus and feel that this is the ticket to your own fame. Your hero Hunter S. Thompson is an enigma, and you feel as if you could become one, too. Excessive praise will follow. You are true to your ego but haven’t figured out what a true writer is. During so much of this dreaming, writing and disillusionment something else happens. You also learn how crucial investigating a story can be.
You want to uncover a rape that happened and the lack of security on campus? Grab a crowbar and break into a manhole, photograph all the open doors to administrative buildings—open doors to offices. See how the tunnels lead to most dorms on campus, too. This is how the perpetrator entered the women’s building. No one comes to arrest you for breaking and entering. No security meets you at the manhole entrance when you resurface forty-five minutes later. Go down in the tunnels again, almost aching to get caught. No one comes for you just like no one heard a thing.
The next day you notify campus security about the lack of protected doors on campus. They do not give you a quote for your story. They tell you to call them back in five minutes. They advise against running the piece before you have the “facts.” Run the story above the fold and in twenty-four hours (as administrators threaten to kick you out of college) notice how all the manholes on campus have new secured locks on them.
Your journalism professor tells you if the college tries to kick you out of school for writing an investigative news story about a woman who was raped on campus, you can sue the college for a lot of money. You like the word “investigative.” It feels powerful.
You and another reporter will follow the accused for months as authorities change their minds about whether they should press charges or not. He’s a football player with a bright future ahead of him. And really it’s, “He said versus she said, isn’t it? Where’s the physical proof?”
Investigating and writing this story has been an eye-opener. You feel as if your writing, for the first time, has helped save lives. Undoubtedly, what you have done has made things safer. You feel as if you have given voice to the woman who was raped and no longer feels safe at school—a person who left this small-town American college and will never return. You fight back for someone who feels powerless. You couldn’t save your friend in high school—but this is proof that your words can help save people in the future. You don’t have much, you are still a college student, after all. But you have discovered your true voice—and no one can take it from you.
A year later, you will win a first-place award for investigative reporting from the Nebraska Collegiate Media Association. It will come at a time when you are flat broke, have a college degree, and are wondering if writing is a fit profession for a man. You wouldn’t know because you sort mail in a warehouse. There are not many editing and writing jobs in Nebraska with your minimal experience. The award is enough to keep you going. To realize you are hungry. You scribble anecdotes and stanzas on mail flats and return receipts. Witness what is going on around you. You care more about the greater good than others. With no money it’s hard to realize your voice can help make positive change. But you see a faint glowing bulb ahead. Return to school and earn a PhD.
During all of this time, you need to keep writing and publishing poems. You need to gain lived experience and write your first book of narrative poetry. You need to begin teaching at a college. Because of your publishing and editing experience, get yourself asked to start a creative writing program at the federal prison in the city where you teach; jump at the chance. Begin gathering information for a book. Tell yourself this will only take a year. You have little knowledge how our prisons work—the forces at play—the cash-cow this system is. You’ve always assumed prison is where people learn and come to terms with their misdirected decisions. You equate most prisoners with X, who raped and murdered your friend Christina in high school.
You are beginning to listen—a craft every good writer should know by heart. It’s a struggle because you feel the more you talk about your interests, your ideas, that the story will magically appear. You still aren’t working hard enough. Then you discover Charles Bowden. He has written an article for Harper’s Magazine called ‘The sicario: A Juarez hit man speaks”. This is what a true crime writer looks like. This is what immersion in the story—not the self—what gonzo really is. You don’t know it, but this is what you will model your career after. You realize this is what you must do in your own way.
The brutal conflict escalated on the border and reporters Charles Bowden and Bill Conroy were engulfed in it when then Mexican president Felipe Calderón declared a war against the drug cartels days after taking office. There have been nearly 500,000 murders in Mexico since 2006 when Calderón professed this—and an additional 100,000 victims have been “disappeared,” most since 2006, many likely buried in mass graves like the one discovered in the backyard of the “House of Death” in Juarez. Calderón’s former Secretary of Public Security is caught and convicted in early 2023 for working with and taking bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel—the evil he had sworn to protect innocent Mexican citizens from.
According to Amnesty International, Approximately 20% of the global prison population is detained for a drug-related offence.[iii] The drug war? There’s that term again. All you know about that is the “This is your brain on drugs” public service announcement on television—the crack of the egg and then the frying of that egg in a black cast-iron skillet. You also learn a lot of the men in your prison classes are in for drug-related crimes.
You meet Bowden and become friends. You devour his work. You ask him lots of questions. You begin to see the bigger picture. You ask yourself, Why is this human rights crisis allowed to continue? Like Bowden writes, it’s because drugs are illegal. Criminalizing drugs makes them very fulfilling, and people must weigh the reward against the risk of arrest. By de-criminalizing or making drugs legal then we can study ways to fight addiction, instead of sending all “drug criminals” to prison. Bowden is encouraging readers to look at the root of problems to fix them. Now that would be a humane thing to do and it would overhaul our entire approach to the way we look at things, run our justice and medical systems, and treat all people—the wealthy, middle-class and the poor.
You read, read, read. You publish some of Bowden’s and his partner Molly Molloy’s essays in the college literary journal you edit. Even with a PhD, and more experience, when you try and wrap your head around what this enormous “war” has become, it feels out of your wheelhouse.
Lose your ego and quit bragging about training in arts programs in prisons like San Quentin. After a few more years of intense study and immersion, learn what our war on drugs—the war on race and the poor—really is. Learn from Bowden that criminals could be evil but also, importantly, human. You can’t make sense of it all but you have worked with men in prison who fought back—murdered to save their own lives from the abuse they were forced to endure. Fight or flight. ACE’s. Adverse Childhood Experiences. You continue asking questions. Does being a victim of crime justify crime? You realize your passion for writing—really what a true writer is. Your interest in why criminals do what they do is coming full circle. Don’t stop asking, why?
Continue to write poetry about men who are incarcerated and understand more and more about what led some of them to these jails and prisons. Poverty, A way out. Addiction. ACE’s. Evil. Abuse. Evil? Scribble everything down. Find the moleskin notebooks they let you take into San Quentin that first year. Re-read every quote. Write more than poems. You have to try and piece this puzzle together. This must be prose. What is the narrative arc? Is there ever a climax to true crime?
A few years later you are in another city presenting at a book festival and you make a point to go and listen to a recent Edgar Award winner. His details and description are very good. You are captivated by his honesty in admitting he doesn’t know a lot about crime. After his presentation you see him walking in a banquet room, riding a high after the day’s events. You introduce yourself. Tell him you enjoyed his reading and talk on craft. “Oh, you are that prison writer. I totally have to pick your brain to find out what criminals are really like,” he says. That is the third time a famous crime writer has said that to you.
Your poems are turning into prose. With the shift in genres your audience has grown much larger. Like most writers, you want your voice to reach as many people as possible. You want the “high” of the Edgar-Award winner. Something else is developing and you can’t put your finger on it, but gradually you realize, it’s you. This is one of your realizations. After some misdirected decisions, you could be just like so many people you are helping behind bars.
You ask a lot of questions and learn more and more about trauma and crime. You learn about secondary victims. When a murder occurs there’s a fear and paranoia, an awakening to atrocity among everyone whose life touched the victims in any way. You are beginning to piece the puzzles together—crime, murder, the war on drugs. You are beginning to understand that you were awakened to atrocity long before you knew there was such a thing, and that brutality silences—scares—unvoices, until you learn to speak back to it. The stark white lightning of reality. This happened—but now you understand it.
If it bleeds it leads. You’ve heard this phrase before. You wonder about intention versus attention, all the media’s devotion to crime. The public has this It doesn’t affect me attitude when it comes to prisoners, when, in reality, most all of us are guilty of crime, petty or not. You know you’ve committed crimes yourself—just like everyone. We are all criminals.[iv] You feel compelled—even a little obligated, to tell society what you are learning because crime doesn’t just affect the criminal and victim—violence spreads to families and communities. Victimhood, primary and secondary victims, the repercussions of crime, trickle into the fabric of our being. Friends, lovers, and family lose their voice—have it stolen from them forever or if they are lucky and live, are too afraid to talk. You must speak to this—speak to each other. How else do you move forward?
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Crime fiction is glamorized—you know this. There’s always a journey—a before and after. There’s always suspense. Thrill. A wild ride. A climax. There are industries devoted to it. Millions of fans turn on, tune in and watch, listen and read these stories. But in real life, there’s not always a resolution. There’s not always a satisfying ending. People are left with nebulous feelings. What you don’t always hear about are the victims. But you are starting to. That is the intrigue with documentaries, with true-crime podcasts, with unsolved cases. You are starting to see the realities, and in some cases, you can watch it as it unfolds through real-time texts, live surveillance, recorded videos and police bodycams. The problem is, some people in the industry are insulated from its reality. And it is an industry—a cash cow—with no real incentive to change things for the better. Why? Because there’s no money in rehabilitation.
You also have to realize there are 1,800 state and federal correctional facilities and 3,200 local and county jails, according to Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post. To put these figures in context, there are slightly more jails and prisons in the U.S.—5,000 plus—than there are degree-granting colleges and universities. In many parts of America, particularly the south, more people live in prisons than on college campuses.[v]
2016 and you work at two prisons within a fifty-mile radius of your house. Both prisons were colleges less than forty years ago. Each year the United States spends billions on criminal justice but doesn’t seem to be spending near enough on rehabilitation and education behind bars. In the small city where you live, listen as a local leans back from his beer and asks, “Why should we care about what you are doing? Waste of my tax money.”
According to a bi-partisan RAND Social and Economic Well-Being study, every dollar spent on prison education saves taxpayers $5 on recidivism costs.[vi] If you are just worried about your “tax-dollars”, this is why education matters. This is why you should care.
According to the United States Department of Justice, “More than 650,000 ex-offenders are released from prison every year, and studies show that approximately two-thirds will likely be rearrested within three years of release. The high volume of returnees is a reflection on the tremendous growth in the U.S. prison population during the past 30 years. For the communities to which most former prisoners return (communities which are often impoverished and disenfranchised neighborhoods with few social supports and persistently high crime rates), the release of ex-offenders represents a variety of challenges.”[vii]
You are eating lunch with a friend, Bob, a Philly transplant who has been a local in your city longer than you have been alive. He’s the former baseball coach at the university where you teach, the former interim dean of the university for whom they named the baseball field. He’s a smart man and a good coach. He understands that life, just like baseball, is a game of failure more often than not. Most times you go to bat you aren’t a success. You say, “I wish I had a quick comeback for people who ask me why I do this work at the prisons.” He doesn’t blink an eye and says, “If we all aren’t trying to chip away at the iceberg, what’s our alternative?”[viii]
Part of being a writer is that you stew and worry. It’s in the job description. Anxious. Paranoid. Abrasive. Critical. Witty. Kind. Self-effacing and self-centered. You ask yourself; can you tell the story? Do you have the right to? You were just friends who went dancing. You didn’t date each other—you never went to her house. Met her family. Why you? The one who has worked in prisons—a cushy camp and maximum-security penitentiaries—for a decade and a half. Why not you? You’ve become an advocate. When trauma happens, you should not turn the other way or try and suppress it. You need to listen to others and learn. Your job is to report.
For fourteen years you’ve helped men and women dig deep to tell their stories. You have listened and encouraged them to share their feelings, and in doing so that has made a difference to them and those in class. You can’t guarantee they are going to be released and become changed people, but for a time, they wrote their wrongs—their fears, their failures—their hopes for a better life. It’s the first step in many ways.
“Approximately 77 million Americans, or 1 in every 3 adults, have a criminal record. A criminal record—which can be an arrest record, criminal charges, or a conviction—creates barriers to jobs, occupational licensing, housing, and higher education opportunities.”[ix] You have a response now to, “Lock ‘em up and throw away the key.”
Time and time again you learn that “criminals” or “inmates” have been victims themselves and that is what drove them to commit their crime. Being a victim does not excuse becoming a criminal. Your uncertainty, your conundrum about X, Christina’s murderer, is beside the point. You do not want to talk to the person who killed your friend. You understand that some people want gory details. Why he did what he did. There’s no way to justify his premeditated murder. What you have learned and what this all means is that you are speaking for “all victims”—even “criminals” because they are all human beings and deserve mercy. And “mercy” doesn’t necessarily mean everyone should go free. But everyone can be treated humanely and with empathy.
You want to believe, at your core, X is better than the worst act he committed. However, you are not the judge and jury. Nor should you pretend to be. His reconciliation with his crime is on him. At first, you felt strange writing about Christina’s murder and how it affected your community, but not anymore. You arrived here for a reason. Your work in prisons may have been happenstance or perhaps it was karma—but you know your voice is not. The work you’ve done is not easy work. Give yourself a break. Be proud. This is the truth, as you’ve come to know it. This is true writing.
You need to speak to crime and how it controls people. If you do not, nothing changes. You suspect you are not the only one who never knew how to deal with Christina’s murder—your feelings—your rage and fear. The idea of safety was lost forever. Or so you thought. You are hyper-vigilant. You are always on the lookout. Prepared, like most investigative reporters should be. You are also willing to help—and have helped, killers.
If you don’t find ways to rehabilitate those who victimize primary and secondary victims—you’re going to continue to relive these atrocities—you will continue to bring them back to your neighborhoods and communities where criminals will continue to infect you with victimhood, with their misplaced guilt—their misplaced regrets, distress, undigested life material and all of the other mysteries that remain unresolved and which can’t be answered.
Whether fact or fiction—news or Netflix, all this growing exposure usually concentrates on the villain and the police—seldom the victim of crime. In the news, on shows, documentaries or books you hear partial stories. What happens after the blood is dry—who cleans up the crime scene? This is not Pulp Fiction—Harvey Keitel does not magically appear as “The Wolf” and clean the scene. Families are the ones left who pick up the pieces, who scrub the blood from the carpet. There are no crime-scene-cleaners to call—not in real life. You don’t hear about the victim’s fear and dread.
If the villain is prosperous, they are seen as a success in the story—remember Breaking Bad? If they are caught the police become the heroes. The victims are seldom successful protagonists. And what are you learning from this formula of storytelling? You are usually fed one side (the detective or the criminal)—not both sides. Telling a partial story is a version of fiction, too.
But how much of any story do you know for certain? How many complete stories can be told? As you try your best to be true to your subjects and ask as many questions as you can—as you peel off layers of what you perceive to be your own fictionalized glory and focus more on the complex subjects and their crimes—you realize how true your writing can be.
As you work to try and wrap your head around what evil looks like, and interview and speak about Christina’s murder, you come to understand that you’d like to see as many people rehabilitated as possible. Like most advocates, you agree that looking into the eyes of criminals to see them as human beings is more important than the other expression—eye for an eye.
There will never be a decisively indicative test about what true evil is. What your personal desire is for X, doesn’t matter. You are not the judge. When questioned about the topic now you can simply answer, this is why people like me, who have been affected by crimes like murder, aren’t making life-without-parole decisions.
And you’ve come to this realization because you listened. You showed experts how these emotions of yours really left you puzzled and it was a personal need to get to the bottom of it. You assumed that if you could define evil—could figure out why X killed your friend then you’d have the answers you needed and could move on. But that’s not what happened at all. You’ve come to understand a whole lot more about yourself and the emotions you rightly are free to have. An unanswerable quest has turned into a learning experience—one you can share with others.
You learn a lot about trauma and how it affects everyone, how much it must have affected others who were in your high school. What a crime like Christina’s murder has done to Beth Ann, the little girl in the house where the murder happened, and to Christina’s family, is indescribable. When things like this happen in your life, you are told to talk with a counselor, talk with friends and family, and then to move on. As a person who has spent some time in counseling offices, you can now share with others that you don’t have to move on—but apply what you have learned—from silence to voice—from discounting your fear and confusion to realizing your role. Your friend’s murder and a serial killer’s presence are part of you and always will be. Take that knowledge, apply it in the world and help others. Stay with the criminals and rehabilitate all of them whether all of them deserve to be released. You must stay with the victims—you must, for all communities that exist on both sides of razor wire. When trauma affects you, you should not turn the other way or try and suppress it. You need to listen to others and learn. After all, most people are both criminal and victim, to one extent or the other.
For years you’ve helped men and women dig deep to tell their stories. You have listened to and encouraged them to share their feelings, and in doing so that has made a difference to them and those in class. You can’t guarantee they are going to be released and be changed people, but for a time they learned to use their voice, they wrote their wrongs—their fears, their failures—their hopes for a better life. It’s the first step for many.
You are giving voice to victims who are not here to speak for themselves. You are not afraid. You’ve gotten as close as you can, and are willing to get to, some criminals. You will speak about the repercussions of crime. The writing must always be about discovery, not display. This is true crime writing. This is what you do.
[i] https://law.justia.com/cases/nebraska/supreme-court/1986/843-8.html
[ii] https://allthatsinteresting.com/john-joubert
[iii] https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/drug-policy-reform/
[iv] https://www.weareallcriminals.org/
[v] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/01/06/the-u-s-has-more-jails-than-colleges-heres-a-map-of-where-those-prisoners-live/
[vi] https://www.rand.org/well-being/justice-policy/portfolios/correctional-education/policy-impact.html
[vii] https://www.justice.gov/archive/fbci/progmenu_reentry.html#:~:text=Over%2010%2C000%20ex%2Dprisoners%20are,within%20three%20years%20of%20release.
[viii] Jim Reese, Bone Chalk, Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2020. (A few brief passages from the essays “Never Talk to Strangers” and “Degrees of Love” reprinted with permission.)
[ix] https://www.ncsl.org/civil-and-criminal-justice/criminal-records-and-reentry-toolkit#:~:text=Approximately%2077%20million%20Americans%2C%20or,housing%2C%20and%20higher%20education%20opportunities.
Author bio
Jim Reese’s latest book is Coming to a Neighborhood near You—the Repercussions of Crime and Punishment (Potomac Books Sept. 2025), which draws on his extensive work with both the Federal Bureau of Prisons and South Dakota Department of Corrections. He spent fourteen years in residency for the National Endowment for Arts’ interagency initiative with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, where he established Yankton Federal Prison Camp’s first creative writing and publishing workshop. Reese is the author of eight books, including the nonfiction collection Bone Chalk, and has received several awards for his writing and public service. For more information visit: www.jimreese.org