Empty Promises

rush of déjà vu, I found myself in the same courtrooms I’d visited years ago, where nothing but the faces had changed. After thirty years, a certain philosophy has burned itself into my mind: Bereft of honesty, empathy, trust, concern for other human beings, and any sense of guilt, there are those among us who seem destined to commit the kinds of crimes that make headlines. There are certain rules of human interaction that, when broken, will lead to tragedy, if not violence. The era in which we live doesn’t change that. But sometimes we can only understand the people who break these rules with the clear vision that comes with hindsight.
    Then we can see that long before relationships escalated to a point where murder was committed, there were lies. There are people, both men and women, who pretend to be someone they are not. They make commitments, agreements, assurances, pledges, and vows—promises—to get what they want. When they abuse the trust of those who believe in them, those empty promises often lead to violent death.
    This is the seventh volume of the crime files series I began in 1993. Empty Promises focuses on cases where all manner of victims were betrayed by killers who were adept at making pledges that they never intended to honor. The naïveté of the victims often led to chilling endgames. As I looked for cases for this volume, I wasn’t surprised to find an inordinate number of homicides that were spawned by broken love affairs, where one partner “loved” too much. I found many hollow vows made to victims who were kind and trusting—so trusting that their lives ended at the hands of the devious schemers who ensnared them. For many, the promises were implicit in a friendly smile. Innocents—who failed to recognize the danger in those smiles—died.
    Two disturbing categories of homicide keep appearing in the letters and calls I receive from readers and detectives. One has, I fear, always been with us and is finally surfacing because the victims are no longer ashamed to come forward to ask for help. Many years ago I responded to domestic violence calls when I was a policewoman, but there was nowhere for battered women to go for help in those days. Even though there are now shelters and help, many women live with abuse, both mental and physical, until it is too late. The second murder genre that has accelerated alarmingly in the last decade may well reflect the violent images our children are routinely exposed to: homicides committed by teenagers. Cases representative of each category appear in this volume.
    I often say that what real people do can be so heroic, bizarre, savage, and completely unpredictable that no fiction writer could have pulled it out of her imagination. The characters in Empty Promises won’t disappoint you as you read their incredible stories.
    As many of you know, in the seventies and eighties my territory as a correspondent for five fact-detective magazines was the Northwest: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and western Montana. In my fifteen years as a stringer, I wrote about the same detectives from big-city police departments dozens of times. Readers of my true-crime files may recognize the names of these investigators. The names are the same; the cases are unique. If I were producing a television series, it would be along the lines of NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life on the Street , and Hill Street Blues. But the series would be called Seattle: Murder in the Emerald City or Portland: Cops and Roses. Another, far more important, difference would be that every one of my cases would be absolutely true.
    Most of the stories in this collection are companion pieces. They show slightly different views of similar motivation on the part of the killers. The first book-length case deals with the bleak mystery of wives and mothers who vanish inexplicably from their homes. In “Empty Promises” you will learn about a lovely young woman, trapped and seduced by a world that was completely alien to the atmosphere in which she was raised. Her marriage was a nightmare. It’s necessary only to turn that story a few degrees to find a tragically similar puzzle.
    “Bitter Lake” and “Young Love” demonstrate that not being loved at all can be preferable—and much safer—than being loved too much.
    “Love and Insurance” and “The Gentler Sex” seem at first to be quite different from one another. And yet they both deal with charming con artists who actually seem to savor the