Last Dance, Last Chance

DANCE,
LAST CHANCE

Prologue
    A s I begin my twenty-first book and look back over three decades of writing about true-crime cases, I have come to a place where I am no longer surprised by the unusual requests I receive in phone calls, letters, and e-mails. Hundreds of people send me suggestions about cases for book topics, and a third of them actually offer me stories from their own lives. Predictably, most of them are victims’ survivors. Very rarely does a convicted killer’s family look for an author to write a book. Many long-time readers can spot the characteristics I look for in a criminal case, and I appreciate that, but I can choose only a small percentage of the suggestions presented to me. Try as I might, I can write only two books a year. Back when I was the Northwest correspondent for True Detective magazine, her four sister magazines, and the Justice Stories in the New York Daily News, I could report on many more cases. My accounts were much shorter, naturally, but I was able to write two crime stories every week.
    Fortunately, I saved copies of all of them, and some stand out sharply in my memory. In the true-crime files that follow, I came to know many of the people involved very well. Sometimes I knew them before the path to crime escalated to violence, and sometimes it was long after. The victims’ parents or siblings often became my friends through my membership in our Washington State support group: Families and Friends of Victims of Violent Crimes and Missing Persons. For twenty years I was a familiar visitor in various homicide units from Seattle, Washington, north to Bellingham, and south to Eugene, Oregon. The detectives I met shared their investigative techniques and their gut feelings about murder with me.
    This book is different from all the others. To my great surprise, in the long title case— Last Dance, Last Chance —I heard from both the would-be killer and the victim, albeit two years apart. I probably wouldn’t have remembered the first call from the convicted man if an alert reader hadn’t sent me an e-mail. She wanted to tell me about a story in her city that she thought would make an interesting book. It sounded interesting—even more interesting when she gave me the name of the accused, which sounded vaguely familiar. I dug deep into a box of newspaper clippings, letters, and my own notes scribbled on fading yellow legal pads and found something that matched my recall. I finally located what I sought—notes on a phone call from a physician in Buffalo, New York. He had called to persuade me to write a book that would unveil the shabby treatment he felt he had received from the New York State Department of Health. They had taken away his license to practice medicine for reasons, he said, that were entirely prejudicial.
    I remember that he was very well-spoken, with a deep authoritative voice, and that I felt some sympathy for him as he told me his life was in ashes. I explained to him that I wasn’t an investigative reporter and didn’t write the kind of book he wanted. I suggested that he contact a reporter in Buffalo who might be interested in exposing the roots of a medical scandal.
    He seemed to understand, and he even introduced me to his wife, who was listening on an extension. Although he knew I couldn’t write his book for him, he insisted on sending me the biography his wife had written about his tragedy. A few days later, I mailed him the eight-page handout I have put together for aspiring writers. He sent me the manuscript of his biography, which was more than a hundred pages long, single-spaced, and full of details about his life, especially about his career in medicine and its disastrous ending. Titled M.D.: Mass Destruction and written from the point of view of the doctor’s wife, the manuscript was ponderous, although the spelling and grammar were correct. His wife obviously idolized the doctor, and she went on for chapter after chapter about how wonderful and kind he was, how brilliant and dedicated. The story wasn’t for me, and I have to admit that I didn’t read it all: it was overwritten, overwrought, and very one-sided.
    It wasn’t a true crime case at all. At most, it dealt with civil matters and possible medical malpractice, and I had a book deadline to meet. I was so involved with writing The End of the Dream that I promptly forgot all about the New York doctor.
    If someone had asked me six months later the name of the Buffalo physician who