TAYLOR'S HOLE IN THE WEB

LUGGAGE BY KROGER

 

Since its publication in December of 2008, my true crime memoir--Luggage by Kroger--has earned awards from five national book contests in true crime and general non-fiction while attracting enthusiastic reviews from a number of established book review publications as well as general readers at Amazon and other outlets.  It is available in all e-reader formats for 99 cents and in paperback from Amazon for $9.99. 

Reporter’s True Crime Memoir Offers Inside View Of Notorious Texas Fatal Attraction Tale 

With the publication of Luggage By Kroger, Houston journalist Gary Taylor provides true crime and memoir buffs with a book that offers an insider’s view of a true-life fatal attraction case that has been grabbing headlines in the Lone Star State and nationally since 1980.

In Luggage By Kroger, former Houston Post reporter Gary Taylor recounts his intensely personal involvement in the trail of controversy that has followed Texas attorney Catherine Mehaffey Shelton for nearly three decades. It’s a trail littered with murder investigations and acts of violence that has warranted coverage by media outlets as diverse as The Dallas Morning News, the Houston Press, CBS-News 48 Hours and the A&E channel’s American Justice. It’s a trail that has placed Taylor in the public eye as a true-life fatal attraction interview subject on talk shows from Oprah Winfrey to Sally Jesse Raphael. It’s a story that has been twice-optioned for television docudramas and served as the lead segment on a prime-time TV special called Crimes of Passion.

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But the intimate details of Taylor’s fatal attraction tale have remained under the radar until now. With his true crime memoir, Taylor invites readers to grab a seat on the wild ride of an obsessive relationship, from its erotic beginning through the violent end and the trials required to clean up the mess. Laying bitterness aside, he employs self-deprecating humor to share comical anecdotes and maintain a reporter’s detachment on what becomes a tale of self-discovery through a potentially deadly encounter that nearly cost him his life.

   
Beyond that volatile relationship, Taylor also offers a historical treasure trove of information from his days as a crime and courts reporter for The Post, covering some of the state’s most significant criminal events: from the 1972 murder of Dr. John Hill, through the 1974 siege of Huntsville prison, the trial of officers accused in the death of Joe Campos Torres, early capital murder cases in the death penalty center of America and the Houston trial of Fort Worth tycoon T. Cullen Davis.

Luggage By Kroger defies all efforts to pigeonhole it into one specific genre. In the end, however, it emerges as an action-packed and suspenseful memoir of a personal odyssey that should tantalize a wide range of reading interests.

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​The book is available in all e-reader formats for 99 cents (Kindle, Nook, Apple, Sony, Kobo and SmashWords) or in paperback from Amazon for $9.99.

Recognized as one of 2009’s TOP TRUE CRIME THRILLERS, here is the scorecard for Luggage by Kroger:

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• Silver Medal in True Crime from the 2009 Independent Book Publisher Awards (IPPYS).

• Bronze Medal in True Crime and Finalist for Book-of-the-Year in the 2008 ForeWord Magazine Book-of-the-Year Awards.

• Runner-Up in True Crime from the 2009 National Indie Excellence Awards.

• Finalist in True Crime from the 2009 USA Book News Awards.

• Runner-Up in General Non-Fiction at the 2009 New York Book Festival.

 

In June of 2009, award-winning true crime author Ron Chepesiuk sat down with me to do an interview for the New Criminologist web site about the genesis of Luggage by Kroger and true crime writing in general.  Here’s a recap of our discussion.

Chepesiuk:  For Gary Taylor, Houston Texas journalist, writing his award-winning true crime memoir, Luggage by Kroger, was truly personal. Like any good journalist, Taylor has turned his near death experience into a fascinating and riveting true crime tale. What is your book about?

Taylor: Murder and adultery? But that’s too cute, isn’t it?

Chepesiuk: Well, if we leave it there, it sounds like dozens of other true crime books.
 
Taylor: OK. Luggage by Kroger recounts the pivotal year in my life that included a dangerous liaison with a femme fatale lawyer named Catherine Mehaffey. She ended our affair by shooting me in the head and in the back. We met in 1979 while she was under investigation for the still-unsolved murder of a former lover she claimed as a common-law husband. I was estranged from my second wife at the time and vulnerable. Although convicted in my case and suspended from law practice for a while, Catherine went on to trigger additional murder investigations in Texas, including one 1999 Dallas case that landed her husband, Clint Shelton, in prison for a life sentence. While the story of my relationship with Catherine has been covered widely and earned me status as the poster boy for true-life fatal attraction tales, my book represents the first intimate account of this obsessive relationship, erotic beginning to violent end, and the trials required to clean up the mess. What I hope emerges is a genre-crossing book that is as much psychological thriller and mystery yarn as legal procedural and personal memoir.

Chepesiuk: So why did you write this book?
 
Taylor: Even as these events were occurring in 1979-80, I knew that, at some point, I would have to write them down as a personal project to leave a permanent record for my descendants. I also realized I was living an important psychological and cultural story with a front row seat to criminal insanity. I believe the truth of that observation even more today, now that I have written the tale. But I never really had the time to start until just a couple of years ago. And that was probably for the best because, during the past 25 years, subsequent events demonstrated to me the full extent of the drama involved and allowed me to shape the organization of my true crime memoir into the award-winning book that is Luggage by Kroger. Friends often pestered me to write it up, with some of them even suggesting I was sitting on a literary gold mine.

 
Chepesiuk: But the idea fermented for years.

Taylor: Yes, I never really had the time until recently to pursue it. The popular reception of the movie Fatal Attraction in 1987 triggered my first recognition of the universal appeal my story might have. Let’s face it: Femmes fatales have served as irresistible literary devices since Adam and Eve and Samson and Delilah. Because my story was so similar to the movie, and included a female antagonist to rank with the classics, I became the poster boy for a series of interviews and talk show appearances based on the theme of true-life fatal attractions.

Chepesiuk: Tell us about some of your appearances.

Taylor: They began with a profile in People magazine. That led to stops on Oprah, Regis and Sally Jesse Raphael. Those generated my first movie deal, when one Hollywood production unit contacted me out of the blue and optioned the rights to my story. A script was written, but a writer’s strike sidelined production. By the early 1990s, that script was forgotten. But my unstoppable ex-girlfriend had completed her probation and re-emerged in Dallas with her law license renewed. Immediately, she became a controversial legal figure in that community, and, by 1999, police there were investigating her in a sensational murder case of their own that culminated with the conviction and life sentence of her husband on a murder charge. Reporters included me in their stories as part of her back story—and as the only target in her life who had gained a conviction on her. Immediately Hollywood called again.

Chepesiuk: Did you have any better success with Hollywood?

Taylor:  This time the script led to production, and I collected $65,000 in 2004 simply for sharing the rights to my tale. But the movie, starring Melanie Griffith and Esai Morales, has never appeared on US TV because the producers deemed the final result too weak for presentation.  I understand, however, that it has been released overseas, and I have seen it offered on eBay in a format that will not play on American DVDs. So, I haven’t seen it. After receiving the fee for my rights in 2004, however, I decided I needed to start writing my own story. Hollywood had fucked it up twice now, I figured, so maybe I should try. I began dabbling with the narrative, showed it to a few journalist friends, received encouragement and got serious about finishing.

Chepesiuk: How would you describe your book’s niche within the true crime genre?

Taylor:  It plays well as both a serial killer tale and a psycho-thriller. I do manage to get inside the head of a woman suspected in a string of murders. I am the only one of her targets ever to get a conviction. There is mention of three murders in my book, but rumors of others are still around. Her conviction in my case resulted in suspension of her law license for eight years—most are amazed she ever got it back.

Chepesiuk: Why did you go the self-publish route?

Taylor: I opted to self-publish in 2008 because I was too impatient to spend time seeking an agent. My plan was to enter it in contests and see if the story had much universal appeal. I think the results so far indicate it does. If more sales come from that, so much the better, but, let’s face it: I only have about $3,000 invested in this book so I’m playing with house money here thanks to Hollywood.  What do I have to lose?
 
Chepesiuk:  You are an experienced journalist but this was your first book. What were some of the challenges in writing it?
 
Taylor: Actually, while working as a freelancer from 1980-97, I authored four books and one of those would rank as true crime. I never mention them because they were not really commercial productions. In each case I was hired by a publisher to do them. One was a coffee table book about Houston, another was a history of the Federal Reserve, and the third was a corporate history of a prominent Houston company and the fourth was the most interesting — ghostwriting a true crime memoir for a Vietnamese refugee who had helped bust a major drug ring in the Washington DC area.

Chepesiuk: That’s interesting! How did that come about?

Taylor:  He wanted to leave a record for his family and hired me to help him write it.

Chepesiuk: Was it hard for you to stay out of your story and make it objective?

Taylor: I was determined to take a detached approach and use humor to illustrate my tale because I did not want the book to read like some sort of bitter attack on a cruel world that had done me wrong—as some true crime memoirs turn out. I’ve never been bitter about what happened to me, but I still feared it might be seen in that light. As a lifelong student of literature and nonfiction, I also wanted to create more than a mere slash-and-burn true crime thriller. I envisioned something along the lines of Fatal Attraction meets Angela’s Ashes—a so-called “nobody memoir” with an authentic dramatic tale.  Since I could tell my story in the first-person, I decided to make it more interesting by at least trying to channel Mickey Spillane. I became a poor man’s Mike Hammer and my girlfriend became the femme fatale trying to bring him down.
Like any good work of literature, my book also has a strong subplot and that actually proved the hardest to write.  It concerns the end of my second marriage, which happened simultaneously as part of my fatal attraction story and resulted in my assumption of custody of my two young daughters as a surprise ending to my book. So, the subplot reads more like Fatal Attraction meets Kramer vs. Kramer, and the process of writing that portion forced me to turn myself inside out. I have pulled no punches covering anything I’ve done in my life.
The intersection of that subplot with the main story creates the metaphor for my unusual title, Luggage by Kroger. These events occurred at a time when I was sleeping on a buddy’s couch while estranged from my second wife, driving around town broke in a $200 car and toting my dirty laundry in a paper grocery sack. Into this desperation suddenly walked a woman who solved all my problems by becoming the only problem I could have. And, as a self-publisher, I enjoyed using that image for the first cover design of my book. I found clip art of a sultry, film noir-style dame pointing a pistol and told the designer: “Stick her in a grocery sack full of dirty clothes. That’s my story!”

Chepesiuk: What kind of reaction has the book elicited from your family?

Taylor: My second wife has a significant role in the book, and there was no way to keep her out of it.  I used a pseudonym for her as a buffer against legal action for invasion of privacy. But I remain concerned about her reaction to reopening old wounds, and that was extremely difficult. And I didn’t want the revelations to embarrass my daughters. Although they each have a copy of the book, I don’t believe their mother even knows about it, yet. I am prepared to defend any lawsuits, however, should they arise. For me, this whole process proved satisfyingly therapeutic. I recommend a memoir for everyone!
 
Chepesiuk: What were some of the major sources and resources you used in writing the book?

Taylor: I have always been a dedicated pack rat. I kept a journal back when all this was happening. I realized I was romantically involved with someone important, even if she was a psycho-babe. I wanted to psychoanalyze her and study her. There were also depositions and trial transcripts. Much of the book includes testimony from three different trials. I accumulated the documents as part of the 1987 movie deal, when the production company reimbursed me to purchase them for their script.  I simply made extra copies and kept them.  As I note in my dedication: “The reader will realize that most of the dialogue is unforgettable.” I recreated some of our conversations from memory. I am satisfied I am close enough. Readers will just have to determine for themselves whether my 40-year reputation as a journalist deserves their trust. I had a law professor pal read the book in an early stage, and he gave it a clean bill of legal health.
 
Chepesiuk: Who are some of the true crime writers you like and have learned from?
 
Taylor: True crime has always been a favorite genre of mine. Early influences were Joseph Wambaugh (The Onion Field), Peter Maas (Serpico) and Tommy Thompson (Serpentine and Blood and Money). Thompson in particular influenced me because I was the first reporter on the scene of the 1972 John Hill murder in Houston and then had to watch while Thompson turned that story into a bestseller. I mention this incident in my book. Rick Nelson with The Cop Who Wouldn’t Quit also served as an influence because he was a colleague at The Houston Post in the 1970s. His book of a Houston murder case from those years is fascinating. Regarding more recent direct influences on this book, I have to mention two. From Clifford Irving’s The Hoax I learned the importance of harnessing humor to entertain in explaining my relationship with an obviously dangerous woman. And, from James McManus’s Positively Fifth Street, I learned the power of creating an alter ego to humorously blame for all my shortcomings. He called his alter ego “Bad Jim,” and I simply called mine “the rogue.” I had fun writing about my “evil twin” and, I hope it helps the reader to forgive me my sins.
 
Chepesiuk: What are your future plans as a writer?
 
Taylor:  I work full time as a senior writer for an oil and gas business newsletter and plan to continue doing that until I retire, hopefully in about four years. While that may sound pretty stale, I have to say I’ve managed to work my courts and police background into that job. I ended up covering one of the criminal trials of former Enron CEO Ken Lay, and I did a series of articles a couple of years ago about a young industry CFO who embezzled $70 million from his oil rig company. It seems that crime reporting finds me wherever I go! I would like to do some more ghostwriting of memoirs or even another book if I find a good story to tell. I have been writing something every day since 1968, so I imagine I will find something if I have any time on my hands. It’s become a habit after all these years.

(Ron Chepesiuk is an award-winning freelance investigative journalist, documentary producer, Fulbright scholar and a consultant to the History Channel's Gangland documentary series. His true crime books include Drug Lords, Black Gangsters of Chicago  and Gangsters of Harlem.)