True Crime, Grief, and the Unlikeable Girl, a guest post by Megan Cooley Peterson

The inkling of the idea for my young adult thriller, Dead Girls Talking, first came to me in 2015 while watching the true crime documentary series Making a Murderer. The docuseries follows Stephen Avery, who was wrongly convicted of a violent crime in 1985. After 18 years in prison, DNA evidence overturned his conviction. Avery filed a $36 million civil lawsuit against the county, the sheriff, and the district attorney for wrongful imprisonment.

But Avery wasn’t home for long before he was accused of murdering Teresa Halbach, a freelance photographer. In 2005, she came to the Avery property to take photographs of a van they wanted to sell in Auto Trader magazine. Avery was convicted of her murder in 2007. The documentary focuses on the what ifs: what if he didn’t do it? What if the police set Avery up for her murder to stop the civil lawsuit from proceeding?

As I watched with rapt attention, I started to feel . . . a little uncomfortable. Where was Teresa’s story in all of this? She was a young woman with her whole life ahead of her, but in the docuseries, she seemed almost reduced to a character. She had family and friends in mourning, yet the documentary painted Avery as the victim. (I totally get why her family wanted nothing to do with this docuseries. I wouldn’t have either.) Even now, as I continue to be fascinated by true crime, I wonder if true crime is unethical. Are we as a culture mining other people’s pain for our own enjoyment? And if so, what does that say about us?

I set out to write a true crime story from the POV of a victim’s family and friends. My novel follows 16-year-old Bettina Holland. When Bett was 6, her father murdered her mother. Bett was the only witness, and her testimony helped convict him. Bett’s maternal grandparents, who are very well-to-do, are raising her. They never talk about her mother’s death. They’ve swept it under the rug, almost made it a taboo topic in their beautiful, but cold, home. There is no room for Bett to grieve for the mother taken from her so violently. 

Her mother’s murder is also the subject of podcasts, murder tours, and a highly anticipated docuseries. The true crime machine makes Bett feel like she’s losing her mom all over again. Her grief and confusion and fear have become twisted up into the very core of who Bett is. She has a very large chip on her shoulder. She isn’t always kind, not to herself or to others, and she pushes people away who are only trying to help her.

Bett is also incredibly angry.

While editing Dead Girls Talking, the pandemic shut down the world, and my mother was diagnosed with cancer. She passed away in 2021, and the most surprising part of my grief journey was my anger. I was mad she got sick. I was mad at her for dying. I was mad at people who still had their moms. Grief doesn’t always make sense or look pretty, and it was cathartic for me to allow Bett to experience grief her way. Bett is mad at her mother for staying in an abusive marriage. She’s mad at her father for so cruelly and violently taking her mother away from her. She’s angry at her former best friend, whose mom started a “ghost tour” in town to capitalize on the murder. And she’s fed up with strangers stalking her online, and people in her own small town gossiping about her.

As if all of this isn’t traumatic enough (we writers love to torment our characters!), Bett stumbles upon a murdered woman in the woods at the beginning of the novel. The woman looks eerily like her mother. And scratched into the dead woman’s face are the two words Bett never wanted to see: I’m back. Is this a copycat murder? Or is her father innocent?

Enter Eugenia Cline, the undertaker’s daughter.

Eugenia is one of my favorite characters I’ve ever written. She’s quiet, thoughtful, and an outsider. (The rumor at school is that Eugenia does the dead people’s makeup in her parents’ funeral home.) She has a distaste for small talk and a strong sense of justice. When the inept local police force doesn’t show much interest in solving the murder, Eugenia suggests to Bett that they team up and solve it themselves. And Bett, instead of pushing her away, very slowly lets Eugenia in. Witnessing their budding friendship was an absolute joy for me. I can totally picture Bett and Eugenia as a couple of old ladies, still friends, still challenging each other, and the status quo. 

I knew when I was writing Dead Girls Talking that Bett might fall into the category of “unlikeable girl” for some readers. The true crime machine so many of us can’t look away from, myself included, has done real harm to Bett. How can she be labeled as “unlikeable” when she’s a victim, too? Teenage girls should be allowed to take up space—with their bodies, their ideas, and their emotions. And I let Bett and Eugenia take up space in this novel. They don’t have all the answers. They make mistakes. There’s no sugar-coating their pain or flaws here. And there shouldn’t have to be. Give me all the unlikeable girls. 

Meet the author

Megan Cooley Peterson is an author, editor, and coffee drinker. As a teenager, Megan was part of a cult-like doomsday church that didn’t like to be questioned. She questioned anyway. She has written more than 200 nonfiction books for children on a wide variety of topics, including dinosaurs, sharks, urban legends, and haunted objects. She is also the author of two young adult novels, The Liar’s Daughter (2019) and Dead Girls Talking (2024). She lives in Minnesota with her husband, daughter, and “unlikeable” cat, Eva.

Links:

website: www.megancooleypeterson.com  

Instagram: www.instagram.com/megancooleypeterson 

Twitter/X: www.twitter.com/MeganNCPeterson 

TikTok: meganpeterson185 (@megancooleypeterson) | TikTok

About Dead Girls Talking

The town of Wolf Ridge calls him The Smiley Face Killer. Bettina Holland calls him her father.

Everyone knows Bettina’s father was the one who murdered her mother a decade ago. It’s the subject of podcasts, murder tours, and even a highly anticipated docuseries. But after growing up grappling with what that means, a string of copycat murders forces Bett to answer a harder question: What if he didn’t?

Old-money Bett must team up with the only person willing to investigate alongside her: bookish goth girl Eugenia, the mortician’s daughter, who everyone says puts the makeup on corpses. Can this “true crime princess” unmask a murderer who’s much closer to home than she ever imagined?

Gritty, gripping, and propulsive from page one, Dead Girls Talking is a ride for readers who love to see girls get their hands dirty as they claw their way to the truth. Peterson’s knife-sharp thriller cuts deep, with a wicked sense of humor, a wire-taut atmosphere, and a deadly serious approach to bigger issues of justice and female anger.

ISBN-13: 9780823457014
Publisher: Holiday House
Publication date: 06/18/2024
Age Range: 14 – 17 Years

Filed under: Guest Post