Between the Badge and the Burial: Writing True Crime

People often as my why I'm in true crime. While it is heavy, and there are often times I have to step away and center myself because of that weight, I always return.

Let’s skip the cinematic origin story. Skip the moment I found a true crime book on my grandmother’s bedside table—its pages dog-eared, its spine softened by use—only to realize it chronicled violence in the same town where I laid my head at night. Skip the eerie coincidence. The seed.

Because the real beginning isn’t romantic. It isn’t tidy. It isn’t aesthetic. The real beginning is work.

I am EMT trained. I worked 911 for years—Police, EMS, Fire—long nights spent in a headset, the cadence of panic in my ears, learning to separate chaos from clarity in seconds. I’ve worked in the legal field since I was seventeen years old. Family law. Civil litigation. Medical malpractice. Workers’ compensation. I’ve sat across from people who were losing everything and from others fighting to keep it. I learned early that paperwork can hold as much devastation as any crime scene.

I stood beside veterinarians for years as an assistant, hands steady when owners couldn’t hold their own. I later worked in one of the largest hospitals in Tulsa as a surgical assistant—under lights so bright they erase shadows, in rooms where life is measured in blood pressure and oxygen saturation.

I was trained in 911 with the recording of a mother’s worst nightmare. Donna Wooten’s voice filled my headset as part of our instruction—the call she made when her daughter, Caitlin, was abducted by her ex-boyfriend and later killed in a murder-suicide. It was presented as a test. If you cannot handle listening to this, they told me, you will not make it as a dispatcher. So I listened.

I learned to hear the tremor in a mother’s voice without letting my own hands shake. I learned to extract facts from panic. I learned to stay measured while someone else’s world was collapsing in real time. I made it. But that call never became just a training tool to me. Years later, I rectified that experience the only way I knew how—by telling the whole story. First on my podcast. Then again in Allegedly. Not as a cautionary tale for recruits. But as a life that mattered. As a daughter who deserved more than to be remembered as “the audio we use in training.”

In the operating room (OR), I've seen firsthand a drunk driver who hit two sixteen-year-old girls. One died. The other was wheeled into surgery while her parents’ world unraveled in a waiting room somewhere down the hall. I stood there. I witnessed her brain surgery. I watched skilled hands attempt to reverse the irreversible. Two floors above her, the man who hit them lay in a hospital bed—still intoxicated—his injuries limited to a broken leg.

I’ve watched orthopedic surgeries so aggressive they felt like war. I’ve watched a gallbladder removed by a robot while the surgeon operated from thousands of miles away—medicine bending space and distance in ways that would have once sounded like science fiction. I’ve rushed a man riddled with gunshot wounds from the ER to the OR and watched as the team pulled him back from the brink. And when it was over—when the adrenaline quieted, and the doors swung shut—I walked back down the hall and cleaned his blood from the floor.

I’ve taken the call of a terrified father whispering through chaos. He had corralled his young children and his wife into a small back room of their home while two men stood just outside, firing at each other—and into the neighborhood—like it was some reckless reenactment of the Wild West. Bullets don’t care about property lines. They don’t care about innocence. They pass through siding and glass the same way they pass through flesh.

In first response, we are taught never to tell someone “it will be okay.” It is a promise you cannot guarantee. So instead, you anchor them to instructions. Stay low. Stay quiet. Stay inside. Lock the door. Move away from windows. Even when your instinct is to offer comfort, you give them procedure.

The family survived without injury. The two men outside killed each other. And I stayed on that line advising a father how to shield his children from both stray gunfire and the sight of what would be left behind—telling him to keep them away from the windows, to keep their small eyes from seeing the aftermath cooling in their own yard.

I’ve seen a doctor refuse to surrender a life in the operating room. Forty-five minutes of relentless effort on a coding patient—compressions rotating from one set of exhausted hands to another, sweat pooling beneath surgical caps, voices sharp and urgent beneath the hum of machines. He would not call it. He demanded we keep going. Rotate. Push harder. Again. Again. Again.

Hope, in that room, wasn’t gentle. It was defiant. Until another physician finally stepped forward, placed a steadying hand on the chaos, and called the time of death. And just like that, the fight ended. The room went quiet in a way that only operating rooms can—clinical, stunned, already shifting toward the next task. But for those forty-five minutes, I watched what it looks like when a human being refuses to let another slip away without exhausting every ounce of strength available.

That stays with you.

And then—on the other side of it all—I lost a cousin to murder. I have stood on the side of the family. I have felt the silence after the calls stop coming. The endless questions. The autopsy report that answers some things but not the things that matter. The way grief lingers in rooms long after the casseroles are gone. The way justice, even when served, does not resurrect.

With all of that behind me—dispatch consoles, operating rooms, legal filings, funeral programs—my podcast and my writing were meant to translate. I have worked cases. I have been the family. And those two realities do not have to live in opposition.

When I write, when I podcast, my goal has always been to bridge the space between the people who work the case and the people who live it. To examine both sides of the coin. To understand the detective’s preliminary investigation and the mother who lays her son to rest. To study what was done well—and what fractured along the way. To ask where the system holds and where it fails.

Because both sides matter.

The working side rarely sees the long echo of their decisions. The families rarely see the hours, the paperwork, the dead ends, the internal politics, the human limitations that exist between those brief update calls or carefully worded emails. It is a system. A coin with two faces that almost never meet. They move in parallel, but seldom stand eye to eye.

If the investigative side is the face of the coin and the family is the back, then I am the rim—the thin, often unnoticed edge that holds it together. Even if it is only documentation. Even if all I can do is gather the story from each side and present it whole.

That is the purpose. This work is about understanding. About accountability. About memory. About preserving the human cost alongside the procedural record.

I have answered the 911 call.

I have assisted in the surgery.

I have filed the paperwork.

I have stood graveside.

Those experiences are not separate chapters. They are the same story told from different angles.

That is why I write.

That is why I podcast.

True crime, for me, has never been about the crime alone. It has always been about the people standing in the blast radius—the first responders, the surgeons, the detectives, the mothers, the cousins, the ones who clean the blood and the ones who bury the dead. It is about accountability and humanity existing in the same breath. If I can hold space for both—if I can document carefully, question honestly, and honor the weight each side carries—then the work has meaning. Not because it is dark. But because it is real.