S.K. Patton

I am the author of exactly one book and truthfully it's probably the only one I'll ever write! Boy was that a lot of work!

In my daily life, I'm a nurse and the mother of two amazing children. I found myself drawn into the true crime world a decade ago when the retrial of a high profile murder case was moved to my small midwestern town. The media coverage in the area was so pervasive and so heavily biased against the defendant that there was no way he was getting a fair trial in his home town.

I started reading about the case and soon realized that when you put the evidence all together, it was an obvious wrongful conviction. Not only was it nearly impossible for him to have committed the crime, the reason he was convicted in the first place was an astonishing amount of prosecutorial misconduct. When I compared the information that was presented at trial to the way it was being covered in the media, the difference was startling. It didn't matter how much evidence the defense had in their favor or how well the trial was going for them, the media still wrote up the case in favor of the prosecution. It was horrifying to see this innocent man not only have his family taken from him, but not be able to clear his name no matter how much evidence he had that he'd been framed. After he was acquitted, he had to leave the town he called home because the media had turned the public against him. This was a turning point for me. I'd always loved to write, but I'd never had something I was this passionate about before. I found my calling in criminal justice reform and began doing wrongful conviction advocacy in 2013.

In my spare time, I found myself studying court cases and writing about them on message boards. My favorite cases are wrongful convictions, acquittals, and cases with unusual legal issues--there's always an interesting rabbit hole in these types of cases! I began studying the Anthony case and saw a similar dynamic happening to the case tried in my town. She wasn't as obviously innocent as he was, but the narrative the media was spinning was very different from the actual events at trial. I want my readers to understand the complexity of the case and to know the true reason why she was acquitted. My message board series began to get the attention of podcasters and YouTubers and I knew it was time to write a full length book. This is the only full length book I have written, but my other notable true crime contributions are that I came up with the Starlight Tour theory in the disappearances of Felipe Santos and Terrance Williams, and my writing on the Holly Bobo case (another obvious wrongful conviction) gained significant attention.

If you would like to discuss this or other cases further, I am active on Reddit and run the True Crime Discussion and Casey Anthony subreddits. I'd love to hear from my readers!