Website & Social Media:
Website ➜ https://caitlinrother.com
Twitter ➜ https://twitter.com/caitlinrother
Facebook ➜ https://www.facebook.com/caitlinrother/
Instagram ➜ https://www.instagram.com/the_real_caitlin_rother
BlueSky ➜ @caitlinrother.bsky.social
Can you tell us what your book is about?
Serial killer Wayne Adam Ford, a long-haul trucker, picked up troubled women in his truck, where he raped and killed four women during rough sex, dismembered two of them, then dumped their bodies into
the California Aqueduct and other bodies of water. This updated edition is a re-release of the book with 32 pages of new developments prompted by the ID of his first dismembered victim as Kerry Anne Cummings via genetic genealogy—25 years after she was murdered.
Why did you write your book?
I wrote the original edition, which was released in 2009, because Ford is the only serial killer I’ve ever heard of who turned himself in so he wouldn’t be able to kill again. He made national news because he had his latest victim’s breast in his jacket pocket when he turned himself in at the Humboldt County sheriff’s station in Eureka, CA. Ford is also a complicated fascinating subject with many psychological problems and disorders, including sexual paraphilias, which are like fetishes x100. But he was also a decent guy at one time, a karaoke singer and school bus driver who joined the Marines as a teenager, and stopped on the freeway to help a car crash victim. While he had his hand against the victim’s neck to stop the bleeding, he was hit by a drunk driver and knocked 40 feet down an embankment, suffering a severe head injury that put him into the ICU for nine days. His family said his personality changed dramatically after that.
What kind of message is your book trying to tell your readers?
We don’t live in a black and white world, but a world of gray, where no one is all good or all bad. Mentally ill people are not evil, they are sick. Ford never got the mental health treatment he needed. Two of his victims didn’t get the mental health treatment they needed either, and unfortunately, as a result, they ended up dead.
Is it hard to publish a book?
Always. Books are hard to write and they are also hard to get published. Some of my nonfiction books have taken 12 years to complete. Two of my novels have taken 17 years. Each. And yet, here I am still crazy enough to keep doing this. But that’s how I got 15 books published, with four more waiting to be published. Two of those four are already under contract, and I’m manifesting a second two-book contract for the next two, which are all part of the same fiction series. You just have to keep trying, rejections or not. Because if you give up, you will never get them published.
Have you suffered from writer’s block and what do you do to get back on track?
Go for a walk around the block and chew a couple of pieces of sugar-free bubble gum.
I can’t come up with ideas or solve plot problems when I’m sitting still. I often come up with ideas when I’m swimming or in the shower, so apparently, being in the water helps too.
What do you like to do for fun?
I exercise, either walking or swimming, every day, and I also recently added weights to my routine to try to get stronger. I also play keyboards and sing in a jazzy, bluesy trio. Exercising and playing music are both extremely important to my mental and physical well being. I also watch a lot of movies and limited series, because my goal is to get a movie or TV series made based on one or more of my books. My other goal is to write the script myself.
What do you like the most about being an author?
I love having the freedom to write what I want to write about. I spent the first 19 years of my professional writing career as an investigative newspaper reporter, where I had to write what my editors told me to. I wrote a lot of throw-away stories that held little meaning to me. That evolved over time to where I was able to choose my topics and go deeper, but I could never write as long as I wanted to. Space was always an issue. So that’s why narrative non-fiction books are so great. They are long-form journalism and they allow me to dig deep and spend years, if necessary, researching a topic of my choosing. Lately, after many years of trying, I’ve become more successful at writing fiction, and thrillers in particular, so I’m doing more of that, which is much less stressful and way more fun. Although I still do research and conduct interviews, it’s far less intensive than nonfiction and I can write it much faster. And unlike nonfiction, where I don’t make up a single thing, with fiction I can go into my imagination and come up with all sorts of wild plots and characters. It’s great fun. Watch for my thrillers (Thomas & Mercer) in 2026!
What kind of advice would you give other true crime authors?
You can’t fake this stuff. You also can’t make it up. You need to do your research and learn your writing craft. To write narrative nonfiction, which reads like a novel but is all true, you must do way more research than you do for the newspaper or even a magazine so that your tone is authoritative. If you want to embellish, exaggerate or make up your characters, you should switch to fiction, but even there you still need to know your material, and if you don’t know it, you need to ask someone who does. The last thing you want is for a reader to catch you making a mistake because you didn’t ask the right questions or you thought you could just wing it when it comes to a myriad of issues from guns to SWAT protocols, criminal charges, Miranda readings, courtroom antics, and so so so much more.
BODY PARTS is available at Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Body-Parts-Serial-Killers-Compulsions/dp/0806543914.