Kathryn Casey

Kathryn Casey
Kathryn Casey at the 2009 Texas Book Festival
Born	Wisconsin
Occupation	Crime writer, novelist
Nationality	United States
Period	1984-present
Genres	Crime fiction
Subjects	True crime
www.kathryncasey.com

Kathryn Casey is a true crime writer, novelist and journalist. Author Ann Rule has called Casey "one of the best in the true crime genre."

Early life and education

Born in Wisconsin, Casey settled in Texas with her family in 1980. She attended the University of Houston, where she earned a degree in journalism.

Career

In 1984 Casey kicked off her writing career as an intern at the now-defunct Houston City Magazine. When she left two years later, she was a senior editor. Casey's next stop was a two-year interlude as editor of Ultra, a state-wide magazine geared toward wealthy Texans.

In the years after Ultra, Casey branched out to a national audience, with her articles appearing in Ladies' Home Journal, where she was a contributing editor for 18 years, as well as More (magazine), TV Guide, Rolling Stone, Seventeen, Reader's Digest, and Texas Monthly. During her more than two decades as a magazine journalist, Casey interviewed celebrities, including movie, television, and recording stars, presidents and first ladies. She covered subjects that ranged from the Oklahoma City bombing, the aftermath of 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina, to infertility and the McCaughey Septuplets.

Throughout those years, many of Casey's articles examined sensational crimes. In the early 1990s, she took one such case, the subject of a Ladies' Home Journal article, about a serial rapist attacking Houston-area women, and turned it into her first book, The Rapist's Wife. After its publication, Casey moved away from magazine writing and concentrated on books, at first true crime, nonfiction accounts of actual cases. Perhaps her most widely read book is She Wanted It All, which recounts the case of Celeste Beard, who married an Austin multimillionaire, only to convince her lesbian lover, Tracey Tarlton, to kill him.

One of her recent books, Shattered, was included in True Crime Book Reviews' Top 10 book awards for 2010.

Casey's latest true crime project is a book on the Matt Baker case in Waco, Texas, about the Baptist minister who was convicted of killing his wife and staging it to look like a suicide. Baker, sentenced to 65 years, resides in the Allan B. Polunsky Unit, a Texas state prison.

Based on Casey's experience covering real crimes, she turned her attention to crime fiction. In 2009, Booklist, the publication of the American Library Association, named Casey's debut novel, Singularity, one of the "Best Crime Novel Debuts of 2009" on its Bestseller Lists. The main character in Casey's mystery series is Sarah Armstrong, a Texas Ranger and a criminal profiler. In Singularity, Armstrong travels across Texas hunting a deviant serial killer. Library Journal picked the third in the series, The Killing Storm, as a best book of 2010 in its mystery category.

In addition, Casey is a co-founder of and a regular contributor to Women in Crime Ink, which has been described by the Wall Street Journal as "a blog worth reading."

In July 2011, Casey wrote an article for Forbes Woman about new options available to authors with the advent of eBooks and self-publishing.

She lives in Houston with her husband.

Appearances

In 1995, Casey appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss The Rapist's Wife along with the woman referred to in the title, Linda Bergstrom. In the years since, Casey has appeared on Oprah Winfrey's Oxygen Network, Court TV, Biography, Nancy Grace, E! Network, Investigation Discovery and the A&E.

She's a regular speaker and panelist at book festivals and events, including the Texas Library Association convention, Southwest Louisiana Writer's Conference, Pulpwood Queens Girlfriend Weekend book conference, and the Texas Book Festival.

Books

True Crime

• The Rapist's Wife (1995 HarperCollins)
• A Warrant to Kill (2000 HarperCollins)
• She Wanted It All (2005 HarperCollins)
• Die, My Love (2007 HarperCollins)
• A Descent into Hell (2008 HarperCollins)
• Evil Beside Her (2008 HarperCollins) a reissue of The Rapist's Wife.
• Shattered (2010 HarperCollins)

Fiction series

• Singularity (2008 St. Martin's Minotaur; the first in the Sarah Armstrong series)
• Blood Lines (2009 St Martin's Minotaur; the second in the Sarah Armstrong series)
• The Killing Storm (November 2010 St. Martin's Minotaur; the third in the Sarah Armstrong series)

External links

• Author's official Web site
• Kathryn Casey's blog
• Kathryn Casey's blog on Amazon.com
• Women in Crime Ink
• truTV Crime Library citation, "Marriage, Money and Murder: Steven and Celeste Beard," for Notorious Murders section
• TV.com's listing for Kathryn Casey appearance on "The Montel Williams Show"
• The Internet Movie Database listing of appearances by Kathryn Casey
• Texas Observer, "Writer's Block" column, "Texas prisons start barring book authors from inmate interviews," January 8, 2004