HE-E-E-E-E-E-E-RE'S JEANNIE!!!

We've got company today, fellow Stiffs. Please join me in welcoming my friend and fellow ITW debut author Jeannie Holmes, author of the soon to be released vampire police procedural Blood Law.

(Excerpt from Blood Law HERE, and it's really good!)

Without further ado, here's Jeannie:

First, I’d like to thank the regular Working Stiffs for inviting me to guest blog today, and I’d especially like to thank Jennie Bentley for reminding me about it. There are days when my mother’s words are far too accurate, “I swear you’d forget your head if it weren’t screwed on.”

Okay, so I may be forgetful at times but there are some events I can’t forget: the day I met my husband, the day I signed my contract with Bantam Dell, the day I graduated high school…the list goes on. There are also plenty of memorable people: my mom, my dad, my first grade teacher, and Jane Doe.

I never met Jane Doe, at least not the Jane Doe who inspired a portion of the mystery in my debut novel, Blood Law. In the book, my protagonist, Alexandra Sabian, is a vampire and Enforcer with the Federal Bureau of Preternatural Investigation who is assigned to police the vampire population in small town Jefferson, Mississippi. Everything is going great until someone starts killing the vampires and leaving their headless and staked bodies around town. Naturally, mayhem ensues throughout town. Jane wasn’t a vampire nor was she staked or decapitated. However, she was murdered and her nude body dumped near a wooded area at an interstate rest area a few miles north of my hometown in Mississippi.

If my memory serves me correctly, Jane was discovered by a motorist who was walking his dog at a rest stop along Interstate 55 in Copiah County, Mississippi. This was in the late 1980s or very early 1990s, but I can’t remember the exact year or the full details of how Jane was found or even killed, although I believe she was strangled.

For weeks, the entire state talked of nothing but Jane. Sketches of her appeared on the news, ran in all the papers, and southwestern Mississippi became a hotbed for reporters and amateur sleuths trying to discover Jane’s true identity. But as the weeks turned into months and eventually years, no new leads developed and Jane became a cold case. The reporters moved on to bigger, hotter stories. The amateur sleuths returned to their day jobs. Jane, however, remained Jane Doe, buried in a cemetery with a simple headstone bearing her new name and the date she was found.

As far as I know, Jane has never been identified, her killer has never been captured, and my efforts to find out more about the case haven’t been easy. It’s almost as if all the media attention she was given years ago has vanished. Jane has truly been forgotten.

I think that’s why I remember her so well and why I used her story to inspire portions of Blood Law. The tragedy of her murder shouldn’t go unanswered. Her family, whomever and wherever they may be, shouldn’t have to wonder what happened to Jane.

I hold no delusions that my posting here, which is the first time I’ve spoken of Jane in a public forum, will somehow jumpstart a cold case investigation. My hope is that by sharing Jane’s story, others will remember her as well because no one should be completely forgotten.

###

 

Jeannie Holmes is a Mississippi native who now lives in Mobile, Alabama with her husband, four neurotic cats, and an arthritic shaggy dog. Blood Law is her first novel.