Kathryn Casey

Kathryn Casey
Kathryn Casey at the 2009 Texas Book Festival
Occupation	Crime writer, novelist
Nationality	United States
Period	1984-present
Genre	Crime fiction
Subject	True crime
Website
www.kathryncasey.com

Kathryn Casey is an American writer of mystery novels and non-fiction books. She is best known for writing 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.

Early life and education

In 1980, Casey moved with her husband to Texas. She attended the University of Houston and earned a degree in journalism.

Career

In 1984, Casey began writing as an intern at the now-defunct Houston City Magazine. She left two years later as a senior editor. Next, Casey worked for two years as editor of Ultra, a regional magazine geared toward wealthy Texans.

Casey then wrote for a national audience, with 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.

Many of Casey's articles examined sensational crimes. In the early 1990s, she turned one case, which was the subject of a Ladies' Home Journal article about a serial rapist attacking Houston-area women, into her first book, The Rapist's Wife. After its release, Casey moved away from magazine writing to concentrate on non-fiction, fact-based crime books.

Casey's seventh true crime book covered 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.^[1] Baker, sentenced to 65 years, resides in the Allan B. Polunsky Unit, a Texas state prison. Cy-Fair Magazine, upon the July 2012 release of the book Deadly Little Secrets, covered the Baker case and others in a feature article about Casey.^[2] The Houston Chronicle also covered the release of the book.^[3] Deadly Little Secrets was the inspiration for the film Sins of the Preacher, which aired on the Lifetime television network in September 2013.^[4]

Casey then turned 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.^[5] The main character in her 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.^[6]

Casey's 11th book, Deliver Us, released January 2015 by HarperCollins, is based on murders along the Texas Killing Fields and Interstate 45.^[7] In March 2014, Elle Magazine included Casey along with Agatha Christie, Jane Smiley, Edna Buchanan, Joyce Carol Oates, Gillian Flynn, Ann Rule and others, in a list of "The Ten Best Thrillers and Crime Writing by Women."^[8]

Casey was a co-founder of Women in Crime Ink, which has been described by the Wall Street Journal as "a blog worth reading."^[9]

In July 2011, she wrote an article for Forbes Woman about new options available to authors with the advent of eBooks and self-publishing.^[10]

Author Ann Rule called her "one of the best in the true crime genre."^[11]

Personal life

She lives in Sugar Land, Texas, with her husband.

Appearances

In 1995, Casey appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss The Rapist's Wife along with the subject 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.

In October 2006, she appeared on The Montel Williams Show to discuss women who unknowingly dated wanted criminals.^[12]

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.^[13]

Books

References

External links

• Author's official Web site
• Kathryn Casey's blog
• Author's Amazon.com page
• truTV Crime Library citation, "Marriage, Money and Murder: Steven and Celeste Beard"
• TV.com listing, "The Montel Williams Show"
• Kathryn Casey on IMDb
• Texas Observer, "Writer's Block" column, "Texas prisons start barring book authors from inmate interviews," January 8, 2004
• Contributor, Women in Crime Ink