Criminal Profiling Topic of the Day: I Read it on the Internet: Superbike Murders - Part Three

This is my third and final post on the Superbike quadruple homicides that took place in Chesnee, South Carolina in 2003. I will be discussing persons-on-interest and how the evidence in the murders supports taking a stronger look at some of them and doesn't support overfocusing on certain persons to the exclusion of better suspects.

Before I begin this discussion of what I read on the Internet concerning certain persons-of-interest, I want to state that nothing I am putting forth here is any accusation of guilt; no one has been proven to have committed these crimes and they are innocent in the eyes of the law until proven otherwise in a court of law. However, if certain people behaved in certain ways and said certain things that are concerning, then it is not unreasonable to expect that the investigators from the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Department should have properly and thoroughly investigated these persons, which, from what I read on the Internet, they did not.

There are three main persons-of-interest in the Superbike murders. As in all crimes, the last person to see the victims alive, the first person to see them dead, and anyone who might have had access to the scene in between those times are the persons-of-interest and each needs to be investigated and eliminated.

I want to start with the least likely person-of-interest in these crimes which is the man in the composite the Sheriff's Department has been dogging for almost nine years, claiming straight out that he is involved in the homicides. First of all, from everything I read on the Internet, there is not one shred of evidence linking this unknown man, this customer who was not the last person in the business before the homicides, to the crimes. There is no unknown DNA or fingerprints that can be linked to anyone, so no match is ever going to pop up in CODIS linking some felon to the Superbike murders. Unless this man one day is arrested for the commission of another crime and a firearm is found on his person or in his car or apartment that matches the ballistics in these homicides, then this avenue is pretty much worthless. The only other possibility is that someone rats him out, a warrant is gotten, and the detectives find the gun at his residence. Could it happen? Sure. Not likely, but I am all for a miracle.

Problem is, the man in the composite is the least likely of the three persons-of-interest to have committed the crime. Why? First of all, it is blatantly stupid and hard to believe that this man would go to the business, spend a relatively long time chatting with the people there, sit on a motorcycle, and let all the other customers see his face if he were planning to blow everyone away that day. Furthermore, why would he leave the business and come back to kill everyone? Why not hang around until there were no customers were there or just kill a customer or two if you are psychopathic enough to blow away the others? And since you have let someone see your face, the customer who inspired the composite, why not just kill that man so you don't have a witness left behind to identify you? I find the unknown customer in the composite a red herring of a lead that, yes, should have been followed up but he would not be my top choice of focus.

Let's back up to the last person who was in the business before the murders went down. As I read on the Internet, he was a reasonable person-of-interest and he has not been entirely eliminated. The best reason to look at him was the simple fact he was there right before it all went down and, if he killed everyone and drove off, there would be no witnesses to say it was him. However, his credit card was swiped right before he left, so he would have to be a blazing idiot or extremely angry. Now, the first he was not from what I have read on the Internet; the second was possible. He was a bit annoyed with the shop that day. And, because of this, he needed to be eliminated as a suspect. As I read on the Internet, he certainly had firearms and he refused to take a polygraph. However, it seems, he might have an excellent alibi. As I read on the Internet, his truck was seen going by a convenience store in a video with a time stamp on it that was only two minutes after the last shot was fired. That shot was made at 2:52 pm and his truck was seen  going by at 2:54 pm. Now, the drive from the shop to the store is 4.2 miles and supposedly takes eleven minutes according to Google. I test drove that road in a sports car and I was able to cut the time in half.

I was unable to learn from the stuff I read on the Internet whether the detectives had double-checked the accuracy of the clock associated with the video; if the time was off by a few minutes, this could disqualify the alibi of the last customer. However, the time would have to be quite a bit off because it took me around five minutes to drive like a hellion in a small sports car and I had to time leaving the parking lot just before I saw a car coming, so I could pull out in front of it and hope to get a clear road all the way to the store with no slow boat in front of me or anyone pulling on to the road and ruining my speedy run. In fact, it took me a dozen runs to get lucky enough to have no traffic impede me and get my speed down to five minutes. The last customer/person-of-interest was driving an old truck which was pulling a motorcycle, so unless the clock was seriously off (by at least five or six minutes), there is no way he could have made it down the road that quickly. However, the clock should still have been checked so that this man could have been solidly eliminated as a suspect and he wasn't.

Although this would be my second-in-line person-of-interest, I think his alibi could hold, the credit card swipe with his name makes it rather unlikely that he would then commit the homicides, and, although he was a bit annoyed, there is nothing in particular that makes me think he had enough motive to kill everyone there, starting with Beverly Guy.

Now, to my Number One person-of-interest, Noel Lee. Again, I will state that I have no proof from what I read on the Internet that there is evidence to arrest and convict this man. He is only a person-of-interest to me and, in the eyes of the Sheriff's Department, not a person-of-interest at all. How this can be mystifies me. Even if he is innocent of the crime, he should have been investigated and eliminated because he was, as I read on the Internet and you can actually read this on the Internet and even see him say so in Geraldo's video, that he was the one to discover the bodies and make the 911 call. The only reason I mention his name here is because he willingly did so with his appearance on television which means he was not attempting to keep his identity a secret.

The first reason Noel Lee must be a person-of-interest is because he was the one to discover the bodies. As we have seen in many crimes, often the perpetrator shows up on the scene to "find the bodies" because that way. he can have an excuse for being seen there in case he was indeed seen there (or his vehicle was seen there or in the area) and, if he is worried his fingerprints are there or he has blood on his clothing, he can say he touched things when he arrived or he touched the bodies in an attempt to check on their condition or do CPR. To be clear, from what I read on the Internet, Noel Lee, who discovered the bodies, did not have blood on his person or clothing and he did not touch the bodies. He only touched the phone in the business and there is no information available as to whether his fingerprints were found anywhere (supposedly only the fingerprints of the victims were found which is a bit odd considering this is a place full of customers). However, it is unlikely the killer touched anything anyway as this all went down very quickly. The only  places he might have touched would have been the outside door and the swinging doors between the front showroom and the back work area. He may have been wearing gloves.

The second reason Noel Lee should be a person-of-interest is because he has no alibi that I know of (from what I read on the Internet). He phoned the business from his home phone and spoke to Beverly Guy about picking up some tickets. As I read on the Internet, that call was placed at 2:25 pm. The shootings took place around 2:50 pm with the last shot being fired at 2:52 pm. Lee placed the 911 call at 3:12.

Noel Lee's home is 11.4 miles from the shop. Again, Google states a rather slow drive with nearly thirty minutes required. Considering I halved the drive to the convenience store in my sports car, I find it highly likely Lee could drive the distance to the shop in his BMW in half that time or less considering he states, as I read on the Internet, that there were no other cars at all on the road on his way to the shop. If he left the house directly after hanging up the phone, he could have been in the store by the time the shootings went down.

From what I read on the Internet, Noel Lee's story changes from his first to his second interview and he says a number of things which are rather peculiar and raise red flags; this is another reason he should have been looked at more closely.

As I read on the Internet:

In his first interview he states: He tells Beverly Guy he is on his way to pick up the tickets, arrives at the store, and thinks his friends are playing a joke on him by lying in blood on the sidewalk in front of the store; then he stated, "I’m calling 911 and immediately went to the phone inside the front show room on the wall and called 911. She asked me if they was anybody down and I told her I see his mom down in the back showroom and she said is there anybody else down? I said I don’t know. I’m not walking into the back of this place. She said well go back outside and wait on 911 to arrive. So I walked back out front and waited on you guys to get here." He also states he hadn't been around the business within the last two weeks.

In his second interview, two years later, he states: " For some strange reason, I decided to take a shower instead of just throwing my clothes on and going up there." And he is talking to his girlfriend the entire time while he is driving. In fact, she tells him not to call 911 from across the street (or to use his cell phone) but tells him to go inside the business (where the killer might still be) to make the phone call. He claims she told him that "if you leave and somebody sees you leave, they are going to think you did it." So he steps over his friend's body that is blocking the door and goes in to make the 911 call. This time he claims he said something totally different to the operator, "I said I need to go see if the fourth person is here because they were normally four people here and she said do not go into that back room because you do not know who else is there." He also states he was at the business the previous weekend.

From what I read on the Internet, Lee states that he went inside without a gun because he wasn't thinking and thought if he could get help there quickly, he could save their lives. Yet, in his 911 call, he doesn't get around very quickly to requesting medical assistance; in fact, his whole demeanor is rather breezy. He also states that he looked to see if Brian Lucas's chest was moving up and down and he was going to give him CPR. Apparently, he never does and he says he never saw his chest move up and down during the time it took for the news helicopter to fly overhead.

There was twenty minutes from the time the last shot was fired until the 911 call leaving Noel Lee enough time to leave the scene, ditch a weapon and wash his hands (he had moonshine available in his vehicle and water is available nearby) and come back. A GSR test was listed (as I read on the Internet) but the results were not. Likewise, there was something about a polygraph but further details were not available. Lee has told others he passed one. No tickets were noted to be found inside Superbike nor on Lee (but it was not stated that his clothing or pockets or wallet or vehicle were examined). Lee states he could see the hands of Scott Ponder, yet this would have been impossible by the time he arrived as Ponder's hands were not visible due to the position he was expired in. 

Lee's behavior following the murders was considered odd by a number of people who felt he showed little sadness or concern over his friend's deaths. He claims in the second interview that I read on the Internet that he is on medication to keep him from "wigging out" and he has had seizures since the stress of his first marriage and short-term memory problems which causes him to forget things. Also, I read on the Internet, a curious bit of questioning about Lee having left the scene and come back which he said he was 100% positive he didn't do and "would put his hand on a Bible" to attest to that fact. As to his statement that he "for some strange reason" decided to take a shower, statement analysis of this wording indicates deception; first of all, it is odd Lee would decide to take a shower just to go pick up some tickets and take one at that time for no reason, which is exactly why he has to say "for some strange reason;" it is behavior that doesn't make sense. The only good reason a shower would be useful at that time is to delay his arrival at the shop until after the murders go down.

One more strange statement is useful to analyze; that Lee thought his friends were playing a trick on him  by pretending to be dead on the sidewalk and he saw them and told them, "Joke's over." In many crimes when a guilty party gives an odd statement in explanation of what they did or thought, what they are doing is using a previous event (because it did happen and then speaking of it is a sort of truthful thing) and moving it forward to another time or situation. My question would be, "Did someone tell Noel Lee, "Joke's over." And if so, what joke did they think it was?

A number of people state Lee had a falling out with Scott Ponder and Brian Lucas and was told not to come around the shop. Yet, he is supposedly picking up tickets that day from Scott. Just before the last customer leaves, that customer overhears Beverly Guy having a heated conversation with someone, he believes she is on the phone with because he doesn't hear another voice or see anyone else. This is exactly the time Noel Lee made his call to Guy. Twenty-five minutes later, Guy is the first one shot in the quadruple homicides.

I want to point out to those who think this might have been a professional hit: there was nothing particular professional about it. Eighteen rounds were fired to kill four people, a number of them completely missing their target. The shots were fired at relatively close range so an average person would have little trouble hitting their target (and, in spite of this, as I read on the Internet, the shooter missed Sherbert and the two escaping men a couple of times).  The victims were capped in the head only after they were immobile, so this didn't require much talent either. The killer left all the shell casings on the floor which meant he left evidence. This is not a brilliant crime nor an overly skilled one. It was simply opportunistic. No one saw the killer commit the crime and he got away with it.

From what I read on the Internet, there was no follow-up on Noel Lee, no phone records checked to see if he was on the phone with his girlfriend during the drive to Superbike, no serious interrogation, nothing of substance that indicates the detectives considered Lee a serious person-of-interest or even attempted to eliminate him through aggressive investigation.

Noel Lee just may be an oddly behaving fellow with the bad luck to come upon his friends just as they had been shot. But in almost nine years from the very first day, obvious persons-of-interest like Lee were ignored while one questionable person-of-interest got all the attention. This is an egregious failure of the Sheriff's Department to handle the case properly, if one can call this handling the case at all.

Almost no case so mishandled from the start has a prayer of making it to prosecution. Evidence that should have been located and confiscated early on is likely long gone. For a case with no DNA or fingerprints, the loss of time may be a justice killer. All we can hope now is that by my going public with all the information I have read on the Internet, someone with information and evidence will come forward and, by the miracle all the families hope for, justice can still be served. 

And, if it can't be, we need to work to make sure our law enforcement agencies receive better training, more funding, and have criminal profilers in place when the case is fresh so that egos and politics don't squash the input of these profilers or of private investigators who come in years later and find the case has been wrongly pursued. We need to insure that the families and citizens have the right to hold their police agencies accountable for their work product, that new laws are instituted - "Sunshine Laws" -laws that require cases to be reviewed by an independent panel after a specific number of years in order to ensure oversight of case handling and police honesty and professionalism. 

Something needs to be done. The failure of the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Department to solve a solvable crime for nearly a decade is not an anomaly in the world of criminal investigations. Cold case after cold case get shelved for similar failures and we are not doing a thing to change a system that is clearly not working.

 See also: Criminal Profilng Topic of the Day: I Read it on the Internet: Superbike Murders - Part Two, Criminal Profiling Topic of the Day: I Read it on the Internet: Superbike Murders - Part One

and  Criminal Profiling Topic of the Day: The Second Tragedy of the Superbike Motorsports Quadruple Murders 

Criminal Profiler Pat Brown

May 19, 2012

Pat Brown’s ONLY THE TRUTH

Harkening back to the writing styles of the earlier American authors – John Steinbeck, Harper Lee, and Carson McCullers, "Only the Truth" is a story of soul searching, a psychological mystery which examines the question, “Whom should one love and when should one quit doing so?” Billy Ray, a lonely and rather slow, uneducated African-American man living in the mountains of Arkansas, runs across a mysterious young woman at the railroad tracks. She asks to go home with him and Billy Ray takes her with him as she requests. He comes to love this woman, Charlene, unconditionally. She is the only woman he has ever loved, and life is finally good for Billy Ray. Then Charlene shoots the neighbor and burns down the neighbor’s house. His happy life destroyed, a confused and devastated Billy Ray is at a loss. Is the woman he loves “just a troubled girl” or a psychopathic killer? Billy Ray sets out on a quest to find the truth, only the truth, whether it leads him to be able to save Charlene from a death sentence or it frees him from her spell.

Criminal Profiling Topic of the Day: I Read it on the Internet: Superbike Murders - Part Two

The first place any profiler or detective should start in doing an analysis of a case is with the crime scene, not with gut feelings, tips, rumors, or even suspects. The crime scene tells us exactly what happened and often, why it happened, and then who most likely made it happen.

Sometimes the department will keep secret exactly how a crime went down in hopes that when they interview a possible suspect, that person will describe the scenario and, if it matches what actually happened, the detectives will have a good clue that this person knows more than the general public as to the crime elements. However, after almost nine years and no suspect in sight, the Superbike murders would be better served getting the truth out to the public and seeing what it shakes out. For this reason, I feel the forwarding of the case will be helped by an accurate description of what occurred. Also, since Sheriff Chuck Wright and the Department have repeatedly put forth a theory that is clearly not based on any evidence I read on the Internet and has had no problem laying out their version of the order of the shootings, I will follow their lead and do so as well.

To get an overview of the crime scene and Department's conclusions, you can view location of the scene and description of how they say it went down with this television offering by Geraldo Rivera.

The Spartanburg County Sheriff's Department is adamant from what I read on the Internet that the shooter came in the back bay door of the business shot Chris Sherbert first as he was cleaning up a motorcycle, then went through the swinging door into the shop and encountered Beverly Guy leaving the bathroom or the office and shot her, and then shot Brian Lucas and Scott Ponder as they tried to escape out the front door. As I read on the Internet, seventeen rounds were fired requiring a changing of clips. The Department has never explained or at least I never read it on the Internet just when the shooter did this in the midst of shooting the three in the front room and there is no explanation, if he had to change clips at that point, why the two men didn't escape further while he was doing so. They have never explained when the shooter shot them in the bodies and when he shot them in the head. They never explained why, if the shooter mixed his ammunition with eleven silver casings and seven brass (as I read on the Internet) and he shot the victims from the back of the store to the front, each of the victims ended up with a bullet in the head that had a brass casing (as I also read on the Internet).

I believe the Department's refusal to explain  (as I read on the Internet) that oddity lies with their need to develop a scenario that matches their theory that the unknown guy in the composite first went after the employee cleaning up the bike he was supposed to buy and then went after everyone else. Not that this makes great sense because if you come in the back way and start the shooting there, you are unaware of who is out front and by the time you get there, other customers may have come in. Besides, your anger should be with Scott Ponder and he should be the most important target and normally a killer would choose him to start with. Perhaps the thinking is that the perpetrator didn't want his vehicle seen so he parked in the back and came in that way and then went back that way to his vehicle. Nothing wrong with this theory and, in fact, it still could be true if the guy walked past Christ Sherbert to the front, did his shootings, and then return to get Sherbert. But, the detectives, from what I read on the Internet refuse to even allow for this possibility and I think this stubbornness lies in their desire to make Sherbert the first victim of the guy in the composite and, in doing so, choose to ignore the ballistics evidence. But it is terribly important as it shows exactly what the shooter did and why as you will see.

From what I read on the Internet, I propose this scenario of how the shootings went down:

The behaviors of the victims clearly indicate Beverly Guy was shot first. If the killer had been intent on shooting Ponder or Lucas first and pulled out a gun in the front room, he would likely have shot the men where they stood considering how close the shooter was to these two men. However, the killer shot them only after they were in motion, running toward the front door in order to escape. Something clearly set them off and this would be the shooting of Guy. Once that shot (Shot One, Silver Casing 19) was fired directly at Guy’s chest, the shooter being face to face with her, the men made a break for it (Shots Two and Three, Silver Casing 20 and Projectiles at 9 and 10). The shooter did not stop to shoot Guy in the head as his other intended targets were bolting for the door. The next shot hit Brian Lucas in the backside causing him to collapse in the door, with Scott Ponder leaping over him; then the shots to Ponder’s back took him down to the ground.

At this point the shooter knew there was one more person he needed to deal with and he turned and went back through the swinging doors into the work area. There was music on in both the front and back so it is questionable as to whether Sherbert actually knew the others had been shot down. It is possible he did hear the shots but by the time he realized what was going on, the shooter had already entered the back of the shop. The shooter fired as soon as he came through the swinging door approximately from the area of three bikes to the left of Casings 21 and 22. The trajectory is in perfect line with the back storage room where the bullets went through the boxes. The shooter’s position would be in the general area where the crescent wrench with the black handle was found should Sherbert have thrown it at the shooter in a desperate attempt to stop him. This evidence is proof that Sherbert did see him coming and that the shooter was coming at him from the swinging doors. He was the final victim, not the first victim. Sherbert likely was ducking behind the motorcycle he was working on as soon as he saw the killer coming toward him with a gun.

At this point in time, the killer ran out of ammunition and changed clips. He then moved in on Sherbert who had no way to stand up from behind the motorcycle and run out the bay door without getting shot. The shooter came up over him and shot him in the shoulder and chest and then capped him with a shot to the head. 

The shooter then returned to the front of the business to finish off his victims. He shot Guy once in the head, then Lucas once in the head. It is during this time (or while the shooter was in the back) I believe Ponder, still alive but knowing he was not going to make it, dialed 33 on his phone and pressed send, attempting to reach his wife with a final goodbye and, perhaps, an attempt to identify the shooter to her. Ponder appears to have pushed himself up on his knees with his left arm and dialed his phone with his free right hand and pressed the send button at 2:52. This was likely very within a minute or seconds before the shooter capped him in the head.  I do not agree with the theory I read on the Internet that Ponder dialed the phone number while running in a panic over his friend and through the glass front door. I have attempted to recreate this scenario and found it impossible to hit the three buttons on the phone while in this kind of motion. The shots in the head of all four victims apparently ended their lives within seconds as there is no evidence of movement after the last four shots were fired. 

At 3:12 PM, the emergency phone call to 911 comes in from Noel Lee.

This scenario is very important in determining suspects. The scenario shows exactly when the shootings occurred and the time it took for them to go down and what the likely motive was. I will be discussing motives and persons-of-interest based on this scenario an all I have read on the Internet in my next blog post.

 See also: Criminal Profiling Topic of the Day: I Read it on the Internet: Superbike Murders - Part One

and  Criminal Profiling Topic of the Day: The Second Tragedy of the Superbike Motorsports Quadruple Murders

Criminal Profiler Pat Brown

May 18, 2012

Pat Brown’s ONLY THE TRUTH

Harkening back to the writing styles of the earlier American authors – John Steinbeck, Harper Lee, and Carson McCullers, "Only the Truth" is a story of soul searching, a psychological mystery which examines the question, “Whom should one love and when should one quit doing so?” Billy Ray, a lonely and rather slow, uneducated African-American man living in the mountains of Arkansas, runs across a mysterious young woman at the railroad tracks. She asks to go home with him and Billy Ray takes her with him as she requests. He comes to love this woman, Charlene, unconditionally. She is the only woman he has ever loved, and life is finally good for Billy Ray. Then Charlene shoots the neighbor and burns down the neighbor’s house. His happy life destroyed, a confused and devastated Billy Ray is at a loss. Is the woman he loves “just a troubled girl” or a psychopathic killer? Billy Ray sets out on a quest to find the truth, only the truth, whether it leads him to be able to save Charlene from a death sentence or it frees him from her spell.

Criminal Profiling Topic of the Day: I Read it on the Internet: Superbike Murders - Part One

Almost nine years has gone by since four people were brutally gunned down at Superbike Motorsports in Chesnee, South Carolina in 2003. And in all those years, the only thing the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Department will tell the family and community as to what they are looking at is one man who was seen in the business prior to the homicides that no one knows who he is. This is their one and only suspect in the murders. And, yes, I can call him their one and only suspect because Sheriff Chuck Wright clearly stated this to the press when he said, "This fellow will tell us exactly what happened in the shop that day."

Now, since Sheriff Chuck Wright surely always tells the truth and is always straight with the citizens of his county, what does that statement tell you? You don't need to be a profiler or statement analyst to interpret those words. Sheriff Wright is telling us the man in the composite was involved in the homicides either as the shooter or a co-conspirator. And because he is telling us this, then by default,  he is eliminating the person I believe all the evidence that I read on the Internet points to.


And why does Sheriff Wright know that the man in the composite is involved in the crime? Is it because he has any evidence supporting his involvement? Absolutely not. From all the evidence that I read on the Internet, there was not one witness to the crime to say that the man in the composite was involved nor were any statements about this man in the composite made that would indicate anyone saw him elsewhere tossing a gun or speeding off in a car and no one has heard a man of this description talking about involvement in the crime. In fact, the only time the man in the composite was seen or heard was in the store that day and the only one to say about anything about him is the man who gave the description for the composite (which after eight years he decided should be changed because it wasn't quite right). And what was this suspicious man doing? Looking at a motorcycle, trying to decide if he was going to buy it. What a crime.


So, what makes this man the one and only suspect for Sheriff Chuck Wright? I read on the Internet that if the man had no involvement in the crime, he would have come forward and admitted he was the one in Superbike that day shopping for a motorcycle because folks in South Carolina, unlike other places in the country, would always come forward if they were innocent, even if they had a criminal record and distrusted cops. And, because this man never gave the police a call, it means he is involved in the crime.


Also, I read on the Internet, it was terribly suspicious that the owner didn't have his name written down on the paperwork, like the man was hiding his identity. Did the Sheriff ever consider that perhaps this customer was being giving the hard sell?

"Hey, why don't I get the paperwork started and the bike cleaned up for you and then you can come back and sign everything?"

And, then, either the guy realized he couldn't afford the bike and decided not to come back and buy it or he heard about the murders and had no reason to come back. Once he saw his face being shown on television as a person of suspicion, he decided (wisely in my opinion considering the Sheriff is claiming he is involved in the crime without a shred of evidence and I know this because I read about it on the Internet), to pretend he never entered Motorbike Supersports that day.

MOST IMPORTANT:  What if that guy left Superbike, went down the street to buy a soda, came back and saw the killer leaving the crime scene? Now, he will never come forward. Thank you, Sheriff Wright, for impeding the investigation by totally scaring off a possibly excellent witness.


Now, to analyzing motive: why would this man in the composite check out the place, leave, and come back a short time later and blow everyone away? What was the motive? From what I read on the Internet, the motive the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Department has assigned to this crime is price gouging. Yes, supposedly some guy got cheated out of some money, perhaps via an Internet transaction with the shop, and decided to kill everyone there over the issue. Now, I also read on the Internet that there was no evidence of anyone angrily communicating with owner or anyone else in the shop in the days, weeks, or even months prior to the murder about being ripped off as on would expect if someone's anger was escalating to the point of a coldbloodedly murdering everyone in the business. Also, one would expect someone furious about being cheated out of money to steal his money back from the business or take something else of worth but, from what I read on the Internet, nothing was taken from inside the business.


So where did Spartanburg County Sheriff's Department come up with this idea of price gouging as a motive? I read on the Internet it seems like they just thought that could be a possible reason for the murders. The only other motive that I read on the Internet they seemed to have considered is something to do with drugs although I also have read on the Internet that there is no evidence that drugs had a thing to do with these murders. The detectives may be open to receiving all sorts of tips and leads concerning price gouging, drug dealing, and any other sort of possible motive leading to homicide (as they should), and they may follow them up (as they should), but, I can tell you from what I read on the Internet, that there is only one person-of-interest with a solid motive and to whom the evidence points (as I have determined by reading stuff on the Internet) and he is not the man in the composite. Note: I am not saying that the man in the composite could not be involved in the crime or shouldn't be investigated. I am simply saying there is no evidence linking that man in the composite to the crime and he should not be considered the top person-of-interest nor identified as a perpetrator as the Sheriff has done.


And while the person-of interest I am alluding to may not be guilty of the crimes, he certainly should be investigated and eventually charged if sufficient evidence supports charges or he should be eliminated as a suspect if the investigation determines he is not involved in the murders. I can tell you without question having read the information on the Internet that this man was never properly investigated nor eliminated; he has no alibi for the time of the murders, he was deceptive in his interviews, he had the opportunity and a credible motive.


If nothing else, I can tell you from what I have read on the Internet, he is a far stronger suspect than that man in the composite that Sheriff Chuck Young keeps using as his fall guy for a poorly handled and failed investigation.

See also: Criminal Profiling Topic of the Day: The Second Tragedy of the Superbike Motorsports Quadruple Murders


Criminal Profiler Pat Brown


May 17, 2012

Pat Brown’s ONLY THE TRUTH

Harkening back to the writing styles of the earlier American authors – John Steinbeck, Harper Lee, and Carson McCullers, "Only the Truth" is a story of soul searching, a psychological mystery which examines the question, “Whom should one love and when should one quit doing so?” Billy Ray, a lonely and rather slow, uneducated African-American man living in the mountains of Arkansas, runs across a mysterious young woman at the railroad tracks. She asks to go home with him and Billy Ray takes her with him as she requests. He comes to love this woman, Charlene, unconditionally. She is the only woman he has ever loved, and life is finally good for Billy Ray. Then Charlene shoots the neighbor and burns down the neighbor’s house. His happy life destroyed, a confused and devastated Billy Ray is at a loss. Is the woman he loves “just a troubled girl” or a psychopathic killer? Billy Ray sets out on a quest to find the truth, only the truth, whether it leads him to be able to save Charlene from a death sentence or it frees him from her spell.

Criminal Profiling Topic of the Day: The Second Tragedy of the Superbike Motorsports Quadruple Murders

The Victims of the Motorbike Motorsports Murders

Eight years ago on November 6, 2003 four people were gunned down in cold blood in Chesnee, South Carolina in the middle of an ordinary work day at the Superbike Motorsports, a shop that sold motorcycles. The murdered were the owner, Scott Ponder, his mother Beverly Guy, his best friend and right hand business man Brian Lucas, and a new employee who was cleaning up bikes in the back, Chris Sherbert. Someone came into the business shot them all dead in the middle of the day when there were no witnesses in the building to identify the shooter.

Zero progress has been made in solving this crime. Why? In my opinion, not because it is unsolvable or difficult to solve or because that one person won't come forward and identify himself (the man police claim is the key to the crime, in fact, the man they claim is involved in the crime, the man they have been showing a composite of, albeit now an altered composite, for year upon year). It won't be solved because the police refuse to believe the evidence in front of them or refuse to investigate it for some reason. I know because I spent a week in Spartanburg County, South Carolina working with the Sheriff's department, going through the files, analyzing every photo and bit of evidence, and running an experiment to test how long it took to drive from the shop to a convenience store that would help rule in or rule out one suspect. I have read all the interviews.

After I left, the police told the family I was just a celebrity whose profile wasn't worth anything. Yet, they refuse to show that profile to the family and tell them what is wrong with it. They won't reveal any of what I said because it is damning to their reputation, their analysis and handling of the investigation. I can't tell you what I came up with, what the evidence shows, because I signed a contract that states I will not release the specifics of the evidence. And because of this I have remained quiet for years hoping that they would move forward with the profile analysis and investigate properly. However, ever since AMW rolled into town and harped yet again on that composite of some unknown custom/person-of-interest again, I have just been steaming. What a bloody sham.

I can't tell you what the evidence is but I can tell you this. None of the four murder victims were involved in any drug operation. The motive for the crime wasn't some kind of drug deal gone bad. There is no reason to believe drugs were ever at the business nor hidden in motorcycles coming in and out of the business, so this isn't a falling out over drugs.

Nothing was taken from the business, so this wasn't a robbery. Nothing was damaged in the business, so this wasn't retaliation. The police got the order of the shooting wrong because they misunderstood the ballistics; the guy in the back, Chris Sherbert, was not shot first. The way the shooting went down shows me that the murders were personal and the was a specific reason the four were shot in the order in which they were shot. Also, because nothing was touched in the shop shows me that the murders were not about money. This was the crime of a psychopath who had a falling out with certain people at the business.

Is there someone who fits this description who should be known to the police? You bet there is. Not only is he known but he was interviewed twice and his statements are off-the-wall for bizarre and deceptive. Did he have an alibi for the time of the crime? No. Could he have committed the crime? Yes. When I showed the police exactly what was peculiar about his statements, where he was clearly lying, exactly how he could have committed the crime and why, what was their response? They just said they didn't think it was him.

What did they tell the family? They told him they had investigated the man thoroughly. That is a blatant untruth because I know from the files that the man's cock-and-bull story was never followed up. Why? I have no idea. Why not now? Probably because it would make them look bad to suddenly change course and state they ignored someone who should have been investigated right in the beginning.

Scared schmuck who is NEVER coming forward

I rarely speak out against a police department after I work with them but I am to the point of disgust with being slandered by them to the family and their refusal to come clean with their failure to solve this case in eight years and why. I hope some media outlet and the family finally get fed up with this smoke-and-mirrors game being played by the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Department and get to the bottom of this crime in which the motive is still a mystery.Like hell it is. If you follow the evidence and the obvious person-of-interest it becomes clear as day. If you keep trying to pin the crime on some poor scared schmuck who Sheriff Wright claims should not be worried about identifying himself in spite of the fact he states, "This fellow will tell us exactly what happened in the shop that day,"  you won't get very far.

Actually, all Sheriff Wright has to do to solve this crime is follow the evidence. Heck, he could even watch Geraldo's videotaped interview and get a pretty good start.

Criminal Profiler Pat Brown

May 15, 2012

Pat Brown’s ONLY THE TRUTH

Harkening back to the writing styles of the earlier American authors – John Steinbeck, Harper Lee, and Carson McCullers, "Only the Truth" is a story of soul searching, a psychological mystery which examines the question, “Whom should one love and when should one quit doing so?” Billy Ray, a lonely and rather slow, uneducated African-American man living in the mountains of Arkansas, runs across a mysterious young woman at the railroad tracks. She asks to go home with him and Billy Ray takes her with him as she requests. He comes to love this woman, Charlene, unconditionally. She is the only woman he has ever loved, and life is finally good for Billy Ray. Then Charlene shoots the neighbor and burns down the neighbor’s house. His happy life destroyed, a confused and devastated Billy Ray is at a loss. Is the woman he loves “just a troubled girl” or a psychopathic killer? Billy Ray sets out on a quest to find the truth, only the truth, whether it leads him to be able to save Charlene from a death sentence or it frees him from her spell.

Criminal Profiling Topic of the Day: Hurray! The Madeleine McCann Case is Near to being Solved!

"[We are] seeking to bring closure to the case," Detective Chief Inspector Andy Redwood told the BBC. "I am satisfied that the systems and processes that we are bringing to this set of circumstances will give us the best opportunity to find those investigative opportunities that we can then present to our colleagues in Portugal."

And, clearly, those 195 new leads culled from a years worth of work by the MET's 37-man team should indeed inspire the Portuguese police to reopen the case and get to work following up these valuable clues (provided to me by an unnamed unreliable source) which surely will result in the recovery of a living Madeleine McCann who can then be united with her long-suffering parents whose own five-year-long investigation using private detectives and reportedly spending millions in donated money has been a miserable failure.

But, now it is hoped that 195 new clues unearthed by the stellar British law enforcement agency previously overlooked by the bumbling Portuguese police will now be further investigated by this incompetent bunch of tossers.

A Sampling of the  New Clues (provided to me by an unnamed unreliable source)

1. A Spanish woman saw a blonde child
2. An Italian woman saw a blond child
3. A Portuguese man saw a blond child
4. A British couple saw a blond child
5. A French couple saw a blond child
6. A Spanish woman heard a rumor
7. An Italian woman heard a rumor
8. A Portuguese man heard a rumor
9. A British couple heard a rumor
10. A French couple heard a rumor
11. A Spanish woman saw a creepy man
12. An Italian woman saw a creepy man
13. A Portuguese man saw a creepy man
14. A British couple saw a creepy man
15. A French couple saw a creepy man
16. A Spanish woman saw a creepy woman
17. An Italian woman saw a creepy woman
18. A Portuguese man saw a creepy woman
19. A British couple saw a creepy woman
20. A French couple saw a creepy woman

I am hoping the readers of this blog will see that there is much hope now that the case of missing Madeleine McCann will be reopened, quickly solved, and the child returned home to her family.

Cost of finding 185 totally useless clues? 3.2 million dollars of UK taxpayer money

Worth to the McCann media spin? Priceless 


 Criminal Profiler Pat Brown

Criminal Profiling Topic of the Day: For God's Sake, For All our Sakes, Stop Overplaying the Race Card

(Blogs and Websites who want to encourage people of all races to care for each other, to raise their children with understanding and love for all, to teach them to be good citizens, and to keep them as safe as possible - feel free to repost this article on your site as long as it is the full article and there is a link back to The Daily Profiler and the links included within remain operable)


I woke up this morning to this article in USA today and it just really ticked me off. As everyone knows, I have spent a great deal of the last weeks doing commentary on the Trayvon Martin case, trying to keep focus on the evidence and not jump to conclusions on guilt. I urged people to remain calm when analyzing the case, to realize that we do not yet know all the facts. We do not know if Zimmerman is a racist or racially profiled Trayvon. What I concluded was that Zimmerman clearly profiled a young man as "up to no good" when had no proof of that as Trayvon was not in the act of committing a crime. It appears Zimmerman continued to pursue Trayvon against police dispatcher advice. Zimmerman moved aggressively towards Trayvon while carrying a firearm. If at that point, a fight ensued, regardless of who started it, Trayvon would be the one standing his ground and Zimmerman has no right to pull a gun out and shoot a man because he is losing a fistfight. Only if Zimmerman turned away from Trayvon and walked away from him, was followed and assaulted, would Zimmerman's claim of self-defense be valid.

But, now to what has gotten my goat this morning. Here are some statements from this article that pissed me off.

      Years before the killing of Trayvon Martin grabbed the nation’s attention, the teen’s father warned him that his race could make him a target of violence.

       The advice Tracy Martin gave his black son, that people veiled by racism and prejudices might see him as suspicious or violent, is a common and continuous warning in many black families, parents and experts say. In the aftermath of Trayvon’s death, more families are having “the talk,” teaching sons to be aware of their race, avoid confrontations with authority figures, and to remain calm in situations even if their rights are violated.

      “I’ve always let him know we as African Americans get stereotyped,” Tracy Martin, Trayvon’s father told USA TODAY three weeks after his son’s death. “I told him that society is cruel.”

and these statements from others to back up Mr. Martin's comments:


Reggie Bridges, a father of two young black boys, sees the Trayvon Martin case as an example of the type of racial profiling he has warned his sons about for years.
“You stand out from the norm,” Bridges, of Silver Spring, Md., said he often tells his children. “I try to heighten their awareness of what’s going on in the world.”


Dionne Bensonsmith, 40, of Claremont, Calif., started talking to her first son, Jonah, now 8, about race when he was 5 and 6. The youngster had already started saying “all police aren’t your friends” and pointing out that officers stopped a lot of black people in their small Iowa city, she said.
“I had the talk of how police target people around race,” said Bensonsmith, a professor at Scripps College. “I said if that ever happens to you, you have to remain respectful, you have to remain very calm.”

She and many parents see “the talk” as evolving lessons on racial consciousness that will cover more topics as children grow. But there are challenges to teaching kids to live within racial injustices.

“It’s really heartbreaking,” said Bensonsmith, who also has another son, Akim Shklyaro, 2. “Sometimes I get really pissed off. Sometimes I don’t want to do it. I feel like I’m crushing some sort of potential in him.”

And, finally, this statement from a white parent of biracial children:

When Steve Baker, who is white, decided to talk to his two half-black sons, now 25 and 20, he admits he struggled to understand their place in society. He relied on his black wife, Pamela, and friends he made through an interracial family group to learn about what his sons may encounter.

“There are certainly instances where they were identified by simply what they look like and perceived as a threat and ran into negative behavior based on that,” said Baker, a university administrator who lives in Minneapolis. “There’s real danger for young men of color in our society. … As a white person, I didn’t grow up having to think about that.”

Okay. I guess I completely failed my two biracial children and my one black son. I never gave them the race talk. I never "relied" on my black husband to lecture my children on the realities of being nonwhite in America and I think he forgot to get around to giving them that speech. Neither of us bothered to warn our children about all the racism that was coming their way, of the racial profiling they were going to experience, of the negative encounters with police that were going to be unavoidable. We failed to prepare them at all.

Guess what? They never experienced any major racism nor have they had bad encounters with the police. They grew up with friends of all races and cultural backgrounds and dated people of all races as did, it seems, many of their friends. If they encountered racism, they understood that some people have issues; they didn't live with a chip on their shoulder assuming everyone was judging them based on race. And they didn't see everything around them as race based. Maybe they got that from me.

I once was driving across the Canadian border with my kids (no husband with me) and the border guard looked in my car and seeing nonwhite children, asked me, "Are they yours?" I gave him a mock shocked look and said, "Oh my God, I always thought they were." He cracked up and rolled his eyes and waved me through. I could have gotten mad over pretty much nothing. Was he accusing me of ferrying illegals into the country? I guess I could have looked at it that way. I could have gotten mad that just because my children weren't white, he was making assumptions that they couldn't be mine and that I was committing a crime. I could have become enraged at "racial profiling." I could have started border marches with other white parents with children of color to end racism from the border patrol. Oh, please, it was just a guy who profiled a situation that he could have been right about and I was not so sensitive I couldn't recognize that.

Likewise, at the park, when occasionally people of all colors asked me when if I was babysitting those three kids with me. I didn't get mad; I just said they were my kids and we had a nice conversation.


Once a church lady wouldn't let my black son out the door in spite of the fact he kept insisting that the approaching white lady was really his mother. We had a good laugh about that at the dinner table later with us replaying the incident, "But that is my mother! Please let me go! Let me go!!!". I didn't give him a speech about how horrible the woman was and how he was going to have to suffer forever because his mother was of a different race than him.

If everyone would stop overplaying the race card when it is unnecessary, we could get rid of a lot of racism from people of all backgrounds. Just because someone is ignorant of the fact Jamaica is not in Africa, does not mean they are a racist. Just because someone thinks country music is redneck and rap music is ghetto doesn't mean they are racist. Being overly sensitive about every designation and choice of label makes you a fanatic.

Finally, I did do what every parent should do with their children. I gave them lectures about their behavior and how society would perceive them. I taught them dressing like thugs would get them profiled as thugs in all neighborhoods and by all police officers regardless of the profiler's racial background. I taught my daughter that dressing like a ho would get her called a ho by all races and by both sexes. I told them them they had a responsibility to follow safety rules if and when the police stopped them because the police were scared of everyone they stopped because anyone could pull a weapon out in a flash and kill them. I taught them how using polite language and not reacting with nasty language to any situation would prevent misconceptions and bad altercations from occurring. In other words, I taught my children that they, yes, they had a responsibility to look and act like upstanding ladies and gentlemen when they went out of their homes and moved among other citizens. It is something all parents should teach their children regardless of their own race or their children's races.

I don't know exactly how Trayvon Martin was acting the evening he was profiled by George Zimmerman. I don't know if he was walking like a thug or talking like a thug. I am not saying that Trayvon deserves anything that happened to him (unless he truly attacked George Zimmerman from behind). What Zimmerman did in pursuing Trayvon was wrong since he was not a police officer and it was not his duty to approach anyone who was not in the act of committing a crime. But, hoodie or no hoodie, the  perception people will get of your son or daughter,  black or white or Asian or whatever, is the image he or she projects to others when in public. I really don't care if Trayvon was sporting a gold grill on his teeth and acting gangsta on his Facebook page; I don't care if he tweeted questionable crap to his friends. But, if he took that attitude and presentation to the streets, then that is what people on the streets see. Maybe some folks will only see a kid being a kid but others will see exactly what the presentation presents; a thug they should be wary of and race will have little to do with it.

When children leave the house, they should be dressed and act in a manner that does not bring suspicion or disrespect on them. This is a simple rule. We all have to watch our behavior and conduct in public locations. I don't know the people out there or what might upset them, so upstanding behavior is the requirement and one should have respect for whatever local culture one is in. My daughter and I wore hijab in Egypt and covered our arms and legs. We had no problems. We didn't run around half naked and then whine we were harassed. Conversely, wearing a burqa in America makes people here very uncomfortable and you can't blame Americans for not feeling warm and fuzzy when they see a woman dressed in such an attire. You don't walk into a bar in the south and tell them they are backwards and that the north is a much better place if you don't want to start a brawl. You should never say, "You people," if you don't want to draw a line between you and whomever you are conversing with. Commonsense, respect for others, and and not being a self-centered, arrogant fool make the world safer for everyone.

Parents should give their children "the talk," but they shouldn't give them the "race talk" unless they want their children to view the world as "us" and "them" and continue this whole foolish "people just can't get along" type of thinking.

What all children need to learn from their parents is that "we" need to do our part in caring for each other and there is no other group than "we."

Criminal Profiler Pat Brown

My new mystery novel, Only the Truth with African-American protagonist, Sweet Billy Ray, is now available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble. and Smashwords for just $2.99. If you are tired of all the talk about racial problems, Only the Truth is a story of love, faith, and compassion and nothing to do with racial problems at all; just a man, a simple and lonely man, who loves his girl, Charlene (who just happens to be white). But, Charlene, the mysterious drifter he has lived with and loved for two years, has just gone and shot the neighbor and he doesn't know what he to do about her. Love her still? Run like hell? Only the Truth is the story of a man who is willing to search for truth, only the truth, whether it helps him save his lady from a death sentence or sets him free from her spell.

FOR ONCE, THE TRUTH ABOUT GETTING BOOK PUBLICITY

Montel and I discuss the Madeleine McCann case

by 

Criminal Profiler
PAT BROWN






(Blogs and Websites for Writers - feel free to repost this article on your site as long as it is the full article and there is a link back to The Daily Profiler and links included within remain operable)

           

I am going to make your day, self-published and traditionally published struggling authors! You can stop wishing you were me because, in spite of the fact Nancy Grace and Dr. Drew both mentioned my new mystery novel, Only the Truth, when I was on their shows last week, I didn’t see any dramatic jump in book sales. So, stop worrying if you aren’t on television and you can’t afford a publicist to get you on. I do television at least three times a week and I can tell you, while constant visibility does keep one’s name and book out there, getting on a television show doesn’t mean you are going to become an overnight bestseller, well, unless you are on Oprah which you can’t be anymore.

And I am sure you are likely discouraged by all those bestselling authors who seem to come out of nowhere and hit it big; let me clear that up. One, some of those are lying like dogs and are simply giving themselves the “bestselling author” label and claiming they sold way more of their books than they actually did. Proving someone is a liar is pretty difficult when it comes to questions of success in the book market.  Others who actually achieve success may not get it the way they would like us to believe, by having a great literary accomplishment.

Now, before I get successful authors throwing heavy objects at my head and calling me “jealous” or “bitter,”  - I do already have two traditionally published books, Killing for Sport (Phoenix 2008) and The Profiler; My Life Hunting Serial Killers and Psychopaths (Hyperion 2010) and two more traditionally published books coming out in the next year, How to Save Your Daughter’s Life (HCI Sept 2012) and The Murder of Cleopatra (Prometheus Feb 2013) - let me state that they are some fabulous writers out there and they have become well-known and  lauded for their outstanding books and the merit of their writing. I am inspired, impressed, and proud of each of these authors who have reached such heights through wonderful work and effort.  I love reading their works and I recommend their books to my friends and I wish them continued best of luck.

But, a good portion of selling authors are not making money due to the brilliance of their word-craft or even tolerably good storytelling; many are mediocre at best, and some are downright abysmal and you wonder how they hell they are selling books by the thousands each day or week while you are struggling to sell one per month. It is this group I want self-pubbed authors to understand so they can realize they are not failing to sell their books because they aren’t good.  I also want struggling authors to stop believing a lot of the rot published in anything titled close to  “How to Sell Millions of Your Self-Published Book ” or “100 Top Tricks to Get Your Book on the Bestselling List.” Some of the books are making good money off of desperate authors by selling them an illusion (let that author write a book that doesn’t have to do with selling books and watch him crash and burn) and some of them can’t even sell a book about selling books!  So at no cost to you at all, no price of a book or a seminar, I will give you the scoop right here.  Actually, if I told you the truth in a book or a seminar, no one would invite me back because no one pays for giving out bad news. Not all bad news, but enough bad news that I can’t sell what I have to tell – I am not out to make bucks by shamelessly motivating you with bullshit. Okay, so how do authors sell books?

Well,let’s take a moment to examine authors who are lucky enough to get an agent (I have been fortunate enough to have four and very happy with my present literary agent, Claire Gerus, who just got me my two last book deals) and that agent gets you a publishing deal with the average advance (read: small).  If you want to make really great sales, you have got to get in the front of the bookstore. You need to have your book cover facing out in a nice column on a front rack with a poster next to it. If your book is displayed at the entrance with pomp and circumstance, your publisher is guaranteeing you to make a shitload of cash on your book and they are paying, yes, paying for that prime real estate. But, if your publisher gave you a small advance, he isn’t spending a fortune on a bad gamble, so no front-of-bookstore for you. You can be confident, as crap, if you are not Dan Brown or another hot selling author or an industry insider who saw more than five zeros on their advance check (not counting those with a decimal point in between), your book is not going to be there. It is going to be on the back shelves with the other tens of thousands of books serving as wallpaper for the front runners. Yes, there are a few slightly cheaper paid spots in a bin near the front of the store or on the ends of the racks that might make you a few dollars, but don’t hold your breath that those spots are going to throw you onto The New York Times Bestseller list. 

So, most of you, if you have a traditional publisher and aren’t already famous, you will be on the racks of doom for about six weeks at which time your book will be summarily executed if it hasn’t sold its two copies by then. Most disappear rapidly, a few hang around a number of months, and there are those that eke out an existence in certain genres in a moderate way.

 Book launch? What’s that? Book tours? No way. Publicity from the publisher? Maybe a tad. Pretty much you are on your own when it comes to book promotion, unless you are Dan Brown or a hot selling author or already famous and then you get fifty top book reviews and a couple hundred good reviews from Amazon Vine before the book goes on sale, NPR, lots of big TV, a massive radio tour, full-page ads, book tours, parties, and global attention. But I repeat myself.  What happens to regular published authors is that they are told to get a publicist and to spend about $4000/month for at least six months to make sure their book sells. And the publicist gets the author on some local radio shows, a few small television shows, and gets them book reviews on a few blogs and in a few small regional magazines.  They send out a lot of press releases that bring in very little interest because you are not Dan Brown or a hot selling author or already famous (damn…did it again). Then, instead of making $5000 on a published book, an author can lose $19,000 because that kind of limited publicity isn’t going to rock the buying public’s world especially if they can’t even find your stupid book in the bookstore. So, if you are going to hire a book publicist, make sure they have some level of reasonable book visibility to improve, that they aren't charging you to move your book from ten sales to twenty sales per month.

But, wait! You get an opportunity to have a book signing at your local Barnes and Noble. Awesome! You invite all your friends and business associates and you are the star for a couple of hours, selling and signing twenty books. You are on your way! You manage to finagle another book signing in a small bookstore out of town by fifty miles and at that one, you stand there like a dope in front of a bunch of empty chairs. Finally, a few people come up. Two want to rest their feet and eat their sandwiches and the other one wants to ask you how to sell books (like you know). Humiliated, you skulk out of the store with your publicity material and never do another signing. 

So, why did the first one go so well and the second one feel like an exercise in masochism? Well, the first one was your Tupperware party. The Barnes and Noble manager knew, since you are a local author, you would bring all your friends in to buy books, mostly other people’s books. They get a free event and new customers and you get a moment in the sun. Out of town, reality stinks.

(disclaimer: Not all publishers and publicists follow these general rules, certainly no one I work with).

Feeling goooood now? Okay, that is the raw deal for the majority of authors published by traditional publishing houses. Now, to the worse news. The self-publishing world.  Lets’ say you do what those experts say (the ones you just wasted $9.99 per click buying their ebook of tips) and you have an awesome cover (that you paid for), a manuscript that was well-edited (that you paid for),  and a great story (that you gave up paid work to spend time writing), and you are ready to go. You get help with formatting it for Kindle (which you pay for) and up it goes to take its joyful place among 4,000,000 other hopefuls, a needle in a haystack unless you GPS someone to your book's exact location.  And there the bugger will sit while you spend another $50 buying five more ebooks on how to promote your darling. So you Tweet and you Facebook and you get on message boards, send out postcards, get on some small blogs, and send hundreds of emails…..and you sell one book per month. Desperation and depression set in; you wonder what you are doing wrong. Why are other self-published authors becoming millionaires and you are getting nowhere? You have read some of their books and you think most of them suck eggs; you would never buy a second one of their tripe. Some of these big sellers even have more one-star Amazon reviews than five-star ones. What are they doing right and you doing wrong?

Give yourself a break. Big self-published Kindle authors may just be lucky or they may be master salesmen; they don’t necessarily have far better books than you. Some of them were known published authors with large followings before they went the self-pubbed route and they brought their fans along with them. So they have a big head start. Some of them are able to sell a couple of their books as loss leaders to draw people into their other books, so they have a lot of stuff to sell. Some spend sixteen hours a day/seven days a week promoting in every way possible, studying trends, and spending money on advertising and, still, they need to get lucky as well; many can do all this and still just sell small numbers of books. But you hear about the ones that hit the lottery (and they often make sure that you do because then they can sell more of their books). Some truly just get incredibly lucky that their book came out at the right time,  got a review in the right place, hit the reading public with just the right story, and the thing went viral. Sometimes you can’t figure out exactly what caused an author or a particular book to hit the tipping point and get bestseller status, a thousand books a day in sales, and a movie option. It could be you tomorrow, who knows?  Likely not, but you might just get the golden ticket, so here’s rooting for you.

Now that I have shot down most of your bright hopes, what do I recommend to the aspiring writer and self-pubbed author? Enjoy writing. Love your book. Go ahead and promote your book, be clever if you can, watch trends, encourage folks to put reviews for your book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords, try to get  thebig book reviews if you can find a way,  and try stuff to see if it works (change pricing, go on Kindle Select, blah, blah, blah), but, for heaven’s sake, be realistic enough not to feel like a loser in a race with few winners and don’t drive yourself crazy looking at your book sales every hour of the day (only to see the same number again and again). And don’t waste your money on a lot of guru garble. I am not saying there isn’t some useful advice out there (sometimes one bit of info can make the difference) and I have bought certain motivational and sales books from select guys I consider brilliant in that arena. But beware of salesmen bearing fool’s gold, making big money off of other people’s dreams; yours.

Before I leave you to prepare and plan for your publishing future, let me at least give you some tips on what does make a huge difference in sales, publicity you can aspire to get, that if you do, you may find yourself with a book rising to the top of the rankings. 

1)    Hard work, and by that, I mean years of hard work, not overnight sensation stuff. I got my first agent because I had already been on television regularly for a number of years. As my appearances on television hit over 2000 for the last decade, I had more options because my name was well-known by then. Other avenues  could be working hard in the literary field, in academics, in some specialized field, journalism, in publishing, in any media outlet – places you can build a reputation in either something specific or in the art of writing or make great contacts that will then be willing to back your new novel or nonfiction book.

2)    Build up that social networking even if it doesn’t exactly mean a Tweet or a Facebook post to 20,000 people is going to generate hundreds of sales; it won’t. But your presence out there, a verifiable presence, gives you some clout rather than just being Jane Jones from Noplacesville, never heard of you, lady, and when I Googled you, you didn’t exist. Get a blog and website going as well. All of this is work, work, work, but it may pay off in ten years.

3)     If you are a schmoozer, make well-known friends who can endorse and back you.

4)    Television can be useful.  But, usually we are talking about big, big shows like the ex-Oprah, The Tonight Show, The Today Show which reach huge numbers of people with a particular message and the message must be about your book.

5)    Radio can move things along but you either need to be doing hundreds and hundreds of little shows to get a little buzz or do NPR and make you book soar. Good luck getting on there.

6)    As to book reviews: if you check out the big authors, you will notice they have reviews in big papers, magazines, and blogs like The New York Times and Marie Claire and Forbes. If you check out small authors, you will find them in Tennessee Camping Monthly and Betsy’s Best Books. Bigger is better. Good luck getting in these, too.

7)    Forewords and blurbs written by well-known authors and celebrities. They do this because they a) adore your book, or b) it gets them publicity. B is what happens 99% of the time, so if your book won’t get them good publicity, they probably aren’t going to bother giving you a blurb or writing your foreword, unless they happen to be a very close relative (like your mother).

8)    Find a rich mate who will fund your writing business and let you work full-time making no  money for decades.

9)     Don’t croak too young.

I hope my advice and my tips help you navigate through the world of publishing, traditional and self. Good luck to you all, my writing friends. Meet you at the top of the publishing world or at least at the pub.


ONLY THE TRUTH now available for only $2.99 at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords!

Pat Brown’s ONLY THE TRUTH

Harkening back to the writing styles of the earlier American authors – John Steinbeck, Harper Lee, and Carson McCullers, "Only the Truth" is a story of soul searching, a psychological mystery which examines the question, “Whom should one love and when should one quit doing so?” Billy Ray, a lonely and rather slow, uneducated African-American man living in the mountains of Tennessee, runs across a mysterious young woman at the railroad tracks. She asks to go home with him and Billy Ray takes her with him as she requests. He comes to love this woman, Charlene, unconditionally. She is the only woman he has ever loved, and life is finally good for Billy Ray. Then Charlene shoots the neighbor and burns down the neighbor’s house. His happy life destroyed, a confused and devastated Billy Ray is at a loss. Is the woman he loves “just a troubled girl” or a psychopathic killer? Billy Ray sets out on a quest to find the truth, only the truth, whether it leads him to be able to save Charlene from a death sentence or it frees him from her spell.

About the Author

Pat Brown is a nationally known criminal profiler and television commentator. She is the CEO of The Sexual Homicide Exchange and president of The Pat Brown Criminal Profiling Agency. Having made over two thousand television and radio appearances in the United States and worldwide, Pat Brown is well known for her crime commentary and for her profiling and forensic analysis. She can be seen regularly on MSNBC, CNN, FOX, NBC, and CBS, and is a frequent guest of Nancy Grace, Dr. Drew, Jane Velez-Mitchell, Inside Edition, and The Today Show, Pat Brown was the host and profiler for the 2004 Discovery Channel documentary, The Suspicious Death of Cleopatra and the 2010 Discovery Channel "Mystery Files" in which she revealed a new Jack the Ripper suspect. Pat Brown is also the author of "Killing for Sport: Inside the Minds of Serial Killers" (Phoenix Books 2008), The Profiler: My Life Hunting Serial Killers and Psychopaths (Hyperion Voice 2010), and the upcoming How to Save Your Daughter's Life (HCI Sept 2012), and The Murder of Cleopatra (Prometheus Feb 2013).