May 1, 2026

WHAT IS IT WITH AUTHORS AND CONVICTS?:

A Bestselling Author Became Obsessed With Freeing a Man From Prison. It Nearly Ruined Her Life: After the success of her novel Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen spent years trying to prove a man’s innocence. Now she’s “absolutely broke” and “seriously ill,” and her next book is “years past deadline.” (Abbott Kahler, 3/24/21, Marshall Project)

The letter came from Gruen’s publisher in June 2015, which had forwarded it to her home in Asheville, North Carolina, where she lives with her husband, her son (the youngest of her three adult children), and a menagerie of pets, including horses named Tia and Fancy. Even aside from the remarkable connection to her book — Sara, 52, had indeed researched a real-life performer named Lottie — Murdoch’s letter stood out. He had created his own stationery, decorating his letter with intricate doodles: two flowers, a tiny heart, a spiky fish with neon stripes. He wrote that former chief justice Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit “described my (wrongful) conviction as ‘a truly spectacular miscarriage of justice.’” […]

Still, Murdoch’s letter piqued Sara’s curiosity. She spent the next hour Googling Murdoch’s case — and the next hour, and the next. She had been in the midst of researching her next novel, featuring a cast of characters whose fates collide on the Orient Express, but her outline, arranged along her walls in a sprawling web of Post-its, suddenly seemed trivial in comparison to Murdoch’s case.

Each new page about Murdoch’s twisted legal saga contained a revelation more outrageous than the last. As Sara saw it, the investigation hinged on a coerced confession, and the trial, she concluded, was marred by mercurial witnesses, the suppression of crucial evidence, and a judge who seemed motivated to secure Murdoch’s conviction. Kozinski’s idiosyncratic dissent in Murdoch’s appeal stayed with her:

“If it wasn’t for bad luck, Murdoch wouldn’t have no luck at all. He’s wakin’ up this mornin’ in jail when there’s strong proof he ain’t done nothing wrong. I would certainly defer to a jury’s contrary verdict if it had seen this evidence and convicted Murdoch after a fair trial, presided over by a fair judge, followed by an appeal where the justices considered all of his constitutional claims. But Murdoch had none of these.”

Sara uncharacteristically wrote Murdoch back. Her package contained signed copies of all of her books and a note: “May justice finally prevail.” After sending it, she immediately regretted her response. “Justice is not going to fucking prevail finally on its own,” she thought, “and that was a really asinine thing to write to a guy who’s doing life.”

She didn’t yet know that Murdoch’s letter was to change her own life. It also nearly ruined it. She is now, in her words, “absolutely broke,” “seriously ill,” and her current work in progress is “years past deadline.” Since 2016, she has been in a perpetual state of emergency. She has borrowed against her house. Death threats forced her to flee her home for months. Her health declined mysteriously and with terrifying speed. As Sara’s friend of nearly 20 years, I worried that she might die — or that if she lived, it would be as an incomplete, foreign version of herself, one incapable of coherent conversation, let alone writing books.

As a journalist, I watched, increasingly confounded, as her casual investigation of an old murder case bloomed into a frenzied obsession. Six years on, I tried to make sense of the chaos that subsumed Sara’s existence.

In the days following their initial correspondence, Sara began her own investigation of the murder case and Murdoch’s long criminal history.