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Editor: Kevin Flynn
Profession: Author - Relentless Pursuit

Category: About the Author

From a January 29, 2007conversation between Katherine Grinch of G.P. Putnam and Relentless Pursuit author Kevin Flynn:

KG: Why does this case matter today, do you see similar crimes like this in the news?

KF: It's a sad fact of the human condition that cruelty of the kind that is described in this book has been with us since the beginning of human history. When you work as a prosecutor in a big city, you're constantly exposed to the worst of human nature - granted, most crimes we see are not nearly as brutal as the murders of Diane Hawkins and Katrina Harris were, but many aren't that far off. On the other hand,

you're also constantly exposed to the best of human nature. Families of murder victims enduring great tragedy with remarkable fortitude and joining together to do whatever is necessary to achieve justice for their loved ones. Witnesses to the killings of strangers who take huge risks to come to court and testify against some very, very lethal characters. Police officers working around the clock - oftentimes, literally - to close cases that the stereotypical "lazy cop" would give up on. If there's one thing that my years as a prosecutor have taught me, it's that people caught up in the criminal justice system - everyone from the cops to the victims to the DA's to the defense lawyers - behave a lot more nobly than they're ever portrayed on TV or in movies.

KG: While this was happening, the O.J. Simpson trial was all over the news, a case that had various similarities to this case. Did you watch Marsha Clark and Johnny Cochran on television and pay attention to what he was doing right and she was doing wrong?

KF: I'll never forget watching the O.J. Simpson trial on TV - I was at home on paternity leave, feeding my baby daughter on our sofa - when Chris Darden asked Simpson to put on the glove. A friend of mine called right then and said, "Isn't this brilliant? This is going to show he did it." And I remember saying, "No, it's idiotic - the glove will be smaller because it will have stiffened, and O.J.'s wearing a plastic shield on his hand and that will make the glove seem even smaller, and even if it fits him he'll act like it doesn't, and besides, you never put your key piece of evidence in the defendant's hands in a situation like this" - all things that thousands of experienced homicide prosecutors would have said. I felt like I was watching a car going over a cliff and I couldn't do anything to stop it.

It was difficult to watch as a prosecutor and powerless to stop the key piece of evidence being mishandled. As someone who intends to be a prosecutor for many years to come, I can only say that what happened in that trial fed a lot of cynical perceptions that the public has of people in law enforcement, and all of us are still paying for that all these years later.

KG: At any point during your career, did you feel like justice had not been served?

KF: Are mistakes made sometimes? Sad to say, yes, but the justice system is a human system and humans are fallible. One of my most agonizing experiences as a prosecutor involved a case where we locked up a suspect for the horrific shooting murder of an old man in a barber shop. Two eyewitnesses came to the police within hours of the shooting and identified the suspect by name; they'd known him for a long time and had no doubt he was the shooter. Cases can't start out much clearer than that. But within a week or so, another shotgun murder happened, and the suspect in that case was arrested with the gun in his car. The detective in that case had a hunch that his suspect had done my shooting. Despite the eyewitness statements and the fact that both men drove a similar car that was spotted at the scene, we checked the ballistics and sure enough, the ballistic evidence from my case matched his suspect's gun. We went back and took a second crack at the two witnesses in my case. It turned out that one of them thought she was going to be indicted in a big drug case and figured she'd get a better plea deal if she helped the police "solve" a murder case. So she pinned this shooting on a poor dupe in the neighborhood and somehow persuaded the other witness to support her story.

It's a pretty sordid story, except for one thing: as soon as it began to appear that my case had cracks in it, everyone involved galvanized themselves to get to the bottom of it as fast as we could, because the idea of an innocent man spending even an hour in jail for something he didn't do was too much for us to bear. It was late on a Friday night when the reality began to emerge, and it was a race against time before everything closed to release an innocent man, who didn't deserve to spend another night in jail. I remember walking into court with the defendant's release papers, and having an unfamiliar feeling: I'm about to give a man his freedom. I never had the chance to do that before.

In the end, justice was served and though the suspect we had only stayed in jail one week, it was a week too long and it bothers me to this day. Though this experience made me wary of trusting witnesses completely, it made me admire the dedication of law enforcement officials going the extra mile to help the innocent.

KG: Do you have any advice for lawyers prosecuting domestic violence crimes?

KF: The key to getting to the truth in a domestic violence case is found in one word: corroboration. It's an obvious point, but it's true: there are no independent eyewitnesses to most incidents of domestic violence, and if the prosecutors haven't done their homework in advance, a domestic trial can end up devolving into a simple struggle of "he-said-she-said" - and that's usually not enough to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt. So before they go to court, they've got to talk with neighbors of the victim to find out if they heard screams or anything of that nature; talk to the police officers who reported to the scene, to find out if the victim had fresh injuries and what the suspect's demeanor was like; get the tape of the victim's 911 call to hear what she said to the dispatcher - all pretty basic steps, but sometimes prosecutors get so caught up in their own faith in the victim that they forget that it's still very hard to win a case if it's just based on one person's word against another. And one more thing: you're not the victim's lawyer. You represent the system of justice, and your job is to get at the truth - which isn't always exactly what the victim is telling you. Find corroboration of the story, and then you can go to court confident that you're doing absolutely the right thing.

KG: "Law and Order" and other television shows that depict gruesome crimes are tremendously popular. But how accurate are they and do they affect the mind of the public?

KF: It's very hard to compress the typical day of a prosecutor or police officer into an hour-long episode, so the shows that take more time to develop story lines and characters over an extended period - "The Wire," for example - tend to be more faithful to the real-life experience. A show like "Law and Order" is well-intentioned; I believe it was probably the first show of its kind that acknowledged that there are two equal functions in law enforcement, and so each show divided its focus between the police officers and the prosecutors on a given case. But given its time constraints, it can't come close to depicting some of the aspects of the real-life process that may be more slowly evolving but that are, in fact, incredibly dramatic and compelling. I'm thinking of the tactics that a police detective might use to ingratiate himself with a suspect over a prolonged period of time before lowering the boom and getting a confession out of him, or the way the prosecutor might do much the same thing in cross-examining a defendant on the stand. The simple things about law enforcement also end up being lost. I've been on my share of ride-alongs with the police, and the one thing that has always struck me -- partly from my own observation, but mostly from many hours of conversations with them -- is how incredibly tedious the job can be one moment, when they're sitting around in a car waiting for something to happen, and then all of a sudden a call goes out and they're rushing into a frenzied situation and their life is on the line.

KG: How does the Hawkins' family feel about the release of this book?

KF: The Hawkins family is a huge entity - remember that at the time of her death, Diane had almost 60 nieces and nephews - so it would be difficult, and probably ultimately inaccurate, for me to try to encapsulize in one sentence the combined opinions of so many individuals. All I can say is, I made it a point to approach various members of the family when I decided to write it twelve years ago. I didn't ask their permission per se, but if any of them had tried to discourage me I think I would have faded away quickly. No one did. In fact, I spent many hours with at least three or four of the family members who were closest to Diane, Katrina and Harrell, and when I finished the first draft - which was about twice the length of the version that's now being published - I made it available to different people in the family to get their feedback, and it was all very positive. I think it can generally be said that they recognize that I've tried my best to spread the word about uniqueness of the two people they lost all those years ago, not to mention the overpowering religious faith that they relied on to cope with that loss.

KG: There was a point where these murders were being investigated as a drug related crime, when it was rather clear that Harrell was the killer. Do you feel that it is based on the fact that the victims were African American?

KF: That's a difficult question for me to answer, since I was the one who conducted that investigation. The best way for me to respond is to go back to what the role of a prosecutor is in the American legal system. I see myself as having two main responsibilities in every case: to make sure that I personally am absolutely certain that the person whom I've charged with a crime is in fact guilty of it, and then to make sure that I can actually prove his guilt in a courtroom. It's true that early on in the case, all the evidence was coalescing to implicate Norman Harrell in these murders. If these murders had been committed in a more affluent neighborhood - let's face it, if Diane Hawkins had been a Beverly Hills socialite and Norman Harrell had been her plastic surgeon - then I probably would never have been compelled to investigate the street rumors that came to my attention that they'd been drug-related. However, once I did hear about those rumors - and knowing that they might be seized upon by Harrell to form the basis of his defense - I had a responsibility to track them down and hold them up to the light. It's a sad fact of life that virtually any murder that occurs in an African-American neighborhood is looked at by the media, as well as by too many prosecutors and police officers, as inevitably connected with drugs. I'm hoping that any reader of "Relentless Pursuit" will come away from the experience with the knowledge that victims of violent crime who happen to live in minority communities are real people with real life stories and should never be stereotyped.

KG: During the trial, you faced serious personal issues when your father was battling cancer. How did you feel when your father was diagnosed and how did you process this and manage to stay level at home and in the courtroom?

KF: On the first day of trial, I went to court and was told by the judge that she would be starting the case later that afternoon. I went back to my office, knowing that my father had been scheduled to see the doctor that morning to discuss some numbness that he was feeling in his leg. We had every reason to believe that this was just an aftereffect from chemotherapy, so I wasn't expecting the worst. I'd been pointing toward this date for many months and was looking forward to having him and my mother attend as many days of the trial as they could. I can't easily describe what I felt when my mother told me that his cancer at spread and his outlook was poor - imagine getting terrible news in your personal life on the very day that you are about to embark on the biggest challenge of your professional life - but I think it's fair to say that I was angry, more than anything else - at God, of all things, for reasons the book discusses. As for how I was able to handle the trial after that, all I can say is, I was fortunate as it turned out that I could throw myself into something like that - a trial is an all-enveloping experience, and that wasn't the first, nor would it be the last, time that circumstances threw me into the refuge of the courtroom during a personal crisis.

KG: Faith and religion was something you struggled with throughout the book, yet in the beginning with your daughter the gravesite, you say a Catholic prayer for the dead. Based on the spiritual strength of the Hawkins' family, did you come out of this with better handle on your faith?

KF: Fitfully, over time. For several years after my father died, I harbored a lot of bitterness about how he'd gone out and how much he'd suffered. (I was in the midst of all that when I visited the cemetery, but old habits die hard - after all, I received 16 years of Catholic education.) It took a couple of more years before the bitterness really passed, and as my children grew older I decided that I wanted to give them a better example of faith. Over those years, I often recalled the resolute religion conviction of the Hawkins family, and I know that it worked on me. I'm glad now to call myself a person of strong faith, though of a somewhat different kind than the Hawkins's - I think they'd be more inclined to say that God has a hand in everything and we can't fathom his ways, where I'm more inclined to say that he lets us act on our own free will, even if it means we all do stupid, violent things to each other, but he'll inspire us to get through it if we ask. But it all goes back to the same source.


KG: While writing RELENTLESS PURSUIT, how did you find this case stayed with you twelve years later?

KF: I found I could never put it to one side. I started writing the book about four months after the case ended, two months after my father had died. I'd never written anything more challenging than a legal brief. My first draft took two years to complete and went nowhere; looking back, I understand why, because the experience was still too fresh for me to have proper perspective on it. I was pretty much resigned to simply have that draft gather dust until my children would someday read it and be exposed to an interesting time in their father's life. But there were so many daily reminders of the experience - the extremes of human behavior that I was exposed to, and the remarkable spirituality of a wonderful group of people that I'd become very close to - that I kept going back to the project to try to do it justice. I live not far from the house where I grew up, and every time I visited my mother I was reminded of my father's ordeal all those years ago, and then in short order I'd recall so many details of my day-to-day dealings with the Hawkins family. Every time I'd go to my own church, I'd be reminded of their ceremonies and their rituals and how joyously they proclaimed their faith. It was really impossible for me to ever put it completely behind me.

KG: What do you want readers to take away from this book?

KF: The only way that I can think to answer that is to try to conjure up in my mind the vision of just one reader approaching me, and what I would most like to hear that person say after finishing the book. And that would be something along the lines of, "I first sat down to read this because it was advertised as a true crime story, but I found that it introduced me to a world I wasn't familiar with and to people that I came to grow very attached to and that I learned something from." Obviously, this is a mystery story, a legal thriller. But the themes that the book discusses - the themes that I was fortunate or unfortunate enough to watch play themselves out in front of me in real life - aren't easily pigeonholed in any genre. Whenever I'm asked what my book is about, I have a stock answer ready: "It's about a murder case I tried many years ago." In the back of my mind, though, I think: "It's about a families helping other families out. It's about mothers being strong for their children. It's about the black experience in America. It's about how people find ways to get through the worst that life throws at them. It's about God's mysterious workings - there's your mystery. It's about small moments - an anguished father mourning his daughter's death, a young father celebrating his infant son's life. It's about never giving up until you find the truth about something. And, oh yes - it's about a murder case."