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Editor: Kevin Flynn
Profession: Author - Relentless Pursuit

Category: About the Author

I have a feeling I'll still be writing about this case, and all the experiences that came with it, until I'm 80 years old.

I knew from the very beginning - when I was called to court to handle the first hearing, and I knew the case would be mine from then on - that this was like nothing I ever had worked on, or ever would again, for that matter. Not so much because of the defendant - even though I now see the extent to which I became obsessed with bringing him to justice - but because of the victims, and what I came to know about them as people, and what I came to know about the horrors of their last moments on earth.

Throughout the course of the investigation I found it impossible to discuss Katrina's death without getting choked up. Even in my opening statement at trial, more than a year after her murder, I still had to stop when it came time to talk about her autopsy. I'm not sure if it's going to be any different now.

Having said all that, I have to say that it's a rare case that hits a seasoned prosecutor as hard as this did me. One of the most difficult things about the job is that it requires you to be passionate enough to commit yourself completely to the cause, but dispassionate enough to maintain your objectivity - it's not easy to be dispassionately passionate. But you have to put yourself at arm's length. A typical homicide prosecutor in the Washington D.C. office might be involved in as many as 20 or 25 murder cases in a single year, one way or another. Each of those cases has a victim, sometimes two or three, and each of those victims has a family of at least a few members and sometimes many more. From the time we first start handling homicides we're talking to all those people, explaining the process to them, commiserating with them, trying to get them to keep their faith in us, hearing all their stories about the son or daughter or brother or sister they lost. And every time we sit across from people in a situation like that, we know in the back of our minds that our system is imperfect, we might not be able to do everything for them that they would want us to do, and the person who took their loved one away from them might end up getting away with it. Dealing constantly with those two realities - on the one hand, the reality of sheer, anguished emotion, and on the other, the reality of the day-to-day constraints that we labor under - trains us to approach each case with a certain degree of emotional distance.

Why is it so important that we maintain that objectivity? Because the stakes are so high. I was once asked, by a schoolteacher friend of mine, how many innocent people I'd knowingly put in jail. I said none, and proceeded with a polite answer, when what I should have done was to fire back the question that first came to my mind: How many times have you taken money from a student to raise their grade? Never, right? I think it's fair to say that the average member of the public has no idea how much time the average prosecutor devotes to making sure that we get the right guy every single time.

I started on the book about four months after the case ended, two months after my father had died from cancer. There were so many daily reminders of the experience - the extremes of human behavior that I was exposed to, and the remarkable spirituality of the 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 put it completely behind me.

I wrote RELENTLESS PURSUIT for two reasons. I wanted the world - or at least the chunk of it that might read the book - to know about the Hawkins family, to be exposed to their strong faith and their loving spirit. But I also wanted people to see how working prosecutors and cops do their jobs on a day-to-day basis, contrary to the sensationalistic public images. Put aside TV courtroom dramas (it's to be expected that they'll take liberties and skew reality for effect) and just think back about all the real-life cases in the last ten years in which either the competence or the character of the prosecutor has been under attack. Start with the first Rodney King case, then the Simpson case, the Ken Starr investigation, and any number of other examples, all the way up to the Duke lacrosse case. I feel like that's a lot of baggage for me to have to carry around - and they're not even my bags.