There is a problem with writing cozy murder mysteries. It can make a folk downright suspicious of everything from hang-up phone calls to white vans.

The other day, walking through a store parking lot, I started past an empty white panel van. At least it looked empty from the side closest to me—but the radio was blaring. I stopped. Imagination went into overdrive. Why the radio in an empty van? Had the driver kidnapped someone? Was there a captive in the back and the radio blared to cover an attempt by that person to summon help?

I approached the van cautiously from the passenger’s side. It still looked empty. I crept around the back to the driver’s side and came face-to-face with a startled man so skinny that he practically bled into the dark leather driver’s seat. He was startled. He jumped in his seat. I was startled. I jumped—sort of. The problem with skinny folk is that they can move faster than the more fleshy folk—like me. He rolled down the window and demanded, “What do you want?”

I was so startled that I blurted out the truth. “I was just checking to make sure there wasn’t a kidnap victim in your van.”

Now he was even more startled. In an attempt to pass off my bizarre statement as a joke, I laughed. After a moment, he chuckled. Rather a weak uncertain chortle which told me that the only thing he believed about me was that—I was a crazy person.

But before y’all judge me, I have a history with white vans. When son Luke was seven, I was 20 feet up in the air repainting a billboard on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada. Luke was riding his bike around the desert lot below the sign when a white panel van pulled off the road and parked on the shoulder. Two men got out of the van and approached Luke, one of them holding a candy bar out in front of him. “Hey, sonny—look what I’ve got for you.”

I didn’t climb down from the sign. I dropped off the ladder like a stone, a growl building in my throat like a momma grizzly bear protecting her cubs. When I hit the ground, blue enamel flew out of the can and covered my arm and the front of my blouse. Before I could attack the men with the paint brush and can of paint—a stray dog that had shown up at our house the day before and adopted Luke charged the men. They saw a crazy blue-painted lady coming at them with a paint brush and a dog coming at them with teeth and flying fur. They vaulted back into their white van and took off with squealing tires.

When Luke was twelve, he started home on his dirt bike from his friend’s house a mile away. A white panel van came up behind his bike so closely that the bumper nearly hit Luke’s bike. Luke leaped the berm at the edge of pavement and rode into the desert to safety.

Fast forward to my job on a weekly newspaper in Lovelock, Nevada. I was assigned to cover the trial of human monsters Gerald and Charlene Gallego who hunted and captured young girls to rape, torture, and kill. They slaughtered at least ten young girls. They hit one pregnant girl in the head with a shovel and buried her in the desert while she was still alive. She was pregnant.

The couple traveled the Nevada desert in a white panel van with their victims and a shovel. Charlene drove while Gerald brutalized the girls in the back of the van. After Gallego killed them—he handed Charlene the shovel and told her to bury them. Sometimes they merely discarded their victims on the side of the road.

Because California courts were attempting to set the killer couple free, Pershing County, Nevada, tried Gallego in Lovelock and sentenced him to death for the two girls he killed and buried in Pershing County.

 The point: don’t be quick to judge folks who seem eccentric, strange, or bizarre. They may have a reason for being weird. Or, they may be writers.

As with all things, the Bible sums it up best. When God directed the prophet Samuel to choose a king for Israel he said, “Do not look at his appearance, or at his physical stature…for the LORD does not see as a man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” 1 Samuel 16:7.

Meanwhile, for the foreseeable future—I’m avoiding white vans.

Amazon.com: Stephanie Parker McKean: books, biography, latest update