The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Love Letters to a Serial Killer by Tasha Coryell

Episode Date: June 30, 2024

Love Letters to a Serial Killer by Tasha Coryell https://amzn.to/3VOMYaD An aimless young woman starts writing to an accused serial killer while he awaits trial and then, once he’s acquitted, decides to move in with him and take the investigation into her own hands in this dark and irresistibly compelling debut thriller. Recently ghosted and sick of watching her friends fade into the suburbs, thirty-something Hannah finds community in a true-crime forum that’s on a mission to solve the murders of four women in Atlanta. After William, a handsome lawyer, is arrested for the killings, Hannah begins writing him letters. It’s the perfect outlet for her pent-up frustration and rage. The exercise empowers her, and even feels healthy at first. Until William writes back. Hannah’s interest in the case goes from curiosity to obsession, leaving space for nothing else as her life implodes around her. After she loses her job, she heads to Georgia to attend the trial and befriends other true-crime junkies like herself. When a fifth woman is discovered murdered, the jury has no choice but to find William not guilty, and Hannah is the first person he calls upon his release. The two of them quickly fall into a routine of domestic bliss. Well, as blissful as one can feel while secretly investigating their partner for serial murder…

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Today we have an amazing author she's coming on the show to talk about her new novel that comes out june 25th 2024 it's called love letters to a serial killer i love this title thank you there you go tasha coriel is joining us on the show today we'll be talking to her about the insights of her book and why you should pick it up now pre-order it where it's available on fine bookstores everywhere tasha lives in st paul minnesota with her husband toddler and greyhound she holds an mfa in creative writing and a phd in composition and rhetoric from the university of alabama her book of short stories hungry people was published by split lip split Published by Split Lip Press in 2018, her debut novel, The One of Four Mentioned, is forthcoming from Berkeley in June 2024, as we mentioned. Welcome to the show, Tasha. How are you?

I'm great. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for coming. It's wonderful to have you. Congratulations on the new book. Give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? So you can find me, I'm very active on the website that used to be called Twitter. It's at Tasha with seven A's at the end. Also search my name, Tasha Correal. I have an Instagram that's at Tasha Correal. And I'm trying to get more into TikTok, which is at TashaCoreyellWriter. But with the caveat that I'm getting better at it, so my videos might not be amazing yet. But someday they'll be amazing.

It's kind of a weird medium to go over there on the TikTok and be cool. It's kind of different. Yeah. It's kind of different. Yeah, and I'm 36, so I've sort of aged out of the TikTok group where it feels really native to me. Twitter feels so organic to me when I'm using it. But then I go on TikTok and I'm like, what is happening here? It's a weird format, too. I'm 56 and I was popular on Twitter in the early days. And TikTok is just so hard to like kind of get i mean it's changed a lot in format now it has like long form they didn't

used to have long form and so like our stuff really didn't play well over there because you know we talked to authors we have long conversations but now they have it up to i think 10 minutes or something like that so it works works a little better. So let's get into your book, the new book, Love Letters to a Serial Killer. Let's talk about it. Give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside? Yeah. So Love Letters to a Serial Killer is about a millennial woman who's really dissatisfied

with her job, her personal life. And so she gets really into true crime, specifically a case about a serial killer. And once he's arrested, she starts writing letters to him while he's waiting his trial. And she ends up falling in love with him. Whoa. Hybristophilia. Is that what they call this? Yeah.

Yeah. I don't actually use that term in the book. But when I was first researching this phenomenon, I was like, oh, my gosh, there's an actual word for it for people who love killers. Yeah, I think it comes to a nature of, I mean, it used to be that if you lived in medieval times, men were killers because they were usually soldiers and fighting battles for kings and all that crap. And they would prep for battle. So I think there's kind of a nature of what women look for in it. So there you go. battles for kings and all that crap and you know they would they would prep for battle so i think i think there's kind of a nature of what we would look for in it so there you go so can you give us a little bit more on the plot without giving too much away does does something happen because the byline is ps please don't kill me is yeah so she falls in love with him she ends up traveling to georgia for his trial and then he ends up

getting acquitted and and she has to figure out whether or not he's guilty or innocent and whether or not she wants him to be guilty or innocent maybe they should get married or something yeah yeah he he does propose to her so i sort of feel like if you fall in love with someone who you know or is supposedly a killer he's been accused of being a killer there's a part of you that has to want them to be a killer right you don't just fall in love serial killer because he like likes dogs or something well this is a whole therapy session of a few years here isn't it the so what how'd you come up with this plot this isn't an experience from your dating life was it pre-marriage

no i i've been with my husband we've been married for seven years and together for 11 years and he's like a very very nice person uh definitely not like yeah i'm not in love with a serial killer anything what happened was that i was reading a lot of like older true crime so there's in rules book about ted bundy the stranger beside me where she worked at a like a help like a suicide help call line with him and then she continued to speak with him even as it sort of began unfolding that he was a serial killer and then i like read about like charles manson and all these other serial killers and like sort of a uniting factor is there's always this like horde of women that fall in love with someone who's accused of serial murder which is such a strange phenomenon and I was really interested in these women and I

think that the attention falls on the man more often than it falls on like these women and why they do these things and so I started playing around with the idea of what would happen if if this did come to fruition and and what does that look like when it plays out how do you initially fall in love and what happens if he falls in love back that's wild yeah this is a hell of a premise So what are your thoughts on why women do this? Why do women fall in love with these serial killers? Like, I'll see a thing where you're like, you know, I think a lot of hipersophilia is where they're on death row.

So, like, they're not getting out anytime soon. You know, it's not like you can, you're just, like, waiting for them to get out. And we'll start a family when he gets out. Because, you know, lethal injection is probably the only way he's getting out. And so you're a woman who could probably go into the world, I mean, a nice good dude, and get married and have kids, but you're chasing someone who's like on a dead-end death row.

And what are your thoughts on that when you see that? I think there are a couple of different factors that go into it so to speak specifically to the death row part there's this thing that i think about a lot which is when i was like 21 i was sitting in a coffee shop with a male friend of mine and he thought that the barista at the coffee shop was really cute. And he was like, one of the things that I like about her

is that I always know where she's going to be. Like, I don't have to figure out where she's going to be. Like, I know that she works at this coffee shop so I can show up and she'll be there. And, you know, there's something nice about it. Like, you don't have to search out, like, the cute girl because she works at the coffee shop. And I think the thing about someone who's in prison, you don't have to worry about where are they? Can I track them on their phone?

Like, I know where they are. They're in death row. Like, they don't have anything in their life except for me. Like, that person, you can be that person's link to the outside world like i think that for some people there's security in that almost yeah you don't have to worry they're not at the strip club or chasing chicks around town or you know doing any troublemaking you know there's a lot of these a lot of these couples now they have location turned on and i guess they're really big at tracking each other's location which is i, I don't know, weird for me.

You know, if you have to resort to that, then maybe you should seek couples therapy. But, you know, I've told my girlfriends for years, look, if I'm going to cheat, I'll leave here first and cheat, or that I'll just come home and be like, I cheated, bye. But yeah, it's really interesting, the psychology behind it. I find it fascinating. And I think there's guys that do it, too. They write to women in prison. Yeah, you're totally right. There's Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who's getting a lot of attention right now.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and so I think she had multiple boyfriends in prison. I haven't followed her that closely since she got out but i know that she like was married and now she's divorced and now she's with a different boyfriend that she i think was with while she was in prison so i think she had multiple boyfriends while she was in prison and you know i'm kind of knowing i know enough about her story where i'm like kind of on her side. So, you know, good for good for Gypsy.

But to go back to your question, I think that there's also in terms of like why women specifically go after killers. I think this is like a greater phenomenon. Like you were talking about before. We're like in medieval times right everyone was a soldier off the war and so like everyone fell in love with someone who killed someone i mentioned that i have a really nice husband he's definitely never killed anybody or hurt anyone in his life but like when i watch television a lot of the fictional characters that i really gravitate towards they're a lot of them are

killers and i still love them and that feels like part of why i love them or even if they're not killers they're definitely like bad people like i was obsessed with the entire cast of succession right and all of them are bad people but i still like that was part of the attraction for me. So I think that there is some sort of link where like we like bad people, right? It's just less palatable when it's like a literal serial killer versus someone who's killed a bunch of people in like a fantasy book or as part of war. Like, you know, it just depends on how you package it but there is this attraction in other forms is it the same as what i do years ago when i used to get depressed i would watch cops the show tv show cops and i would watch like about two hours of that and then i wouldn't be depressed anymore because i would see so many other people are so fucked up

and I'm like you know what my life is great I don't have cops kicking in my door I'm not sitting on the couch with a wife beater picking a fight with cops going to jail getting clubbed or shot to death and or whatever it's called the taser thing and I'm like you know after two hours of that I'm like you know what why am I why don't i'm feeling sorry for myself i have a great freaking life compared to these people on tv is it like that or is it isn't it i don't know the i know women go like to exercise their emotions and so sometimes they like those highs and lows i i know the phenomenon that you're talking about because i watch a lot of of Bravo reality television shows and those have that effect on me where I'm like, wow, like no matter what's going wrong in my life, like it's nothing compared to these people on this television show. But I think it's slightly different than that.

I think it's like we find like people with dark pasts to be like really mysterious. And then we like sort of correlate that with a sexiness. And, and, and that's why we're attracted to them. And then I think sort of when you peel back the veil, if you actually date someone like that, it never goes well.

Right. You talk to people who are like, Oh yeah, I like bad boys. And then you're like, how, how are your relationships going? And they're like terrible.

And it's like, yeah, of course they're terrible. You like bad boys, And then you're like, how are your relationships going? And they're like, terrible. And it's like, yeah, of course they're terrible. You like bad boys, but it's like that upside attraction is there. Yeah. It's pretty crazy how people live their lives and bad boys and prisoners, people on death row.

It's crazy. So Tasha, give us your final pitch out to people to order the book, wherever fine books are sold and your.com, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So my final pitch out to people to order the book wherever fine books are sold and your.com, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So my final pitch, I would say is that this is a great beach read. I really wanted a book that people would want to read for fun or listen to for fun.

I've heard really good things about the audio book from people who prefer to read in that format. If you want to reach me, I am very active on Twitter or X, you know. And so my name on Twitter is at Tasha with seven A's. You can also find me on Instagram. I am new to TikTok. I'm still trying to work that out. And I'm at Tasha Coriel on Instagram and at Tasha Coriel Writer on TikTok.

So you can find me there. And my website is TashaCoriel.com. There you go. Well, it's been fun to have you on. Thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Thanks for coming. And thanks for tuning in to my audience. Pick up the book wherever fine books are sold. Love Letters to

a Serial Killer. I love the concept of it. It's out June 25th, 2024. And thanks to everyone for being here. Go to goodreads.com, 4chancechrisfiles, linkedin.com, 4chancechrisfiles. Chris Files is one of the TikTok-ity and all those crazy places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other.

Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.