NINE YEARS AGO, I read an article in the Glens Falls Post-Star about a woman from a small town in upstate New York who was holding a fundraising event at a local bar. She needed money to travel to the upcoming execution of the man who had raped and murdered her young daughter twenty-two years before.
Everything about this story stuck with me: not only the tragic death, but also the woman’s dire circumstances and her quest to find justice and closure two decades later.
For years I wanted to write a novel about this, but I didn’t know what the story would be. Then one day I was having coffee with a writer friend, John Henry Davis, and he suggested: “What if the guy who’s being executed maybe didn’t do it?”
And that’s how The Necklace was born.
After I wrote the novel, I discovered something amazing. There is a woman in Idaho named Carol Dodge who devoted her life to proving that Christopher Tapp, the man imprisoned for raping and killing her daughter Angie many years earlier, was innocent. Thanks to Carol’s relentless efforts, Tapp was finally set free and the real killer, Brian Leigh Dripps, was arrested.
Talk about life imitating art!
The Necklace is not only the story of an incredibly courageous woman, it’s a story about life in the foothills of the Adirondacks, where I’ve spent a lot of time for the past thirty-five years, including living there for ten. The area has struggled in this new century, with factories and mills shutting down and tourism not quite filling the economic gap. And yet people continue to cobble livings together, raise their families, and work for a better future.
Susan, the diner waitress who’s the heroine of The Necklace, is a composite of several women I’ve known in the Adirondacks. The relationship between her and her mom—the good part, not the guilt-ridden part!—is inspired by my wife’s relationship with her mother.
Other characters are inspired by real-life people too. FBI agent Robert Pappas is based on my friend Paul Bishop, a writer who was an LAPD sex crimes detective for seventeen years. I used to teach playwriting at the Hudson Correctional Facility in Coxsackie, New York, and Curt Jansen is inspired by one of my students there, a dignified man in his thirties who had been in prison for murder for fifteen years and preferred to be called Mr. Smith instead of by his first name.
As for Kyra, the rebellious teenage girl in the novel—I’m not really sure who she’s based on. I think maybe she’s based on me!