Welcome to From the Front porch, a conversational podcast about books, small business, and life in the South.

Welcome to this bonus episode of From the Front porch. I'm Amy Jones, and today I'm joined by Stephen Epstein.

Stephen is an attorney and the author of Evil at Lakes Seminole, a true crime book that immediately caught my attention, thanks to its connections to my hometown of Calahassi, Florida.

Stephen and I talked about the true crime genre, what drew him to the Mike Williams case, and how to write about the victims of devastating acts, was grace and dignity. Without further ado, my conversation with Stephen Epstein.

Stephen, thanks so much for joining me today. Pleasure to be with you.

I am so excited to talk with you about your book, because I am a Calahassi native, and in fact Thomasville is just 30, 45 minutes up the road, as you may have discovered when doing research for your book.

I grew up in Calahassi, very familiar, some might say, obsessed with the Mike Williams case. I grew up reading Jennifer's columns in the Calahassi Democrat, and I went to North Florida Christian school.

So Mike is older than I am was older than I am, but this is just one of those kind of hometown stories that I've heard much of my life.

Sure.

I'm excited to chat with you. My first real question though, I see that you are an attorney. My husband is an attorney. I worked for a couple years for the Florida bar in Calahassi, and I'm just wondering what led you to kind of pursue this writing career on the side.

What drew you to begin writing books, kind of as your side gig in addition to being an attorney?

I wish I could put my finger on that. I really can't. I literally one day woke up. I was familiar with my story in my first book, which is called Murder on Birgley Drive, from having like you read a lot of newspaper stories about it over several years, and one day I decided I was going to write the book about that story.

I had no background in that kind of writing whatsoever, but I knew so many of the players involved, and it was such a compelling story. I decided somebody has to write this book, and if nobody else will, it may as well be me, and that's how my writing career got started.

I was fascinated by that because I was journalism major in undergrad, so I definitely have that sense of, I don't know, if somebody else isn't going to do this, I will.

And again, just kind of this fascination and kind of research obsession. I love reading news articles. I love kind of doing a deep dive on a story, but I will be honest. I don't know that I have the self control or the stick to itiveness to pursue the story and actually write it.

So I'm really impressed that on top of your legal career, you also took its time consuming, isn't it, to write a story like this?

Oh, it's tremendously time consuming. If you think about all of the material that you have to digest in order to convey a narrative and understand the characters and flesh out the characters and be accurate, because this is true crime, you can't just make it up as you go along.

You have to be exceedingly accurate. And so I read all of the transcripts. I watch all of the video footage of the trials.

I devour like you said, every piece of newspaper information, every story on the web that I can about these stories to make sure I know the story inside and out.

And I have to interview for evil like Seminole, I did somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 interviews, the people involved to make sure I get my facts straight to make sure I flesh out the characters in a way that they would say is accurate.

So at the end of the day, nobody who reads the book who's familiar with these people and familiar with the story would say, no, you got that wrong.

That that would to me would be the worst nightmare having written a book like that like this for somebody to come up and say, no, you didn't get it right.

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