Eastern Shore writer Stephanie Fowler recounts the story of a 1968 jail break and a double murder in her new book Into the Night. It is just her latest look at true crime stories in the region. Delmarva Public Media's Preston Baker talked with Fowler about the book and her work.
BAKER: Stephanie Fowler has built her career telling powerful true crime stories rooted in the Eastern shore. I'm Preston Baker for Delmarva Public Media. Her newest book Into the Night brings the readers into the grueling story of the 1968 jailbreak and double murder in Salisbury, a case that also carries a personal family connection.
FOWLER: It's the story of the murder of the Wicomico County Sheriff Samuel Adams Graham and his jailor, Albert Lee Kelly, in December, 1968. There was a deputy working the desk in the basement. That deputy was my grandfather.
BAKER: But long before Into the Night, Fowler's life as a writer was shaped by another story, one much closer to her heart. In 2011, her high school teacher, Alice Davis, was murdered. A loss that shook her community and inspired Fowler's book, "Chasing Alice."
FOWLER: To so many of us, she wasn't just this person that got murdered, she was something much larger. And so I started to write, I kind of shelved this project about the sheriff and the jailer and the prisoner, and I focused on writing a book called "Chasing Alice", and it was about who Alice was beyond this terrible headline, this terrible thing that happened to her. I wanted people to know who she was, and I wanted people to know what happened to her because she mattered.
BAKER: That book became a turning point, not only in her career, but in how she saw true crime writing. Fowler says, Alice's story taught her that crime is never about just one moment. It's about the people left behind and the impact that lingers for years.
FOWLER: You always watch Dateline or 48 Hours or 20/20, and it's a very sad story that happens to someone out there, over there. Oh, that's really sad. That happened to them. And then it happened to someone that I knew. It happened to someone that I loved and someone that I cared about, and it made me think differently about these kinds of true crime stories. I mean, if you've loved someone and they've been murdered, that is a bell that cannot be unrung. Six months, a year, five, ten years, twenty years down the road, the families and friends of these people still carry that with them, and that has far reaching effects.
BAKER: That same understanding carried into her work on Into the Night. With her grandfather's connection to the case, Fowler approached the 1968 murders with the same care and perspective she first discovered while writing about Alice.
FOWLER: I tend to look at the murder as sort of an inflection point, but not the most important point. I tend to want to look at these things, and maybe it's because I lost Alice. I wanted to know "why did that happen?" and can we learn anything from that as a cautionary tale that we can take forward? And so with this new story Into the Night, it gave me a whole new series of things to look at.
BAKER: For Fowler, place matters as much as people. She says her writing is inseparable from the fabric of life on the Delmarva Peninsula.
FOWLER: The thing about Delmarva, even though it's rapidly changing in a lot of ways, I still think there is still this sort of essence of rural community that still kind of holds in some ways, and I think the story Into the Night sort of holds that true. That's one of the things about Delmarva that I always find so interesting and so lovely and so bizarre, and as a writer, it's something that I always want to sink my teeth into.
BAKER: It's that sense of connection to both history and community that Fowler hopes readers feel when they pick up her books.
FOWLER: I think for me, true crime is more about the "why did this happen" and "what can we learn?" or "will we learn from it?" I want to tell these hard stories. I want to tell these complicated stories. I want to tell these stories that are revealing and make us feel something, hopefully.
BAKER: From honoring Alice Davis to uncovering her grandfather's role in a historic case, Stephanie Fowler has created stories that are deeply personal, historically grounded and rooted in the Eastern Shore. Her new book Into the Night encapsulates exactly that. I'm Preston Baker for Delmarva Public Media.
