Murder In Pleasanton, 40 years later
So you wanna write a book, huh? Part 2 of my ongoing advice to aspiring book authors focuses on True Crime
On this day 40 years ago, a 14-year-old girl named Tina Faelz walked home from high school because a group of classmates were bullying her and she was scared to take the bus. Tina opted for a route that went underneath a highway, a popular shortcut among students, but ultimately a path that meant few people could see her.
Tina never made it home. She was violently stabbed to death before she reached the underpass, a murder that shocked my hometown of Pleasanton, Calif., tormented her family and friends, frustrated police detectives, and the collateral damage continues to carry an indelible impact on the people closest to the case.
It took 27 years for the police to arrest a suspect, three years for the case to reach a courtroom, three weeks to reach a verdict, and another six years after that for the convicted man to finally admit that he killed her.
The case is an example of the faulty methods that police used to interview witnesses in the 1980s, the power of DNA to solve cold cases, detectives who refused to give up on the case, a little bit of luck, and ultimately how much patience is involved before the DNA is willing to talk.
My book on this case, “Murder In Pleasanton,” remains my proudest professional accomplishment. I’m not a true crime writer. I’m not even a heavy consumer of the true crime genre. I’ve worked my entire life in sports, mostly baseball. Nothing in my background would suggest that I’m a candidate to write a true crime book.
I did have a few things working in my favor though:
Tina lived five blocks down the street from me in 1984. I was in the 5th grade at the time. I knew the story from day one, the neighborhood, the shortcut, some of the people who knew the case best, other people who could introduce me to those key people, and because I was from Pleasanton, it gave me instant credibility.
I attended the same high school as Tina and my 20-year high school reunion occurred a few months after the arrest. We had all these classmates coming back to Pleasanton, reminiscing about the old days, and this famous murder was fresh in our minds.
About a month after the reunion, I was laid off my job on the Los Angeles Dodgers Radio Network. I had plenty of free time.
The trial began when I happened to be visiting the Bay Area for a wedding. I was able to sit in the courtroom, watch the lawyers argue the case, listen to the evidence myself, study the jurors, and introduce myself to the defendant’s family.
In this Substack post, I won’t be providing too many details about the case.
This is a link to the book I wrote in 2015.
This is a link to the article I wrote for The San Francisco Chronicle in 2020 about the confession (it’s behind a paywall).
Instead, this is Part Two of my periodic advice for aspiring book authors, geared toward those interested in the True Crime genre, focusing on what was my thought process, the questions I asked myself, and how that might guide you.
Who cares?
In Part One of my advice, I stressed that aspiring book authors ask themselves this question. It’s harsh, yet true. Seriously, who cares about this book? I cared, and people from my hometown cared, because this murder was such a pivotal moment of our childhood. I felt like I owed it to my hometown to write the definitive account of what really happened. That was enough for me.
But, unfortunately, murders are a daily occurrence throughout this country. How can I make this case interesting to people who were not personally affected by it? How do I convince a book publisher to select this title out of the hundreds of other possibilities?
I tried to focus on the uniqueness. The case was unsolved for 27 years, even though the consensus from the students in 1984 was that one of their own had committed the murder. People kept saying, essentially, “we always knew it was him. What took the police so long?”
What’s the point of the book?
My book was published after the trial. People knew the verdict and most of the details of the case. So what’s the point? I tried to think of what unanswered questions lingered. I kept coming back to the question, “what took the police so long?”
I didn’t want to simply criticize the Pleasanton Police Department. I wanted to learn from them the challenges they faced, what technology existed back then, and educate myself on what evidence is needed to make an arrest.
I frequently found myself thinking about a famous scene from the movie, “A Few Good Men” when Tom Cruise’s character says, “it doesn’t matter what I think. All that matters is what I can prove.” [The police couldn’t prove anything until they got the DNA hit.]
The other questions I was hoping to answer:
Were they ever close to arresting anyone else?
What did the defendant do during the 26 years between the murder and his arrest?
If he did commit the murder, what was his motive?
As I interviewed different people about the case, I heard dozens and dozens of rumors – some ridiculous, some reasonable – and wanted to do my best to separate truth from fiction.
What did the jury hear? And what did the jury not hear?
Organizing the book
In part one of my advice, I mentioned the importance of a chapter-by-chapter summary to provide yourself a writing roadmap. This helps organize the most important parts of the book and enables you to bounce around if you get stuck.
One of the bigger complaints from Amazon commenters is how “Murder In Pleasanton” was organized. It’s a fair criticism. It was one of the hardest parts of writing the book because of the timeline of actual events. It goes like this.
April 1984 – Tina Faelz is murdered walking home from school in Pleasanton.
August 2011 – Steve Carlson, her former classmate, is arrested in Santa Cruz.
Sept. 2011 – I formally started working on the book. I lived in Los Angeles.
Oct. 2012 – Preliminary hearing takes place in Oakland.
April 2013 – I moved for a new job to Albuquerque.
Oct. 2014 – The trail begins in Oakland. A jury finds Carlson guilty. He appeals.
Feb. 2015 – Carlson writes me a letter from prison, maintaining his innocence.
April 2015 – I turned the final manuscript into the publisher.
Sept. 2015 – “Murder In Pleasanton” is published by History Press.
Oct. 2020 – Carlson confesses the murder in hand-written letters from jail to Faelz’s family.
Most of the details in this story happened in the six months before the murder and the six months after the murder. Then you had 26 years of rumors, a special task force that didn’t lead to anything, a few similar cases from the area getting solved that police hoped were connected, a few news articles rehashing the same old news, some complicated DNA stuff to explain, then the trial.
I tried to separate the chapters into the different layers of the story. Still, it’s a bunch of overlapping news right after the murder, then nothing for decades. It’s tough.
My initial draft was about 30,000 words longer than what the publisher wanted. Trimming out that many words was excruciating. I remember that I eliminated one entire chapter and merged two others together. Ultimately, I still turned in a book longer than what they wanted and just hoped the publisher wouldn’t notice. [It worked.]
I’m sure a better way to organize the book exists, but I still don’t know what that is.
Who can I interview … and when?
Initially, I wanted to talk with everyone. Even if I didn’t use their names and stories in the book, I wanted to capture the raw emotions and learn the impact this case had on their lives. The most important question that I asked subjects was, “who else do you think I need to interview?” You never know how one person can lead you to someone else. Later, I narrowed my focus to the most important people in the book.
Before the case went to trial, the judge issued a gag order to the lawyers and potential witnesses, which included the detectives. They couldn’t talk to anyone from the press until the case was over. The retired police officers could talk to me, as could the family and friends on both sides.
One of my former high school classmates connected me with someone who then connected me with Bill Eastman, the former Pleasanton Police Chief. I’ll never his guidance: the quicker the defense goes to trial, the more confident they are; the longer they delay the trail, the less confident they are. [It took three years for the trial to begin.] Bill was incredibly gracious with his time and I’m forever grateful.
Legally, I didn’t need the cooperation of anyone to write the book. It was a well-known case that was heavily reported in the press. In my heart, however, I didn’t feel comfortable writing a book if the victim’s family was against it. I knew it would be harder to get important details and many sources would be reluctant to talk with me.
I spent a lot of time thinking how I should even approach Tina Faelz’s mother. I didn’t want to cold call her. I didn’t want to knock on her door without warning. I decided to write (actually, type) an old-fashioned letter and mailed it to her. I did that with two people. Both were grieving mothers.
I wanted them to be able to read my words in full, process that a reporter wanted to speak with them, and provide them a phone number to call me at their convenience. Both called me almost immediately after receiving my letter.
Tina’s family was very cooperative and candid, even as they shared family dynamics that were uncomfortable. Telling people that I had their support was vital.
Later, I’d mostly given up on writing the book. It had been three years, I moved, got a new job, most of the publishers I’d contacted were non-committal and I wasn’t going to self-publish. But Tina’s family encouraged me, at times even urged me, to finish the book. I’m forever grateful they did.
“Whose side are you on?”
I was asked this question a lot from people before I interviewed them. The highly-acclaimed documentary, “Making a Murderer” had just come out on Netflix and there was a wave of true crime shows whose purpose was to prove a convicted person was actually innocent. It was natural to wonder if that was my mission.
I told subjects, “I’m not on either side. I just want to find the truth.”
Almost everyone accepted this answer. Only a few would talk if my reporting was going to confirm their theory of the events that unfolded.
A couple dozen people never responded to my messages. I read a comment on a Facebook post that accused me of trying to make millions of a girl’s death. [I’ll never understand why people think all book authors make millions. You’re lucky if it’s a couple thousand. Your hourly rate is less than a penny per hour.]
A few wrote me back to say they weren’t talking, wanting to protect the privacy of their old neighborhood. Understandable, yet frustrating, when you’re trying to write a balanced story. One said he’d only talk if I paid him a certain amount of money.
One person, a critical source, agreed to meet me, never showed up, and stopped returning my messages. I wonder why.
Another person ignored me multiple times, then emailed me that if I tried to contact him again, he was going to stick a lawyer on me. I do know why. He knows that what he did as a teenager was wrong, he’s either ashamed or scared, and he’s still hiding from his actions. I left his name out of the book. It wasn’t worth the trouble.
The most frustrating was the guy who showed up at my book launch party, someone I contacted who I really wanted to interview. He told me that he intentionally didn’t respond to my messages because he doesn’t like talking to the press. Yet here he was, saying hello, buying a book, telling me that he was sitting on the roof of the defendant’s house on the night of the murder, and together they watched the police work the crime scene.
Where to conduct interviews
Overwhelmingly, my interviews were conducted in person, especially early in what became a four-year process to report the book. I drove from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, over and over, stayed at my Dad’s in my old bedroom, then drove all over the region to interview people. I drove from LA to Arizona to interview people.
I wanted people to see me, know who I was, establish trust with them. I also wanted to look people in the eye to make sure I wasn’t getting duped. [Again, it helped massively that I was between jobs.]
Establishing the right environment for interviews was important. Most of the time, I met people at coffee shops. Let me tell ya, I drank a lot of coffee when reporting on this book. Coffee shops were sometimes too loud or too quiet, but usually provided just enough background noise. These are not easy conversations. Sometimes people became emotional or angry. I didn’t want the public space to make those conversations uncomfortable.
Sometimes, it was at someone’s house, or a park, or a hotel. I knocked on doors and chatted on front doorsteps, in living room, kitchens, backyards.
One memorable conversation was at a bar, late morning, and my subject already had a few beers in him. That wasn’t my preference, but I quickly realized he needed the drinks to prepare himself to unload the information he’d kept bottled inside for decades.
How much of my personal story to include?
I can tell you exactly when I decided to write this book. It was a day or two after the initial arrest was made. I read all the initial news reports online. My Facebook feed was a constant stream of people commenting about the case.
I was driving on Sunset Blvd. to Dodger Stadium, talking to my sister on the phone about the case. [My sister was one grade younger than the victim and defendant.] I asked her if she knew the guy arrested.
“Oh yeah, he used to walk me home from school,” she said. I couldn’t believe my ears. I wondered if this guy was ever inside our house, if I knew him, if I was ever around him.
Then …
“He confessed the murder to me at a party one night,” my sister told me. I nearly crashed my car in disbelief.
Many of the people I interviewed knew me as, “Lisa’s little brother.” That opened a few doors. It also made things complicated. I interviewed her ex-boyfriends, guys who wished they were with her, her friends, and people who didn’t like her.
My most paranoid moment came when a source told me to arrive at his house one hour later than we planned. I texted someone the address and wrote, “if you don’t hear from me again with two hours, give the police this address.”
When I knocked on the door, the guy looked at me suspiciously. He showed me a photo and asked where it was taken. I said that was my grandparent’s house. He smiled and let me inside. He was just messing with me. He needed an extra hour because he was taking care of his elderly father and needed time to finish eating dinner and cleaning the dishes.
Facebook was helpful, yet tricky
Most of the reporting occurred between 2011-14, back when Facebook was becoming a powerful force, before it was filled with political divisions.
I doubt I could have reported this book without Facebook. Just reading the posts from people, all the comments, finding people, and contacting them was so much easier.
Still, I had to be careful. People’s memories are tainted by recent events. It was important to ask people, “is this what your heard back then, just read on Facebook, or did you witness this yourself in the 1980s?” [I later learned the police ran into the same problem.]
The “we always knew he did it” belief among the students from 1984 was because of the defendant’s own mouth. But his quasi-confessions and cryptic comments overwhelmingly came at parties when people were drinking and doing drugs. It’s hard enough for sober people to remember something from three decades earlier, let alone when it’s a party.
This led to skepticism from the police. None of this was real evidence that could be used at a trial, but it was part of the story. Figuring out how to write that was a challenge.
Final thoughts
My book is far from perfect. Even though I spent four years researching this story, I couldn’t track down everyone I wanted. Sometimes, people didn’t know I was trying to reach them until the book came out.
In one painful example, I was told something that better explained inappropriate captions in Foothill High’s 1984 yearbook. My heart sank, realizing that I wrote something that I should have ignored.
(The book’s digital version reflects those changes, as does the audio book that I narrated.)
In my heart, I tried to show compassion to Steve Carlson’s family, respecting their privacy, while also detailing what a hellion Steve was before the murder, and how their lives were unwittingly damaged by Steve. They might disagree on editorial decisions I made.
When I finished writing the book and the initial promotion, I thought I was done with this story forever. I didn’t want to write a sequel. I didn’t want to interview Steve Carlson. I didn’t want to write another True Crime on any topic. These books are really hard and took a mental toll on me. I don’t know how Ann Rule, Robert Scott and some of the other icons in this genre did it.
When Steve Carlson finally confessed the murder, as part of the appeals process to a parole board, Tina’s family told me right away. Tina’s brother sent me Steve’s hand-written letters with all the disturbing details. They answered more of my questions. My story in The San Francisco Chronicle reflected Carlson’s possible motives for the confession.
About a year ago, my friend was riding BART and spotted a stranger clutching onto my book. She snapped this photo and sent it to me.
I realize this story will always be with me, always be with all of us from Pleasanton, my story is now part of this story, and any updates to the story — including Carlson’s potential parole — just might come through me.
It makes me proud that I was in the right place at the right time to write this book. I accept the responsibility to stay on the story.
And, Steve Carlson, if you ever read this, I definitely still want to talk with you.
I always keep the comments open for all my posts on Substack. I’ll monitor these comments closer than normal. If you have a question about this case, or a specific question about writing your own True Crime book, I’ll be happy to answer them.
Regarding the parole of Steve Carlson: on Jan. 25, 2024, Carlson voluntarily waived his right to a hearing for three years. He did the same thing on Oct. 7, 2020. The next time he’s scheduled to appear in front of the parole board is Feb. 2027. His status can be tracked on this website.