Then reality and profound regret struck with a phone call from her mother Carol in 1998: “I just wanted to tell you that Kathy died.”Ī local newspaper in Connecticut said that heavy drinking had contributed to Kathy’s sudden death. As often happens in long-distance acquaintanceships, we drifted away and after a while I simply stopped checking in. Near the end I was not a good enough friend to her, though. She was invariably honest and forthright she always insisted that nothing be held back, that nothing was out of bounds in her deeply personal recollections, not even things that were profoundly painful and sometimes embarrassing to her. I had interviewed Kathy at length at her home in Connecticut in 1992, and for years afterward I spoke frequently with her in long phone calls, often through her tears. “I wish to make it known to the FBI that I am terrified of Ron Poole,” she said. Poole’s incessant interferences were “contributing factors in causing the death of Susan Smith,” Kathy asserted in an eight-page statement to the FBI in March 1992. I remained in close touch with Kathy for many years after “Above Suspicion” was published in 1993, while she struggled mightily to keep her marriage and her family together, and as she fought personal demons, including her raging fixation on Ron Poole, whom she saw as a half-baked but nevertheless sinister Iago: always scheming, driven by intense jealousy of Mark and a desire, apparently never realized, for an intimate relationship with Susan.
None of them wished to comment for this revised epilogue to the new 2017 editions of this book, which was originally published in 1993 and republished in 2017 in updated print and e-book editions by Open Road Integrated Media.Īfter I interviewed him over several days in 1992 in a federal prison Rochester, Minnesota, I HAD stayed in touch by mail with Mark until early 1999. Mark later remarried and is living in the South, as are Danielle and Mark Jr. A Kentucky corrections department spokesman said that Mark had been a “model inmate” who volunteered in the chapel and commissary and took classes in maintaining heating and cooling systems. It was a crime of passion,” Carol told The Hartford Courant newspaper when Mark was released, his sentence reduced from sixteen years to ten for good behavior. Kathy’s parents always remained close to Mark. into their home in Manchester until Mark was released from prison in the fall of 2000. Putnam was found dead in her Manchester, Connecticut, home by her 13-year-old daughter, Danielle” and had died of “an apparent heart attack,” the Associated Press reported.Īfter Kathy’s death, her parents, Carol and Ray Ponticelli, took Danielle and Mark Jr.
This sad story became sadder on February 5, 1998, when Kathy Putnam suddenly died at the age of 38. *** UPDATED EPILOGUE FOR “ABOVE SUSPICION” She finally bestowed dignity on that poor soul. Then he drove back into the mountains, stripped her body, and dumped her down a ravine at an abandoned strip mine, where she lay, savaged by animals, bereft of any dignity, for almost a year before Mark confessed and told officials where he had left the body.Īs I say in the Epilogue to “Above Suspicion,” updated here, I told Emilia Clarke on location that I thought she had brought Susan Smith to life, more fully than I had been able to in the book.
But the FBI agent, Mark Putnam, killed Susan Smith, and then, horrified by what he’d done, stuffed her body in the trunk of his car and drove with it the next day to routine meetings with FBI officials, two hours away in Lexington, Kentucky, before returning to Pikeville that night. What stunned me watching the finale of “Game of Thrones” was that there was at least dignity for Daenerys in having a raging dragon lovingly carry her body into the skies, perhaps to Valhalla.
The actress Emilia Clarke, who played Daenerys, happens to also be the star of the movie version of my true-crime book “Above Suspicion,” in which she plays a sassy, pretty coal-miner’s daughter named Susan Smith, who was murdered in a fit of passion on a lonely mountain near isolated Pikeville, Kentucky, by an FBI agent with whom she was having an affair. I was particularly taken with - stunned, I would say - the thundering, violent scene in which the beautiful regal character Daenerys Targaryen, “Mother of Dragons,” is stabbed to death and her body is carried away by a fire-spewing, shrieking flying dragon.
The second time was the much-publicized finale of the monumentally popular TV fantasy series in May of 2019. Author’s note: I watched “Game of Thrones” only twice, the first time in 2016, just a few days before I was headed to Kentucky as a consultant where the movie adaptation of my book was being filmed.