A woman’s secret. A small town with a dark past. A serial killer bent on revenge. Lies kill in a shocking true crime–inspired thriller by the Edgar-nominated author of The Quarry Girls.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and the author’s note from The Crying Killer by Jess Lourey, which releases on August 18th 2026.
Tuesday Hendrickson has spent eight years running from memories of that night. Her sister’s screams. Blood on the walls. And Arsen Bauer, a monster known as the Crying Killer, shot down in a barrage of bullets as he fled. Case closed.
Intending to build a safe new identity out of the ashes, Tuesday changed her last name and moved away. She’s now a private investigator who guards herself and her daughter, Julia, like their lives depend on it. And maybe they do. Because unless she’s imagining things, Tuesday has seen Arsen on the streets of Saint Paul. She’d know her sister’s killer anywhere.
When bodies begin surfacing bearing the Crying Killer’s brutal and unmistakable signature, Tuesday is certain he’s coming for them. Except no one believes that but her. As her paranoia intensifies, she is left with a terrible choice: unearth the shocking secret she buried with her sister, or become the Crying Killer’s next victim.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Serial killings have an outsize grip on the American imagination despite accounting for only 1 percent of homicides. Millions of us tune into podcasts like Crime Junkie and Morbid, binge documentaries like Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, devour books like Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark.
I think there’s an element of self-protection to the obsession. If we learn how the predators hunt, we might be able to keep ourselves safe. Plus, there’s the timeless appeal of hearing a scary story while you yourself are safe. But those factors are universal, so I don’t think they account for the uniquely American fascination with serial killers.
That, I think, is explained by ratios.
Specifically, the US has more documented serial killers than any other nation, over twenty times as many as England, which ranks second. If a population has a twentyfold difference in anything deadly—car accidents, earthquakes, salmonella outbreaks—it’s going to rightfully invite attention.
On a per capita basis, the three states that consistently top the list for numbers of serial killings are Alaska, Montana, and Nevada, though my home state of Minnesota has recorded its share of repeat offenders. Paul Michael Stephani, otherwise known as the Weepy-Voiced Killer, is one of the most notorious. He earned his nickname due to his whining, anonymous phone calls to police after all but one of his gruesome crimes.
Stephani was born September 8, 1944, in Austin, Minnesota, to a devoutly Catholic mother. His father died when he was young, and his mother remarried a man who was reportedly abusive. Stephani, now part of a blended family of ten children, moved out of the house and to Saint Paul in the mid-’60s. There he held various low-wage jobs, including as a shipping clerk and janitor. He stayed mostly below the radar until December 31, 1980, when he viciously attacked twenty-year-old Karen Potack, beating her with a tire iron and leaving her for dead. In a span of two years, he would go on to murder three women and stab a fourth who—like Karen Potack—survived, bringing his total number of known victims to five.
Because of his childhood spent in a deeply religious family, it’s possible that Stephani’s high-pitched confessional calls after his attacks were not just theatrics but attempts at atonement, pathetic pleas for absolution that offered no comfort to his victims or their families. (For example, he complained, “I’ll never make it into heaven!” when admitting to stabbing Barbara Simons, a nurse, over forty times. As with his other weeping phone calls, he left no identifying information.) His recorded confessions brought him wide attention, which in turn made him seem larger than life.
Like many—all?—serial killers Americans find themselves fascinated with, though, the myth of Paul Michael Stephani overshadowed the reality. Think Dennis Rader, the self-styled BTK (“bind, torture, kill”) Killer, who lived for decades as a Boy Scout leader and church council president, all while concealing his monstrous double life. When caught, he was revealed to be less a criminal mastermind than a middle-aged narcissist. Or Ted Bundy, often romanticized for his charisma and intelligence, who was actually a deeply insecure man as well as a mediocre student with average intelligence. Richard Ramirez—the Night Stalker—left behind ample evidence, including fingerprints, and Joseph James DeAngelo, better known as the Golden State Killer, was described by his neighbors as aloof but unexceptional.
The list goes on.
Serial killers, once stripped of their fabricated mystique, are not the legends popular culture often makes them out to be. They’re typically unremarkable men who benefit from institutional bias and imperfect police work.
Stephani was a prime example.
He struggled to maintain steady employment and was nearly caught multiple times. For the setting of his first attack, he chose the grounds of the manufacturing plant he’d been previously fired from. After his first known murder six months later, the June 1981 ice pick stabbing of recent high school graduate Kimberly Compton, police had witnesses and details connecting him to the scene, yet he wasn’t charged. He was also identified as the last person seen leaving a bar with Barbara Simons, whose mutilated body was discovered the next day.
His bizarre, emotional phone calls also left a trail.
But Stephani was only—finally—arrested after attacking Denise Williams in late August 1982. Williams, an extraordinary nineteen-year-old, bit him, kicked him, and struck him with a glass bottle as he held her down and stabbed her over a dozen times with a screwdriver. He fled the scene. When he got home, he called for medical assistance due to the injuries she’d inflicted. That call linked him to the assault. Williams and the young man who’d come to her aid both identified Stephani, who was ultimately convicted in Williams’s attempted murder as well as the murder of Barbara Simons three weeks earlier.
It wasn’t until fifteen years later, when Stephani learned in prison that he had terminal cancer and confessed, that police were able to definitively tie him to his other crimes.
Despite his mediocrity, like many named serial killers, Stephani has become a grim celebrity. Stories about him focus on his melodramatic calls and his apparent religious guilt, painting him as a fascinating enigma rather than what he was: a man with a possible untreated mental illness, unable to regulate his emotions, who relied on luck and societal blind spots to elude capture. He’s featured in blogs, podcasts, and TV shows, many of them examining his motivation and his crimes.
His victims, on the other hand?
At least historically, they were reduced to names: Karen Potack, Kimberly Compton, Kathleen Greening, Barbara Simons, and Denise Williams. Maybe a detail or two appeared—a student nurse, a bar patron, a woman attacked while walking home. Their lives, so full and intricate, were rarely explored beyond their brief intersection with Stephani’s violence. It’s a difficult balance for journalists to strike because on the one hand, the victims and their families deserve privacy. But also, once named, those who suffered should be presented as more than footnotes in their own lives.
Fortunately, some modern true-crime storytelling, especially the thoughtful approach taken by many podcasters as well as writers (Sarah Weinman’s excellent essay collections are a prime example), has begun to center what too often was left in shadow: the victims. This approach demonstrates how they were more than their encounter with a killer, more than the day they were murdered. They are presented as whole people, with dreams and flaws, with relationships and stories worth telling. Attention is gradually turning from the perpetrators, frequently dull, one-note monsters, to the deep losses their actions created.
Fiction can also help to rebalance the scale.
This novel, inspired by the haunting crimes and confessions of Paul Michael Stephani, shifts the focus from him, instead concentrating on the communities and the families—including the murderer’s own—that are forever altered by serial killings. I find the narratives shattered by the crimes much more compelling than the serial killers themselves, and I aim to stitch them together, piece by piece, placing them at the center of the story.
Where they belong.
