Caitlin Rother's Blog
August 20, 2025
Music is the yin to the yang of my writing. What's yours?
July 17, 2025
Questions about Down to the Bone? Check out these podcast interviews
June 2, 2025
The Book Tour Begins
May 24, 2025
Life as an author takes resilience
May 16, 2025
Cover reveal!
May 8, 2025
DOWN TO THE BONE: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Publishing a True Crime Book in Today’s Litigious World
April 30, 2025
Book tour dates for DOWN TO THE BONE by Caitlin Rother
February 27, 2025
Caitlin Rother re-releases an updated edition of BODY PARTS with 32 pages of new developments
“Caitlin Rother is the model for serious crime journalism today. She's bold, meticulous, and exhaustive, returning to cases with loose ends to update us on the latest innovations and developments.”
-- Katherine Ramsland, author of The Serial Killer’s Apprentice
Twenty-five years after a boater found a Twenty-five years after a boater found a young woman’s torso in Ryan Slough, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office has finally been able to identify the victim using forensic genetic genealogy: Kerry Anne Cummings. For a year after her murder, detectives had no suspects until one evening in November 1998, when a 36-year-old former Marine walked into the Eureka sheriff’s station with a woman’s breast in his jacket pocket. Initially saying he had “hurt some people,” Wayne Adam Ford turned himself in, describing the gruesome details of repeatedly choking four young women during rough sex until they stopped breathing, reviving them with CPR, then doing it again.
BODY PARTS, by New York Times bestselling author Caitlin Rother, takes a deep psychological look at serial killer Wayne Adam Ford. A long-haul trucker, Ford confessed to picking up dozens of prostitutes and troubled women along California roads. After torturing and repeatedly choking and reviving them with CPR during sex, only four of them didn’t survive, he said, claiming that was an accident. After dismembering two of his victims, he dumped their bodies in the California Aqueduct and other waterways in Humboldt, Kern, San Joaquin, and San Bernardino Counties. Ford's complex death penalty case made national news because he is one of the only serial killers to turn himself in and help authorities identify his victims. He was recently transferred from death row at San Quentin to a state prison in San Luis Obispo.
Originally released in March 2009, this new edition of BODY PARTS has been updated with 32 pages of developments about the identification of Kerry Anne Cummings, Ford’s first victim, whom he dismembered and who went unidentified for 25 years. If there is such a thing as a happy ending to a book about a serial killer, this is it. The new material takes the reader through the investigative process involved in solving a cold case like this one so many years after the fact. Kerry now has her name back and her family has closure after so many years of not knowing what happened to her, and being prevented from reporting her missing to police because she was using drugs. Rother is the first writer to interview the Cummings family about Kerry and her troubled life before she went missing in late 1997.
Overall, this book is based on exclusive information Rother uncovered during her extensive research and exclusive interviews with key players, including Ford’s father and brother. She also interviewed, the prosecutor, sheriff's detectives from all four counties, the defense’s sole investigator, and a woman who survived after being raped and tortured by Ford. By obtaining a court order to release sealed court files and digging through boxes of evidence and investigators’ reports, Rother was able to paint comprehensive and compelling portraits of Ford, his family and his victims. Her book shows readers how Ford’s family dynamics, his severe head injury, his bouts of mental illness, and his compulsive sexual perversions led to his tragic killing spree, tearful confessions, and dramatic trial.
Please join Rother at one of these four book signings over the next month:
1) Saturday, March 1 from 12-2 pm at Bay Books in Coronado (San Diego County)
2) Sunday, March 2 from 1-3 pm at the Barnes & Noble in Carmel Mountain (SD County)
3) Saturday, March 8 from 1-3 pm at the Barnes & Noble at the Galleria in Riverside (Riverside County
4) Saturday, March 15 from 2-4 pm at Book Carnival in Orange (Orange County)
To buy a copy of this book online, go to Amazon or bookshop.org
To buy an autographed copy, please contact Rother at crother@flash.net
December 11, 2024
Serial killer Wayne Adam Ford’s first murder victim is identified by genetic genealogy 25 years later
By Caitlin Rother
People often ask me how I cope with writing about such dark subjects in my true crime books. Usually, I laugh it off and say it comes with the job, but to be honest, it does take a toll, especially cumulatively. That’s why I go for walks and swim, sing and play music, and also write crime fiction.
I make it a point not to set out to write a book that I wouldn’t want to read, but I have to admit that BODY PARTS, which was first published in 2009, proved more challenging in that respect than I’d anticipated. To this day, I have difficulty reading parts of it aloud or even summarizing some of the horrific things that Wayne Adam Ford did to his victims.
The short version is that he picked them up in his truck, repeatedly choked them out during sex and revived them with CPR, and when four women didn’t make it back, he dumped their bodies in waterways up and down California. He also dismembered the first and cut the breast off the last, which was in his jacket pocket when he turned himself in.
That’s why I’m happy to announce that I’ve updated this book with 32 pages of new developments to give it a happy ending, if such a thing can exist for a book about a serial killer. The updated edition of BODY PARTS will be released Feb. 25, 2025.
Fourteen years after the book was originally released, I learned from a source that Ford’s first victim had been identified through genetic genealogy—25 years after her torso and left arm were found in Humboldt County. Of course, I was immediately compelled to find out the details, and it was well worth the effort.
As a result, this updated edition not only brought my second-bestselling book back into print, but it brought me a sense of satisfaction that I didn’t get when the book first came out.
It was rewarding for me to explain how a troubled young woman, Kerry Anne Cummings, got her name back and to show that her family has gained closure by finally learning what had happened to her, partly, as it turns out, because her sister read the original edition of my book three times.
BODY PARTS was my third book, all three of which were nonfiction books about murders or attempted murders. I’d also written a crime novel, but it didn’t come out until after this one. Due to its gruesome, violent, and wrenching emotional content, this one had a powerful impact on my well-being.
After writing books back-to-back without a break, something I now know not to do, I was in the throes of chronic arm, neck, and back pain, with bouts of depression, for the nine months I was under deadline to finish this book. The pain continued for nine months after that, while some part of my upper body was constantly in spasm. My acupuncturist told me she thought it was the dark topic, that I should try to surround myself with images of positive light. I told her I could handle it, and said it was probably just the constant sitting at the laptop and typing. I think we were both right.
The couple of years I spent in Ford’s head, researching and then writing this book, grew increasingly dark. And it didn’t get any better, the way Hollywood movies do at the end. This story was tragic, not just for the victims and for their families, but also for Ford’s family. Everyone suffered because of what Ford did, partly because he never got the mental health treatment or help that he needed along the way that might have prevented him from killing these four women, who were among the 50 he picked up in his truck and put through this same ordeal. All the others lived, he said, and one of them testified at his trial.
I chose to write this story because I saw Wayne Adam Ford as a rare bird, a serial killer who felt remorseful and guilty enough after what he did to these four women—Kerry Anne Cummings, Tina Gibb, Patricia Tamez and Lanett White—to stop himself from killing again. He knew what he did was wrong. He was troubled, even disgusted, by it, so much so that he enlisted his brother’s help to turn himself in.
I thought that was a compelling story that needed telling, because it showed that people are not all good or all bad. I just didn’t realize until I got into the details just how gruesome that story was going to be.
Wayne Adam Ford is not your typical serial killer, if there is such a thing. He’s a complicated character, a deeply troubled and disturbed man who suffered a severe brain injury at nineteen. He was in the U.S. Marines at the El Toro base in Orange County, where he sang karaoke at a sushi bar, Taka-O in Laguna Niguel, and drove a school bus for disabled kids. He also spent nine days in the ICU with a head injury after being hit by a drunk driver while trying to save the life of a car accident victim at the side of the freeway.
The way Ford’s family described him, he seemed to have a split personality. He always seemed sweet and polite, they said, never cussing in front of women. He was so good-looking, a talented singer who did a mean Elvis tune. They just couldn’t reconcile these positive memories with the horribly violent murders he’d admitted to.
For these reasons, my proposed title for the book was KILLER WITH A CONSCIENCE. But my publisher didn’t like it. The marketing department knew better, they said, and titled it BODY PARTS.
My goal in writing this book, and several others I’ve published about mentally ill killers, is to help all of us learn more about the human condition, to illustrate what makes a sexual predator, mass murderer, or a serial killer, and how and why these men (yes, they are almost always men), turn out this way. How mental illness can cause bad and even violent behavior, but to me, that does not equate to being evil.
I don’t write these books to rationalize killers’ behavior, but rather to educate people. To help readers, and especially women, who generally are the victims of these men, learn how to protect themselves. Perhaps would-be victims’ families might learn how to better help those vulnerable women before they became victims, when they are unwilling or unable to help themselves. I also believe it’s important to identify flaws and breakdowns in our government systems so we know where to fix them. Only then, in my view, can we hope to prevent such tragedies from happening again.
My goal in adding the updated material to this book is also to show readers who Kerry Anne Cummings was before she became a victim, because I didn’t get a chance to do that in the first edition.
I interviewed Kerry’s sister and cousin about her for the book, but I don’t want to print spoilers here. I’ll just say that she loved her sister, she loved to draw and paint, she liked to live on the road, and, unfortunately, she had some mental challenges that she chose to treat with street drugs rather than pharmaceuticals.
When Ford was interviewed by Humboldt County sheriff’s detective Juan Freeman about the young woman he'd dismembered, he said she was about twenty-five, weighed about 150 pounds, was about five-feet-six-inches tall, had a tattooed band of roses around her ankle, and seemed like she was on drugs.
“I really think her brain was fried,” he said, comparing her difficulty focusing to his. She was “like I am now, not mentally cohesive.”
Ford said she was different from the other women he picked up, he said, because she was not a prostitute. She asked which way he was heading, and when he said north to Arcata, she asked if he would take her to Clam Beach. Ironically, this was where the authorities found her left arm in late January 1998, three months after her torso had been found in Ryan’s Slough.
At least one of the detectives who interviewed him he said thought Ford seemed remorseful. He kept talking about how he wanted to try to help find and identify the young woman he’d cut up in his bathtub. He drew them a map, explaining where he'd buried her head under a cement slab in the river next to the Readimix cement plant in Arcata, where he’d worked and parked his trailer. He offered to go there with detectives and point them to the spot where he’d buried her parts. But when they took him there, the parts had washed away long ago.
When Ford was asked the same questions for a documentary on the case a decade later, he added more details: she had brown eyes and short hair, just below the ears, and was “top-heavy,” with large breasts. She had a plump face with “big cheeks,” and wore a multicolored knit beanie. She told him she was “having trouble” with her parents, but that her sister loved her. He couldn’t remember exactly which state she was from, but thought it was California, Colorado or Arizona. He said she carried a backpack, and inside was a military-style can opener, a rosary-bead cross, a baggie possibly containing heroin, but no money, no jewelry, and no ID. She went by a nickname, and she seemed ill-equipped to be “out in the middle of nowhere. So, I don’t think she was out for very long.”
Most of this turned out to be accurate, but it took some DNA profiles to prove it. So, if you have a family member who has gone missing, perhaps uploading your DNA profile to GEDmatch could help find them too.
Before I close, I also want to mention that I have a second true crime book coming out June 25, 2025. DOWN TO THE BONE is about the murder of the McStay family, a family of four from Fallbrook, California, who went mysteriously missing in 2010. After investigating their disappearance as a missing persons case, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department gave up three years later, deciding that the family had voluntarily gone to Mexico. This was proven wrong when their skeletal remains were found eight months later in the Mojave Desert near Victorville. From there, it became a homicide case, investigated by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.
After a death penalty trial, one of Joseph McStay’s two business associates, Charles “Chase” Merritt, was sent to death row for the murders. Based on evidence presented at trial as well as witness interviews, discovery materials and investigative reports that have never been made public, my book gives the back story on the family and what was going on in their lives at the time of their disappearance. It also explores the two investigations and prosecution of the case, which Merritt and his defense team maintain were motivated by confirmation bias that resulted in his wrongful conviction.
Please contact me at caitlinrother@gmail.com if you want to interview me for your TV or radio show or podcast, write a news or feature story, or review one or both books for your print, digital, TV or radio media outlet, blog, or podcast. I am setting up interviews now and sending out ARCs for BODY PARTS. I’m also making an ARC list for DOWN TO THE BONE if you’d like a review copy when they become available in a couple of months.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, the publication date of both books have been delayed several times, so I could really use some help with pre-orders if you are so inclined. The new pub dates are not going to change again. All pre-orders are counted in the first week of book sales, which is the best chance for me to hit the bestseller list. Here are the links for each book: BODY PARTS and DOWN TO THE BONE.
July 11, 2024
San Diego County Medical Examiner denies petition by Rebecca Zahau’s family to amend her death certificate
By Caitlin Rother
Today, July 11, is the thirteenth anniversary of Max Shacknai’s death, and Saturday, July 13, will be the same anniversary of Rebecca Zahau’s death. I hope they are both resting in peace.
I’ve been a little lax in checking on this, but nothing has been reported in the media, so I’m still ahead of the working reporters who have been following this very high-profile case from the beginning, when Rebecca was found dead, hanging naked, bound and gagged in the rear courtyard of the historic Spreckels Mansion in Coronado, California. My book on the case, Death on Ocean Boulevard: Inside the Coronado Mansion Case, came out in 2021, and is in development for a TV limited series.
But my original prediction fourteen months ago was correct, that the Zahau’s petition to the ME—to amend Rebecca’s death certificate to reflect that her death was a “homicide,” or an “undetermined” cause, rather than “suicide”—was dead on arrival when it was submitted in October 2022.
The San Diego County ME’s office took nearly a year to respond to the Zahau family’s 204-page petition letter. In a brief letter dated September 11, 2023, Chief Medical Examiner Steven C. Campman said he considered the arguments set forth in the letter sent by attorney Keith Greer, but “after reviewing the totality of the evidence, the conclusion of this office has not changed.”
In other words, the ME is sticking to its position that Rebecca Zahau hung herself, regardless of the family’s argument that she was murdered by Adam Shacknai, the brother of her boyfriend, Jonah Shacknai.
A civil jury supported that argument in 2018, finding Adam responsible for Rebecca’s wrongful death. Adam Shacknai claims innocence, but his insurance company settled with the Zahaus for $600,000 against his wishes, to avoid the costs of appealing the jury verdict.
“I considered the arguments set forth in your letter and the information in the accompanying documents,” Campman wrote, referring to transcripts and other information from the civil trial. “I also discussed your arguments with other members of the Medical Examiner’s Office, including staff pathologists and Dr. Lucas, who originally worked on the determining the manner of death classification for Ms. Zahau.”
Adam Shacknai called 911 on the morning of July 13, 2011, to report that he’d found Zahau hanging naked, bound and gaged from a balcony in the mansion’s rear courtyard. Adam claimed he’d stayed the night in the guest house, while Rebecca was in the main house.
In my last blog on this topic last year, I reported that the ME’s office still had not issued a substantive response to the Zahaus because it considered the family’s request to be a second “courtesy review” of the case, the first being in 2018, after the jury verdict was announced.
At the time, Greer claimed to have handed over transcripts or findings that came out of the civil trial, but then-chief ME Glenn Wagner said he didn’t consider any such data because “no new information was forthcoming from the Zahau lawyers.” County officials have always maintained that the Zahaus never presented “new evidence” at trial, only new interpretations of existing evidence. With that disconnect, I always felt it was unlikely that the second “courtesy review” would go any differently.
Despite acknowledging “the public interest and complexities of the case” and promising a careful examination and consideration of the petition, the county’s lack of urgency and Campman’s four-paragraph form-like response to the Zahas speaks louder than words.
Sheriff Kelly Martinez told me before she was elected in November 2022 that she wouldn’t ask an outside agency to re-open the criminal case in Rebecca’s death unless the ME changed its “suicide” finding. This was only after two of her challengers in that election, Dave Myers and John Hemmerling, both said they would re-open the case if elected.
In 2022, Greer sent the same petition letter to Dr. Jonathan Lucas at the Los Angeles Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner, because Lucas was the one who made the original “suicide” finding after conducting the autopsy on Rebecca’s body and signed the death certificate. Lucas, who was the chief deputy ME in San Diego, left to head the LA county’s medical examiner-coroner’s office in 2017.
Greer’s letter to Lucas stated, “The reason for this request is that the large body of evidence and expert analysis developed after you signed Rebecca’s death certificate, as discussed in detail below, shows that it is “more likely than not” that Rebecca did not commit suicide. “More likely than not” is the standard in civil court, vs. “beyond a reasonable doubt” in criminal court.
The letter outlined 13 points of forensic evidence the jury supported in its wrongful death verdict, establishing “Adam Shacknai as the killer.” Greer also cited findings from the Zahaus’ expert witnesses in the civil trial that differed from Lucas’s. For example, forensic kinesiologist James Kent testified that Rebecca’s injuries didn’t gibe with a suicide death caused by a nine-foot fall. He said her height, center of gravity and bound hands would have made it virtually impossible for her to propel herself over the balcony railing, and that she should have been partially or completely decapitated if she’d found some way of doing so.
Lucas left his ME job in Los Angeles several days after receiving Greer’s letter, to which he did not respond and did not plan to, according to a spokesman. In his letter, Campman was apparently speaking for Lucas as well.
Greer has said numerous times publicly that if this petition was ultimately rejected, he would go back to court to request a change to the death certificate in what would be a third round of court proceedings that he hoped would be more successful. However, he has yet to make any such statement or court filing since receiving Campman’s letter 10 months ago, and neither have the Zahaus.
After winning the civil trial against Adam Shacknai in 2018, the Zahaus filed a lawsuit against the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department (SDSD) in 2020, trying to force the release of investigative documents that would show the department hid or ignored internal communications, notes or emails that pointed toward or discussed the homicide theory.
This was somewhat of a fishing expedition, because they had no proof such documents existed. The judge said he wouldn’t force then-Sheriff Bill Gore—or anyone else from the SDSD—to testify about the issue, because law enforcement is protected from having to release, or even discuss, investigative documents under California law.
It is legal to publish findings from such documents if they are released through a party who has access to the discovery process, which is how I obtained investigative reports and witness interviews in the case. However, Greer maintained that the documents he was looking for were never made part of that process due to corruption within the SDSD, which Gore always denied.
After a promising start in the lawsuit against the SDSD, the family ended up asking for a dismissal when the judge indicated he was about to rule in the SDSD’s favor, saying that a writ of mandate was not the proper legal vehicle to go about getting such documents.
The question is, are the Zahaus going to take this case back to court for round three? It’s been a long and costly road for them, but they have said they intend to keep fighting until they get justice for Rebecca. They often wait to make announcements on the anniversary of Rebecca’s death, so I guess we’ll see if that happens later this week.
