Dawn Barclay, the author of the new book "Vacations Can Be Murder: A True Crime Lover's Travel Guide to New England," was today's scintillating guest.

And welcome to the Fromer Travel Show.

I'm your host, Pauline Fromer.

True crime, that has been a major trend in film, in podcasts, in books, ever since Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and now perhaps in travel.

My next guest, Dawn Barclay, has written a really great.

I don't know if I call it a guidebook or an almanac about the topic of true crime travel.

It's called Vacations Can Be A True Crime Lover's Travel Guide to New England.

Hey, dawn, thank you so much for appearing on the Fromer Travel Show.

Well, thanks for having me back.

I really appreciate it.

So how did you get the idea to write this book?

You know, thanks for asking that question.

I was in Minneapolis for Bouchercon, which is the World Mystery Convention, because I write fiction.

I write psychological thrillers and domestic suspense.

And anyway, I was there, and I took a true crying tour of Minneapolis and St. Paul, which I thought was really interesting.

And.

And I wondered to myself if anybody had written a book that included or listed all the true crime tours around the country.

And that was the seed of the idea of.

I mean, I was coming off the success of Traveling different, which was the, you know, the autism travel bible that you actually had interviewed me about.

So that was great.

Yeah, great book.

That book won.

Yeah, it won the L. Thomas Gold Award, I'm very proud to say.

And so I'd already gotten the idea that I can do fairly well with nonfiction.

Fiction is harder to sell, and certainly nobody's interviewing me about it, but a lot of exposure for nonfiction, and I really feel like I'm helping people, and this gave me a chance to feed into people's passions because I love subcultures and feeding into the passions of subcultures.

So that was where the idea began, and it grew from there.

Well, it's quite the resource, I gotta say.

But why do you think.

And this may get philosophical.

Why do you think true crime has become so popular?

I mean, it's not only true crime that we're looking at.

We're now looking at TV shows about people covering true crime and only murders in the building.

Why do you think this is such a touchstone in our culture right now?

I think a couple of reasons.

One is that people seem to love sensationalism and just how horrible can it get?

Or else horror movies be as popular as they are.

But also, I think that there is a feeling of.

I don't know, there's a catharsis.

There's a great feeling when the evildoers get their due and they get.

And they get incarcerated.

And so you have that feeling of satisfaction from that.

But I also think that there.

A lot of women watch true crime and read true crime and it might be to learn what to watch out for.

So they're bit more cautious out there.

Oh, that's really interesting.

Although some of the bad guys are bad girls.

You know they are.

Yeah.

And in your book you tell the story of some of those.

So even though I'm not sure any of our readers are.

Sorry, I should say I'm not sure if any of our listeners aren't aware of true crime.

Let's give some of the stories that you recount in the book just so.

So there's an understanding that we all have about what we're discussing here.

So you talk about a woman named Constance Margaret Fisher who lived in Waterville, Maine.

What was her story?

I just want to backtrack for one second and say that I include snippets of crimes.

Like I give synopses of the major crimes in each state.

I'm limited to how much I can say because of time.

This is already 438 pages.

So it's, it's more of a primer for people who are new to true crime, but also a refresher for people who are.

Who know a lot about it.

And then I include a list of books to read to learn more.

So I apologize.

A list of books to read to learn more.

And also to anybody who's saying that you're just on the sensationalism tract, you also give victim services in the book.

Yes, yes.

Purposely.

Because I thought that was a really important thing to add.

But I just wanted the key to the real, the real key in the heart of the book are the locations to each crime.

And I put those in the itineraries in the back.

So in the snippets, not so much of the exact locations, but I do give you street numbers or if it's an apartment building, I'll give you the apartment address or the business address.

All of that is in the itinerary section back.

That encompasses every.

Brings everything together.

Sure.

All the disparate parts of the book.

But I'll get back to your question.

Sure, no problem.

So.

So there's Constance Fisher.

Yeah.

Fisher, who, who initially lived in Waterville, Maine, was, you know, later she was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

But I think a lot of what she suffered from was postpartum depression.

And she.

She had a boy that was almost seven.

She had another boy that was five, and a daughter who was one.

And she drowned them all in the family bathtub.

And then she tried to kill herself by swallowing a bottle of shampoo.

And she left a note saying that she wanted to protect them from evil.

So, you know, they saved her.

They committed her to the Augusta State Hospital, which is now the Augusta Mental Health Institute.

Five years later, they decided she was okay.

They let her out.

The couple moved to Fairfield and had three more children.

And this is the same couple.

So her husband took her back.

Couple husband took her back.

They had three more kids.

A daughter that was six, a son that was four, and another daughter who was nine months.

And she drowned them again.

And this time she took a pill overdosed.

Afterwards they rushed her to Thayer Hospital.

They saved her.

And at that point they got the idea that maybe they don't want to let her out again.

So they.

They admitted her for the rest of her life to back to the hospital psychiatric hospital.

Oh, wow.

Wow.

And you also tell a snippet of a story of Pamela Ann Smart.

And her tale was so sensational, it was made into a film, right?

Yeah, yeah.

To Die for with Nicole Kidman.

Great film.

So what she did.

Yeah, no, it was a really good movie.

She was a media coordinator at a high school in Hampton, New Hampshire, and she seduced a 15 year old student named Billy Flynn because essentially she wanted him to help her kill her husband.

So she threatened to cut it off.

Her husband was 24, his name was Gregory.

She either wanted to end the marriage just because she didn't want to have a messy divorce, or she wanted the $140,000 life insurance policy.

So he recruited three friends to help him kill Billy.

I'm sorry, Kill Gregory.

They tried to make it look like a burglary gone wrong.

Later, she admitted to the affair, but said she had no knowledge of the murder plans.

Meanwhile, one of the students in the school secretly taped her and had evidence to prove against her.

And she ended up being convicted.

She's serving a life sentence in Bedford Hills, New York, which is not so far from where I live.

And the four accomplices have either been paroled or released by now.

Wow.

And we'll tell one more story just so we understand the scope of what true crime can be.

This is the story of Jeffrey S. Mayo.

Do you know how to pronounce his name.

I think that's how I pronounce it, because that's the French pronunciation.

Right, Right.

And it seems like a French name.

Yeah.

So, yeah, he's.

He's a charmer.

He was somebody that nobody would have ever suspected of doing anything.

He hadn't even gotten a traffic ticket in his life.

Wow.

And so that was shocking when it turned out that he was the Rhode island ripper.

And he used a bow saw in his bathroom in, I guess, the bathtub, which is a technique he learned from watching the Sopranos.

I thought that was stunning.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then he left the bodies in various dumpsters in communities.

And I give the addresses of those dumpsters, if you want to, you know, go and see them.

One woman ended up escaping, and her description of him led to his arrest.

And they were able to only find one woman's remains in a landfill in Johnston.

And he's at the Rhode Island Maximum Security Prison in Cranston.

Right.

And it's fascinating to me that you are telling where these people are now, what prisons they're in.

In fact, in the book, you're talking about a place not far from where I am right now, the Danbury Federal Correction Institute.

And I gotta say, it's just.

This is what's so fascinating about your book to read about who is in this prison, past and present in inmates in included hotelier Leona Hemsley, which I. Oh, my God.

Remember, she left all her money to her dogs.

Was it.

She was.

I got married at her hotel, so I know her well.

She was in prison for tax evasion.

The Reverend Sun Young Moon of the Unification of Church, also in there for tax evasion.

And he actually refurbished the New Yorker Hotel in New York.

Yeah, I think it's still owned by his church.

Singer, actress Lauryn Hill.

I never knew she went to jail.

She went to jail for income tax reasons.

Piper Kerman, who was the author of Orange is the New Black.

So this must be the prison that they based that series on.

Reality star Teresa Guidici for bankruptcy and tax fraud.

Fertilizer manufacturer Alexander Salvagno for environmental crime, and Mafia boss Michael Mancuso, who orchestrated a murder.

So this is all fascinating, but can people visit these prisons?

I mean, so how does a tourist build an experience around these prisons.

In the itineraries, I include that you can drive by them because you can't actually visit these prisons.

There are prisons around the country that you can visit that are still active.

No, they're not active.

But there are ways that I will tell you there's two ways you can do this.

One is that in the book that's coming out in August, which is New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, there are certain prisons where they have programs that you can go and eat there.

They have culinary programs where they're training, you know, low security individuals that are very close to getting out to how to, you know, it's a trade program.

So they're learning, they have a job.

Yeah.

Yes.

So you can go and eat there.

And they're very strict in how the money is.

You know, you have to go and fill a card on an ATM with money and then that's how you pay.

So there's no money exchanged.

And you're told not to bring anything like a wallet or a watch with you.

But you can interact that way and you can feel like you're actually helping with somebody's rehabilitation.

And the food is very inexpensive for that reason.

Is it good?

Very quickly I have a nice in Nice outside of.

Not nice outside of Marseille in France, there's this same type of program, but it's being run by a Michelin starred chef.

So this is a very gourmet experience.

It's about, you know, you go into this maximum security prison, you actually have to go through metal detectors in a pat down and they take it very seriously.

But then once inside you get this gourmet experience, which I thought only the French, but I guess we're doing it here too.

But probably not gourmet.

Although I think I read some reviews that said that the food was good.

And while I'm going by, I would like to go there.

If I travel by there, there's also some that have gift stores where the inmates have made crafts and you can purchase them.

I think that's in the New York.

And then there are also several penitentiaries around the country that are now museums.

I went to one when I was in Philadelphia, the Eastern State Penitentiary.

It was fascinating.

What a really interesting tour.

But the same thing in Alcatraz, the Missouri State Penitentiary.

There's one in Tennessee called Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary and also one in Michigan called Jackson Historic Prison.

And there's also a book for people who are interested in this called Escape to Penal Tourism and the Pull of Punishment.

Wow.

Fascinating.

Fascinating.

Well, getting back to the food experiences, you also have a whole section on both hotels and restaurants that have either a tree true crime meaning or that are haunted.

So let's talk about a couple of those places because they're really fascinating in Newport, which you say may be one of the most haunted places in the country, the White Horse Tavern.

Tell us about the White Horse Tavern.

So this is the oldest bar.

It's America's oldest haunted bar.

Wow.

So I'm sorry, did I get the dates wrong?

I'm sorry.

It's the 10th oldest bar in the.

In the world.

And what interesting about it?

It's also part, you know, us Ghost Adventures includes them on their tour.

But what's interesting about them is one that a man that died of smallpox stayed there, and now he supposedly haunts the bar and also the.

Or the restaurant, as well as the room near where he died.

And they say that he will pester female diners while they eat, and he'll appear behind them in the dining room mirror, prompting them to make a quick departure.

But even more interesting is this woman named Rebecca Cornell.

She died in a fire in the building, and she came back as a vision to her brother three days later and tried to tell him she was murdered.

And the brother went to the police, and the police examined the body again and found a very odd wound in her stomach and ended up arresting her son for murder.

Wow.

And she supposedly haunts the place too.

So not just a haunting, but a true crime twist to this.

Yep.

Fascinating.

And also, I was very taken by the in.

In.

So that was Rhode island.

In.

In Massachusetts, the Deerfield Inn and Champney's Restaurant.

Tell me about that.

Yeah, so there's sort of like a sort of a playful ghost there who tends to pinch people on the bottom.

He tends to hide signs like, we'll be back soon.

Suddenly it disappears, and then it comes back, tips people's hands when they're trying to serve, and suddenly the food is all over them.

So lots of fun.

Yeah, I want to go just for that.

So it's not just you who's creating touristic ways to enjoy true crime.

There are now dedicated true crime tours and also haunted tours across the United States.

You talk about 1 in Burlington, Vermont, Queen City Ghost Walk Tours.

Why did you Decide to feature this one.

She's got kind of the.

She's cornered the market in Burlington.

So Thayer Lewis is a pretty well known historian and she was right.

She founded the country and she was running the tours until this year.

And she gave the.

Holly Bushnell took over.

But she's written a book called True Crime Stories of Burlington, which is a fascinating book book.

And they cover a lot of places in the tour that I don't even cover in the stories because I'm limited to how much I can cover.

But they have a lot of places that are very interesting in that tour, including a spot where a woman named Marilyn Didle shot her daughter outside a synagogue because she wanted to save her from a life of prostitution after the woman was dating a suspected pimp.

Wow.

So I thought that was really interesting.

She also covers pickpocking, pickpocketing exploits of a con artist named John Larney, who is.

AKA Molly Matches.

He used to stay at the Hotel Van Ness.

So I.

They include a lot of inf.

Information about her tours.

I put it in here so you have the addresses if you want to go on your own.

But she offers like six or seven different tours that are very well priced and anything you're interested in, you can sort of see, including a cemetery tour, couple of cemetery tours, Ghosts and Legends of Lake Champlain.

Some of them will allow children that are aged 8 or 10 and above.

I always say that this book is great if you're traveling with older children because they may have a taste for the macabre and they may really, you know, find it interesting to go and see these places.

Yeah.

Well, I.

One of the ways I used the book is we have a house in Reading, Connecticut.

And so I thought, okay, I better see what's happening near me.

There's no, There's.

There's the.

The Ferguson.

Jeffrey Kent Ferguson, who burnt the house down.

He was a landlord who was very upset when people paid him late.

And he actually went to the home and he threw all the people's stuff out onto the lawn, except for $3,000 worth of stuff that he kept for himself.

Huh.

And they sued him because of that.

So he snuck into the house and shot them and burnt the house down and burnt them down with it.

And one guy escaped and fingered him for the crime.

And the house isn't there anymore.

But I give the address of where the empty lot is.

Interesting.

I don't know how I missed that.

All I found was that there's like a serial killer in a nearby cemetery.

Because also cemeteries are listed in the book?

Yes.

Including plot numbers?

When I have them, yeah.

Yeah.

No, it's.

It's quite the resource.

And I gotta ask.

You clearly have a passion for this and a deep understanding of the topic.

If people want to read your fiction, I know you write under a pseudonym.

First of all, why do you write under a pseudonym?

Is it because there's something in true crime that makes you nervous about giving out your real name?

No, because the true crime.

The true crime books are written under my name.

I write nonfiction under my own name.

The fiction I write under DM Bar.

And the reason is because I'm a realtor, and my first book was about real estate.

There was a.

A fake real estate company called Rock Canyon Realty, and all the agents are getting killed, and they're sort of framing one pretty kinky realtor who uses the empty houses for very naughty things.

And I didn't want my clients to think I used their houses that way.

Oh, that's.

And I also didn't want.

My kids were still in school, and I didn't want anything that I had done or written to come back to them.

Like, your mom's a pervert.

It's like, that's not my story story, even though I wrote it, because it's a pretty kinky book as well as being a psychological thriller.

So, yeah, that's why I wrote under D.M.

barr.

And once I started, I couldn't stop.

That's so fun.

So I have seven novels under that name.

The newest one came out in January, and it's called Deadly When Disturbed, and it's doing pretty well.

Good.

Oh, that's great.

So look for the novels of D.M.

barr, as well as Vacations Can Be Murder by Dawn Barclay.

Thank you so much, Dawn.

It's been a pleasure speaking with you.

Thank you so much.

It's always good speaking with you, Pauline.

Thanks so much for having me.

And that is it for this week's show.

A little bit of housekeeping before I say goodbye.

You may have noticed a new piece of audio at the start of this program, as well as a photo of me that now is on the podcast.

I'm proud to say that we have joined the Voyascape Travel Network.

So this is a network of really great travel podcasts from both Canada and the U.S. it's a way to get us all more ears.

So I highly encourage you to listen to my comrade on Voy escapes, or I should say my comrades, because there are a bunch of them on Voy escape putting out really interesting Travel podcasts.

If you like the Fromers podcast, you'll likely like those as well.

So that's the first bit of good news and another bit of good news.

I am putting this podcast out a day earlier than usual because I screwed up last week and didn't let you know that I'm doing a speech at the Katona Library in New York.

Katona, New York.

So if anybody wants to come, it's going to be tomorrow, which is April 27 tomorrow, meaning the day after this podcast comes out.

It is absolutely free.

It's at 1pm and I hope you'll join me there.

I'm going to be doing an encore of the speech I've been doing at the travel and adventure shows, which is about my dad, about his legacy, about his life.

But of course, I also work in current travel trends, current travel news, because that's what dad would have wanted me to do.

You know, he was really very much ahead of his time in many of the things he did as a travel writer, as a travel publisher, as a tour operator for many years.

He really was a man who had a very clear understanding of where the trends were going, but also of where we should be pushing the trends about how travel could be a deeper, more meaningful experience if you were able to tie it in a personal way to local culture, local history of the places that you're visiting.

I hope that makes sense.

Anyway, that's part of the speech and I'm really very pleased to get to give it one more time.

I also want to tell you just a little bit about some of the articles we've had on fromers.com because it's been some pretty interesting things happening in the world.

Some good things.

American Airlines is going to have free WI FI on its flights by the end of this year.

So hooray, that's good news.

And interestingly, in a suburb of Cleveland, a new Frank Lloyd Wright house has opened and is open to people for short term vacation rentals.

In fact, when I say opened, I mean it was just built.

So how can that be?

Well, it's somewhat of a long story, but there was a family who hired Frank Lloyd Wright to create a plan for their house.

And then because of a series of circumstances, that house was never built, but the plans existed.

And so another person just in the last couple of years took up those plans and has built a beautiful, beautiful, very Frank Lloyd Wright house.

I mean, it really has all the hallmarks of his oeuvre.

But with modern housing standards, they had to comply with the current rules.

So you know you're going to get Wi fi, but it's still a Frank Lloyd Wright house.

So I think that that's really cool.

And we have, we have an article about that and all of the other Frank Lloyd Wright houses that you can rent.

There are half a dozen of them all around the United States, which is kind of surprising.

I also covered some very bad news.

As people who follow cruising know, there has been a real epidemic of norovirus aboard ships.

2024 was considered a really bad year because there were 18 outbreaks on ships.

So 12 outbreaks.

So that's not good.

Even worse, the Trump administration has responded by getting rid of the team at the center for Disease Control that tracks outbreaks, that creates action plans to stop them on board ships.

There had been, I have to put this in the past, there had been a dedicated team covering shipboard outbreaks.

That team was all fired.

And crazily enough, that doesn't save the United States one penny because the salaries of that team were being paid by the fees that are charged to cruise ships for this work to happen.

So it's a puzzling, bizarre turn of events.

CDC officials are saying that, oh, we've kicked that work to another organization within the government.

But other lower CDC officials, speaking anonymously to the press are saying, nope, this work isn't going to happen.

There's now a severe understaffing.

So in my article, I talk about the places where norovirus is most prominent.

In terms of the cruise ship ports, 10 out of the 12 outbreaks have been in the state of Florida.

And there's also been a look at the groundwater of Florida, which has found it to be very, very active with norovirus.

So if you are thinking of cruising in the coming months, it may be a good idea, and this breaks my heart to say it, but it may be a good idea to avoid the Sunshine State simply because norovirus seems to be embedded there and the government is no longer working on fixing that.

So that's the bad news.

I hate to end with bad news, but I'll tell you some good news if you come see me in Katona.

And I'll tell you some good news next week on the travel show too, I'm sure.

So thank you for listening.

And to those who are traveling, may I wish you a hearty bon voyage.

Sour candy on the table, lazy afternoons in your sweatpants watching cable.

Well, it Feels so far away.

All.

The channels seem the same Trying to remember all the songs we like to play?

Cause those lazy afternoons don't come so frequently these days Been so long and I cannot help but wonder Are you ever coming home?

I like you with your sour candy in the boat house on the lake oh, but I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate the way it takes?

I can't get you off of my mind Looking out the window where we spend so much of our time?

Cause I miss the way about?

But I guess you can't control those damn cards with the air well, damn, babe I know the both of us are happy when we're free but would it be so hard to find your freedom here and me?

Oh, it's been so long and I cannot help but wonder Are you ever coming home?

I like you with your sour candy in the boat house But I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate, I hate the way it tast and I.

I.

Hate the way it takes But I love it all the same And I hate the way it tastes But I love it all the same Sam.