Joseph Wambaugh

He studied the evidence, the interviews, the dead ends, the suspects who had been cleared, and then he started thinking about how to approach the problem differently.

He had read Joseph Wambaugh's true crime book, The Blooding, which told the story of the first murder ever solved through a DNA dragnet.

It happened in a small English village in the 1980s.

The local police, unable to identify a killer through traditional detective work, went to every man in the area and asked for a voluntary blood sample.

Like, this is William H. Parker's police department in space, you know, which I think is interesting.

But the idea of the kind of stuff I'm talking about, and Wambaugh wrote directly about this.

He wrote about this in The Onion Field.

and he mentioned this later in his life, um, no, like it's an ongoing, like example of kind of the weirdness of the, of the sixties and kind of the new, the kind of newfangled progressivism of it.

But, yeah, we're coming up on the hour, I think, man.

Let's...

I'll do a part three on Joseph Wambaugh if you want me to.

Yeah, that'd be great.

But at the same time, I was trying to write.

you know i had heard joseph wambaugh san diego um

i knew joe we've talked about joe

yeah wonderful wonderful guy you know yes uh heard him on the radio one time you know when he was still a murder cop in l.a saying you know that he decided he was going to write 10 pages a day no matter what and i thought i can't write 10 that's not doable for me but i can write five no matter what i'm sitting literally by the way outside of a campfire pre-dawn in the wilds of kenya leading photograph forest And so I wrote in tents, on buses, in Chinese Buddhist monasteries where we'd stay on these hiking trips.