What happened?
Why is someone shooting on the road? How did that car end up in the ditch? Why is there a helicopter circling overhead?
Increasingly, most of us are in the dark when it comes to unexpected episodes unfolding around us, despite being constantly barraged with information. Good luck finding out about an inmate on the run who could be lurking nearby, and has also managed to escape the media glare. Until now. The story of a recently escaped inmate is the subject of the first installment of this newsletter’s first serial story.
Lack of information, coupled with a love of storytelling, led to the creation of What Happened, a newsletter that picks up where the news drops off and follows the story to the end. The first in the series is about a jailbreak in rural Mississippi that took place mostly off the radar and first attracted my attention because I live nearby. In particular, I was curious about the last of the escapees who remained at large.
Using my sleuthing skills as a freelance researcher and my writer’s obsession with narrative, I began burrowing into the story, which opened a portal into a hidden world -- the life of a stranger on the run – that had the potential to intrude upon and illuminate my own. Each discovery led to new questions, and other intriguing stories.
This newsletter is the result. Subscribing enables readers to accompany me on my journeys to answer what should be a simple question: What happened? Installments are delivered by email, and subscription is free, though there are options to support the storytelling and to gain access to additional content. As a freelance journalist and author of five nonfiction books, I’m no stranger to storytelling, but Substack represents a new approach, enabling me to tell serial stories, pulled from the recesses of the news, as they unfold.
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