If there’s one thing Claire St. Amant learned producing true crime stories for CBS’ “48 Hours” and “60 Minutes,” it’s that the business was cutthroat.
Competitors like NBC’s “Dateline” and ABC’s “20/20,” as well as St. Amant’s own CBS team, would go to any length to get an exclusive.
Once St. Amant cultivated a years-long relationship with a victim’s family in the hope of getting an interview, but that connection was undermined when an anonymous caller identifying herself as “Claire from 48 Hours” sabotaged the effort via an inappropriate phone call to the victim’s family.
St. Amant’s rapport with them was shot, but she emerged far wiser.
If there’s one thing Claire St. Amant learned producing true crime stories for CBS’ “48 Hours” and “60 Minutes,” it’s that the business was cutthroat.
“As much as I hated getting beat . . . I’d gained a valuable lesson in the war games that go on in the national media,” she writes in “Killer Story: The Truth Behind True Crime Television” (BenBella Books, February 18th).
After a stint in the Peace Corps, St. Amant began work as a journalist in Dallas.
In 2010 she wrote for the People’s Newspaper covering the city’s suburbs, and by 2013 she was the managing editor of the start-up CultureMAP News Dallas.
A story she covered on a private-school sexual assault had given her what she calls journalism “street cred,” so when CBS’ “48 Hours” wanted to cover the 2011 Dallas murder of a husband by his “professional manipulator” wife in Dallas, the show asked for St. Amant’s help producing an episode.
While St. Amant was excited for the freelance opportunity, she wasn’t prepared for it. “I actually Googled ‘what does a television producer do?’ ” St. Amant writes.
St. Amant proved a more than capable producer.
She secured interviews with the dead hubby’s ex-wife and daughter and the murderous wife’s adult children, plus used her local connections to secure crucial evidence from local police.
An ABC “20/20” episode featuring Dr. Leon Jacob, a transplant surgeon from Houston who wanted both his and his new girlfriend’s exes kidnapped, tortured and killed. ABC 20/20St. Amant’s talent proved potent enough to thrust her into a successful career producing true crime stories for CBS.
Her location did, too, as the Lone Star State seemed to lead the nation in sensational bad behavior.
“You wouldn’t believe how many roads lead to Texas,” she writes.
Like Texas, medical professionals are also over-represented in the murder-to-TV pipeline.
“What is it with doctors and murdered spouses?” St. Amant asks. “The oath ‘do no harm’ seems to be having the opposite effect.”
Jacob with his then girlfriend Valerie McDaniel. ABC 20/20One murderous physician that she covered was Dr. Leon Jacob, a transplant surgeon from Houston who wanted both his and his new girlfriend’s exes kidnapped, tortured and killed.
The plan was foiled when the hitman Jacob thought he hired simply spent his fee before calling the Houston police.
Though the Jacob story is unseemly, for St. Amant it was a success.
She wrote letters to Jacob in jail, shared phone calls and visited him in prison.
That led to St. Amant securing an “in the chair” interview, industry-speak for when a suspect agreed to speak on camera.
“Killer Story: The Truth Behind True Crime Television” is written by Claire St. Amant.
St. Amant covered the case of Amarillo-based plastic surgeon Mike Dixon, too. When his girlfriend left him, Dr. Dixon hired an unemployed pharmaceutical rep named David Shepard to track down and eliminate the ex’s new paramour.
Shepard did, stabbing the man and shooting him to death with an antique six-shooter (Texas!), with authorities ultimately linking Dixon to the crime through the three silver bars (Texas!) he paid the killer.
While St. Amant successfully persuaded Shepard to talk to her on-camera, that coup came at a cost when she saw the 6’5”, 300-lb. murderer approaching for his jail-house interview.
“Even through plexiglass, I’m scared s–tless,” she writes.
A third deadly doctor St. Amant turned her focus on was Highland Park’s Alan Wolter.
At his wife’s funeral Dr. Wolter gave a touching tribute to his deceased love, but when her “accidental drowning” began to be investigated as something more nefarious, Dr. Wolter would become a prime suspect.
St. Amant reached out to interview the supposedly grieving man, and though it was his day off, Wolter showed up in scrubs and a lab coat for their lunch meeting.
Author Claire St. Amant covered the case of Amarillo-based plastic surgeon Mike Dixon, too.
But if the fear St. Amant felt looking after the doctor down his darkened hallway was almost visceral, it was far from the only terror she faced after nearly a decade working in true television.
In 2016 she was on the scene in Dallas when a 25-year-old Army veteran shot and killed five Dallas policemen and wounded nine more.
In 2018 she was sent to Parkland, Fla., on the day a student killed 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS.
A career covering vicious murders began to be too much for St. Amant, with the years’ worth of crime scene photos she’d studied and grisly confessions she’d heard beginning to become literal nightmares. Parkland might have been the worst, she writes.
The author was a producer on the CBS true-crime series ”48 Hours.”
“Witnessing that raw trauma and seeing so many young lives cut short or forever altered affected me deeply,” she says.
In the early 2020s St. Amant told her husband she’d had enough of network TV. “I feel like we’re trafficking in tragedy, and there’s no redeemable quality to the [stories],” she told him.
Like so many other burnt-out legacy journalists, St. Amant now runs her own podcast — focused, unsurprisingly, on unsolved cold cases.
