That’s true of the young murderers from her book “Cruel Sacrifice,” who tortured and mutilated a 12-year-old whom the horribly abused ringleader, Melinda Loveless, considered a romantic threat - “Her last name is Loveless, and that’s what her life was,” Jones says. If that part of us is tampered with, there’s almost no coming back from that.” I lost my parents at a young age and was orphaned, so I have an affinity (for) helping kids who have been physically or psychologically and emotionally abandoned … The things that happen in childhood stay with you longer than anything else in life. “My shows are not focused on the particular ages of the victims, but in my personal life. ![]() “I attended an event for an organization called ‘A Child Is Missing’ in Broward County and came to find out about CRC. “I actually have been involved in helping missing and exploited children for about ten years,” Jones says. CRC’s board includes John Walsh, former host of “America’s Most Wanted” and current host of CNN’s “The Hunt.” That impulse to expose these wrongs goes beyond the page or the screen, and into her life as an advocate.Įarlier this month, that work led the Chicago native, now a South Florida resident, to Boca Raton and an awareness event by Child Rescue Coalition, a database that works with law enforcement agencies to catch online child predators. The fact is that anybody, from mansions to trailers and back again, can commit a crime,” she says. “A lot of the crimes I cover are about people who don’t have the finances to battle the system, but you can’t make a blanket statement about that, because so many crimes (that wind up in books and on TV) are about domestic violence, dirty secrets that people keep their mouths shut about. It’s about making sure that these victims are recognized, and that the guilty meet justice, no matter who they are. That book started her on a career as a successful true crime writer - her book “All She Wanted” was the basis for the Academy Award-winning film “Boys Don’t Cry” starring Hillary Swank - as well as a talk show commentator, a former crime reporter for FOX News and now the host of her own Investigation Discovery show, “True Crime With Aphrodite Jones.”įor Jones, telling these stories, as well as those of Michael Jackson, Michael Peterson and others in print, and of other famous and not-so-famous cases in her various TV appearances, isn’t just about playing on lurid headlines. And I was outraged,” says Aphrodite Jones, whose book “The FBI Killer” became not only a national bestseller but the basis of a TV movie starring Oscar-winning actress Patricia Arquette as the murder victim. But for some reason, no one outside of the small Kentucky town where the crime took place seemed to care and national media ignored it.įrustrated, one local radio reporter decided that the world needed to know, and did the only thing she knew how to do - she wrote about it. The FBI Killer recounts the bizarre events that forced Mark Putnam to confess to brutally killing his lover, then covering up his crime for more than a year.It was the kind of story every crime reporter imagines covering - an FBI agent tried and convicted of killing his informant, the first person in the bureau to go to jail for murder. ![]() On June 8, 1989, Mark took Susan for a drive into the hills to discuss her insistence on marriage. Susan made demands, threatening to expose Mark in ways that ruined his career and marriage. It quickly grew into an illicit affair that consumed their lives for nearly two years-until she became pregnant. ![]() Their relationship began when Susan agreed to be Mark's paid informant in an investigation of her ex-husband's criminal friends. She prayed for a Prince Charming to come to her rescue, and when good-looking FBI agent Mark Putnam entered her life, she thought those prayers had been answered. An FBI agent's affair with his informant ends in murder in this true crime account of the notorious case by the New York Times bestselling author.Īt twenty-seven years old, Susan Daniels Smith was a dirt poor, divorced mother of two living in rural Kentucky.
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