The Breaking Point

Writer’s Note: On Fact and Fiction

During ten years of writing Body Farm novels, I’ve often noted the blurred boundary — the semi-permeable membrane; the oft-crosssed border — between fact and fiction in the books. Given that the stories are informed by years of Dr. Bill Bass’s forensic casework, how could it be otherwise?

This book is no exception. One factual underpinning is the death of Ann Bass, Bill’s first wife, who died in 1993. Our fictional character Kathleen Brockton is not interchangeable with the late Mrs. Bass, but she obviously shares traits with her, just as Dr. Brockton — who is not exactly interchangeable with Bill Bass — shares many traits in common with him. The specifics of Kathleen’s illness and of Dr. Brockton’s grief are products of my own writerly imagination.

Tragically, the 1991 crash on Otay Mountain that’s mentioned in the book was not a product of my imagination. Country music singer Reba McEntire lost seven musicians and her band’s road manager in the early morning hours of March 16, 1991, when a twin-engine jet — piloted by a crew unfamiliar with the mountainous terrain to the east of San Diego — took off from Brown Field Municipal Airport and slammed into the dark peak of Otay Mountain. Astonishingly, in October 2004, another twin-engine jet — this one an air ambulance — hit the mountainside in the dark, killing the pilots and three medical crew members. After the 2004 crash, the Federal Aviation Administration revised its procedures and charts to reduce the chances of additional collisions with the dark, dangerous terrain lurking to the east of Brown Field.

Four decades ago, Dr. Bass investigated the high-velocity crash of an Air Force plane high in the Great Smoky Mountains, and that case clearly took root somewhere in the nooks and crannies of my mind. But I have a deeper, more personal interest in aviation crashes, too: As an amateur pilot myself, I’ve read numerous NTSB crash-investigation reports, partly in hopes of learning lessons, and partly because of morbid fascination with the fate that has come close — terrifyingly close — to claiming my own life on several occasions.

A bit farther afield and less personal but also based in fact — contentious, murky fact — is the role the CIA played in drug trafficking in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, and in Central America during the Iran-Contra affair. British journalist Christopher Robbin’s 1979 book Air America: The Story of the CIA’s Secret Airlines sheds light on the agency’s dealings in Southeast Asia’s “Golden Triangle,” as well as illuminating the remarkable derring-do of the Air America pilots who flew perilous missions to deliver rice, weapons, commando teams, and more questionable cargo. Numerous reports have chronicled the links between CIA-backed Nicaraguan “Contra” rebels and known drug traffickers. Among those reports is an official government document informally called “The Kerry Report,” which was published in 1989 after a three-year investigation headed by then-Senator John Kerry. At the time, Kerry chaired the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations; he is now U.S. Secretary of State. Do the ends justify the means? It’s a question American foreign policy gives us the chance to ponder on a regular basis.

Joaquin Guzmán Loera—“El Chapo”—is a real-life, larger-than-life drug lord who did indeed escape in 2001 from what was supposedly Mexico’s top-security prison. Guzmán’s remarkable drug distribution network — which included a fleet of planes, a flotilla of boats (and even submarines), and the ingenious tunnels beneath the border fence in San Diego’s industrial suburb, Otay Mesa — made him the world’s wealthiest and most powerful narco trafficker for years. El Chapo remained at large for thirteen years after that escape, heading the Sinaloa cartel, until February 2014, when he was recaptured in a beachfront condominium with his young wife (a former beauty queen) and their twin two-year-old daughters (born, ironically, in America). El Chapo’s recapture marked another victory in the War on Drugs… and created another opening at the top for the next ambitious, ruthless entrepreneur, someone able and willing to meet the seemingly insatiable demand for drugs in El Norte.

— Jon Jefferson

Tallahassee, FL