Had a most illuminating first meeting with one of my proposed interviewees, Jeanine Plummer, who conducts the Servant Girl Annihilator tour here in Austin, walking through the murder sites. Jeanine and I had a really nice walk-n-talk for about two and a half hours through Austin's historic Oakwood Cemetery. Saw the headstone of Rebecca Ramey, the mother of 11-year-old SGA victim Mary Ramey, plus some others of folks associated with the crimes.

It was a perfect day (overcast) for walking through an old graveyard, and it really put me in the zone mentally for thinking about the crimes and this film.

Jeanine and I have differing opinions on the killers. She seems to think it was one man all along. And while I'm leaning towards two killers in at least some of the crimes for various reasons, she did present me with an entirely plausible scenario for one person pulling off the Mollie Smith murder, which you can read about in preceding blog posts.

This is one of the great things about doing a documentary: your interviewees will send you off on new research directions, and new approaches to telling your story. I'm now considering including both the one-killer and two-killers scenarios as possibilities in the movie. (Again, as we have no hard facts to go on for any of these killings, this is entirely legitimate from a narrative point of view.)

I think it will be something that can only give the movie more depth and heighten the sense of mystery about the crimes, maybe spurring viewers on to their own researches.

Anyway, Jeanine was very excited and completely supportive of the project. Hopefully she'll be ready to do a sit-down interview sometime in the next few weeks. She suggested a couple of her assistants to go out with me to shoot additional footage at the murder sites.

So things are moving ahead. I haven't had much time to post new newspaper items to the blog, but I'll start doing some more of that over the next couple of weeks.