When Your Brain Needs a Crime Scene Makeover: Lessons from the LAPD

In my twenty-plus years working as a doctor, my patients come in wanting to tell me things. What hurts and where, when it started, what makes it better or worse. Family members often add helpful details like "She's already tried heat and massage and acupuncture, which helps for like an hour, but then it comes right back." We're all on the same team, working together to solve the puzzle.

Mystery writing flips that whole paradigm. People on the page of a cozy mystery—even one with a medical twist—aren't supposed to cooperate. They're adversarial, obstructionist. They lie, hide evidence, clam up when questioned. And it's not just the villians who behave badly—it's everyone. Suspects who turn out to be red herrings have stuff to hide, too, and they don't make it easy for the amateur sleuth (or the reader) to sift lie from truth.

So I do what any self-respecting doctor-turned-mystery-writer does: I take classes. Attend workshops. Show up to talks that promise to rewire my helpful, problem-solving brain into something more useful for plotting murder.

Which is how I found myself at a Sisters in Crime event, listening to LAPD Senior Criminalist Victor Wong explain "the thought process of a crime and intelligence analyst."

He opened with a caveat: most criminals get caught because they're not that smart. Good news for real-life crime-fighters, not so much for mystery writers. Readers want clever criminals—the ones who take more than two pages to catch.

But then came the good stuff. He walked us through how criminals try to disguise themselves in our camera-saturated world. Between red light cameras, security cameras on businesses, Ring doorbells on private homes, dashcams and body cams, and your average iPhone-wielding citizen, you can't sneeze without someone recording it.

He explained why witness statements can be unreliable, not because people lie on purpose, but because of subconscious biases. Like the witness who swore the robbery suspect drove a Corvette, when it was actually a Lamborghini—because someone in a Lamborghini wouldn't need to rob anyone, right? (Cue the audience laughter.)

And the biggest cases of recent decades? Solved through criminal profiling, digital forensics, rapidly-evolving DNA technology, and law enforcement agencies actually talking with each other. Mind blown.

I left the talk with pages of notes and a head full of new ideas. Turns out, even a by-the-book medical brain can learn to think like a criminal. Or like an amateur sleuth.