Susan Lehmann

Susan discovered writing and journalism at Florida State University. In 1981, she refused a job with the nascent CNN thinking Who would want to watch a 24-hour news channel? Her path in life now determined by the idea that she would be a real journalist instead, she put her interviewing skills to work as a writer, private investigator, and death penalty mitigation expert.

Perhaps because the temperate climate of the  South attracts crazies, her life intersected with  two serial killers, and, as a result, her first two books recount her stories of Ted Bundy in the aftermath of the 1978 Chi Omega murders, and Daniel Rolling during the 1990 Gainesville Student murders.

Her simultaneous professions inform her non-fiction writing, samples of which have earned her a 1996 Eaton Literary Award, a 2016 Utah Original Writing Competition Honorable Mention in Nonfiction and a 1st Place blue ribbon in the 2022 Nellie Bly Book Award for Journalistic Nonfiction.  As a result, she prefers to delve into her wide-ranging experiences as a journalist, private investigator, and death penalty mitigation expert. There ought to be a good story or two in there somewhere. What’s that old saw?

 

Truth is stranger than fiction.

After the completion of 37 capital murder cases, Susan has completed a collection of her private investigation and mitigation stories, Southern Lies and Homicides: Tales of Betrayal and Murder.​