True Crime Story
Joseph Knox
“Will you miss me when I’m gone?”
Mogwai, “R U Still in 2 It?”
Publisher’s Note:
This amended second edition of True Crime Story includes wider context on the previously undisclosed role of Joseph Knox in the narrative, as well as his response to various allegations raised in the press. Further, Sourcebooks can confirm that they and Mr. Knox have mutually agreed to conclude their business dealings and have no plans to undertake any future projects.
Please see below for a brief statement from Knox concerning this second edition.
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When Sourcebooks suggested a second edition of True Crime Story to clarify my position, I just about bit their hands off. Legitimate questions have been raised about the validity of my participation in this project, questions that I will be only too happy to answer in due course. Unfortunately, there have also been libelous accusations, gross misrepresentations of my character, and threats made against my family. These threats are completely out of line. Contrary to reports, I have not objected to any addition that Sourcebooks has made to the text, asking only for a right to reply.
I continue to be moved by reader interest in this story, and although at times personally painful, I consider this edition to be an improvement upon the first. It’s my hope that these amendments will allow us to shift focus from salacious, peripheral details to the true instigators and true victims of this crime.
In the early hours of Saturday, December 17, 2011, Zoe Nolan, a nineteen-year-old University of Manchester student, walked out of a party taking place in the shared accommodation where she had been living for three months.
She was never seen again.
On the surface, Zoe had everything in the world going for her. In September of that year, she’d travelled from Stoke-on-Trent to Manchester, realizing a long-held ambition to live in the city. She moved into a high-rise student apartment with her twin sister, Kimberly, and two other girls who quickly became her closest friends. Singing had always been the great passion of Zoe’s life, and she’d moved to Manchester to more seriously study music, finding herself unexpectedly popular with course mates and around campus. Her contemporaries found her talent and dedication impressive, and she soon met the young man who would become her first serious boyfriend. She passed three seemingly happy months in this state, right up until December 17, the day her parents arrived to take her home for the Christmas holidays, only to find that she had vanished without a trace.
I’d never heard of Zoe Nolan, or if I had, I’d forgotten all about her. In 2011, the year she went missing, I would have been twenty-five-years-old and myself living in Manchester. If you could really call it living. I certainly wasn’t making my dreams come true, I was making minimum wage plus tips in a basement dive bar and putting every penny I earned back into the business. Manchester had made me, for better or worse. It was the first place I’d ever had my heart broken, the first place I’d ever had my nose broken, and somehow that encapsulated so much of what I loved about the city. There was a kind of toughness on one hand and a kind of romance on the other. It was like a man with “LOVE” and “HATE” tattooed onto his knuckles—you never knew which one he might hit you with next. I was always more like a lover than a fighter, always more like a punching bag than a slugger, so I just tried to keep my guard up and weather the blows when they came. The city always struck me as a lot of different things, some of them good and some of them bad, but make no mistake about it, the city always struck me. As a result, so much of it’s a blur now. There are whole years I don’t really remember, whole jobs, whole people, whole places, much less news broadcasts, much less front-page headlines.
Much less police appeals for information.
So when I looked Zoe Nolan up some six years after her disappearance at the insistence of a new friend, I found that all I really remembered was her image, the picture that had been briefly ubiquitous in the city for a few days half a dozen years before, the face I’d never quite put a name to. Zoe was an almost iconic missing person blond—almost iconic but not quite. I skimmed the story, muttered something to myself like, “Oh yeah,” then got on with my day, because from what I read, not much had happened since she walked out of that party. She’d never been found, and I couldn’t see why my new friend was so interested in her, why she was suddenly so obsessed. And anyway, I was a busy man. By 2017, my own life had finally started, and I didn’t have time for people who’d been careless enough to lose theirs. I was a published author now, an important person—going places, if only in my own mind. I had no idea what lay behind Zoe’s frozen smile and no idea what lay behind her disappearance. I had no idea that she’d go on to keep me up at night over the next few years and no idea that she’d go on to put a good friend of mine in mortal danger.
Her story was sad, certainly, but hardly sensational.
Because in my experience—both fictional and factual—girls went missing all the time. As a crime writer, missing girls were more or less my stock-in-trade. Morbidly, I suppose I still expected Zoe to turn up somewhere, even all those years on, not alive necessarily but at least as a dead body. Perhaps there’d be an almost-iconic death to match her almost-iconic missing-person picture. She’d be discovered in a shallow woodland grave, I thought, or a discarded roadside suitcase, or submerged, sunken, somewhere along Manchester’s thirty-six-mile shipping canal. I expected the mysteries of her life and disappearance to be untangled and normalized, if not today then at least tomorrow. I expected her to be rendered mundane by the great villain of our age—a man—a man who had watched her too closely, a man who had taken things too far, a man who had transformed his dark fantasies into a sad and disturbing reality.
If I hadn’t met Evelyn Mitchell, I wouldn’t have given the story any more thought than that. Hers was the first hand in the air at the Manchester Q and A for my debut novel, Sirens. She asked me about the provenance of serial killers in crime fiction and the genre’s tendency to focus more on its murderers than its victims. At the time, I didn’t know I was being tested, and I answered honestly, that I agreed with her to some extent. There were no serial killers in Sirens, and I said I didn’t think there’d be any serial killers in my future novels either, simply because their motives so often seemed superfluous to me. I worried that these increasingly grotesque supervillains FedExing body parts back and forth across the country minimized victims and occasionally just read as ridiculous. We talked a little more when I signed her book later and exchanged email addresses after she told me that she was a writer as well. Evelyn Mitchell, it turned out, was the author of Exitlessness, a scathing first novel about male excess that had been well-reviewed but arrived too soon, selling so little that her publisher stopped returning her calls. A few years had passed and she was no longer the bright young thing who’d been touted for success by the likes of the Observer and the London Review of Books. Now she was standing in line waiting for me, just as in a few years, I’d be standing in line waiting for someone else.