It started with a killer conversation.
An enchanting new novel published this month by the veteran Long Island Reporter is a real-life story with the cold-blooded murderer of a housewife in Suffolk County who had an eerie connection to the horrifying death of the son of famous aviator Charles Lindbergh I was inspired by the interview.
Steve Wick's debut novel, “The Ruins,” was a hit on the bookshelf on February 4th. Longtime Newsday journalists have said the idea of a fascinating story of murder and espionage was planted decades ago. The man was convicted of the brutal murder of Kathryn Anne Dam, a woman from Lindenhurst.
The mutilated body of the dam was found in the fields in October 1954 in an incident that shocked the small town. The incident then became cold for almost 30 years, before Hoff was arrested in January 1979.
“They said it was the oldest cold case they knew in New York,” Wick said of the investigation.
The Pulitzer Award-winning reporter, now a 73-year-old Katchogue resident, has been studying his novel for nearly eight years, but after meeting her at a local diving bar, he was furious at the dam. I continued to interview Hoff, an alcoholic who is a man of the past. Tokonoma and grill.
“He was just a scary guy,” he recalled the towering Hoff.
“What he did to this woman in Lindenhurst in 1954 was horrifying. He literally tore her apart. She bleed in the field and died,” he said.
Hoff eventually became a cuff after threatening a woman in Nassau County decades later, “I'll do to you what I did to that woman in Lindenhurst,” Wick said.
Even after his famous arrest, the former reporter said the weak evidence made it seem like the murderer was walking freely.
“Another very old lady came… I could see Hof looking up, his face just sank. Wick spoke about Gali Hof, who was holding the key to cleaning up him forever. Ta.
Gurli witnessed her husband rubbing blood from his clothes on an infamous night in 1954, and he brought what he was wearing underground and yelled at her to clean it up.
“But she saved the bloody belt and put it in a jar and buried it in the backyard,” Wick said. “In the 1980s, the detective spoke to her about it and said, 'If you don't help us, your husband will be off.”
“They went and dug up, and he was convicted,” the author added Hoff, who died in prison about 10 years ago.
However, when Wick sat one-on-one after Hoff's conviction, it planted an idea in his head and eventually turned into “dead ins.”
“Of course he said he didn't do that and I said, 'Look, don't waste my time,'” Wick recalls. “Then he continued to raise the name Hauptman,” he continued.
The murderer mentioned Richard Hauptman, a German-born man who was executed for murder by his infant son Charles Jr., Lindbergh, New Jersey in 1932.
Lindbergh was the first to fly solo across the Atlantic, and the abduction and murder of his 20-month-old son was widely known at the time as “crime of the century.”
Hof's mother was a close friend of Anna, Hauptman's widow.
“Hoff wanted to compare himself to framed. [he felt] Hauptmann was,” the author said.
Wick's book after Hauptmann spoke with NJ detectives who think “it could have been impossible to do it on his own and at least two other people had to get involved.” leaned against Lindbergh's mystery.
Meanwhile, in the 1930s, Long Island became famous for its enclaves of Nazi and German bands, including those found in Lindenhurst.
“Can we make a murder that just turned the corner here fictionalize it and tie it to something else?”
Wick was also home to German spies who landed in Amagansett during World War II, in the Sabo Termission and Jafunk's infamous Camp Sheekfleet, home to Devot Hitler fanatics.
“The Long Island Railway ran a special train from Penn Station to Yapunk just for its band members. So you'll see a train full of unified Nazis,” he said.
“You can't really believe what you see.”
