#PoliceofftheCuff Real crime Stories episode # 4/2021 with journalist, author, #NancyRommelmann #NYPD

Nancy Rommelmann’s work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Reason, and other publications. She has an eye and ear for capturing those interstitial, unseen lives that are lived all around us, particularly unseen in a place like Hollywood. Her articles are full of them: LAPD officers and the refuge that is the cop bar; the inhabitants of a Skid Row dive; the disciples of a Vietnamese spiritual leader; the workaday lives of a Mexican gardening crew in the Hollywood Hills, and a cross-country trip with one of John Wayne Gacy’s pen pals to interview the serial killer two weeks before his execution. Rommelmann received Best Arts Feature 2009 for “No Exit Plan,” from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN), as well as Best Entertainment Arts Feature 2009 from the Los Angeles Press Club. “Jena at 15,” another LA Weekly feature, received the identical awards in 2001. Recently, Rommelmann has taken to chronicling people whose outsize dreams and delusions inspire them to audacious and sometimes terrible acts: a mother with Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy who murdered her fourteen-year-old daughter before herself committing suicide (Sacrificing Rebecca); the writer Laura Albert, who perpetrated a ten-year con by writing as a teenage boy, the demimonde darling JT LeRoy (No Exit Plan), and Amanda Stott-Smith, who in May 2009 forced her two young children off a bridge in Portland, Oregon. Rommelmann’s Op-Ed pieces and book reviews appear in the Oregonian, and she is also a contributor to the media website LA Observed.