Growing up in Studio City, Daphne Woolsoncroft wanted to be one of two things: a detective or an author.
And you could argue she’s done both: As co-host of the true crime podcast “Going West,” which just celebrated its 500-episode milestone in May, she’s been doing plenty of detective work, albeit in more of an armchair-style capacity.
Now, she’s now a legit author.
ALSO SEE: Like books? Get our free Book Pages newsletter about bestsellers, authors and more
Woolsoncroft’s debut novel, “Night Watcher,” seamlessly blends her passions of true crime, horror movies and writing into a thrilling piece of suspenseful fiction centered around a masked serial killer known as The Hiding Man. While she found inspiration in countless slasher movies featuring masked antagonists, as well as the hundreds of true crime cases she’s mulled over since starting the podcast in late 2018, Woolsoncroft also drew from a family connection to one of the greatest novelists of all time: “Frankenstein” author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
“She’s a distant ancestor on my mom’s side,” Woolsoncroft confirms. “It’s been passed down through some documentation, but I’m still very much trying to find a genealogist that can help find that exact connection. That’s something my mom and I have been on a mission with in the last year. We’ve always been so inspired by that connection. My mom’s a huge horror and literature fan, so it does mean a lot to us.”
Wanting to be like Shelley, who wrote “Frankenstein” at the age of 18, Woolsoncroft said she rushed a self-published novella when she was 19, but “It was really bad. It was not ‘Frankenstein’ by any means,” she said with a laugh.
“Night Watcher” follows the story of Portland, Oregon, resident Nola Strate, a radio host of a late-night program, “Night Watch,” that takes listener call-ins to discuss paranormal stories. She inherited this popular radio show from her semi-famous father, and all is well until an on-air listener call goes awry. This conjures up Strate’s childhood brush with The Hiding Man, who was never caught and seemingly disappeared after a string of brutal murders.
But has he returned to seek revenge?
The Hiding Man was in part influenced by a real-life, convicted serial killer who was given the moniker BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill).
“BTK was a big one for this story because he did kill multiple people, then take a hiatus,” Woolsoncroft said. “I had read so much about BTK and also just having a general knowledge of the motives of so many serial killers and how many come from damaged backgrounds and their own personal rejections throughout their lives make them want to turn on others. Just reading all of those stories and recognizing the patterns, I knew how to make a perfect serial killer.”
Her love for slasher films and a classic like John Carpenter’s “Halloween,” which features the iconic masked killer Michael Myers, made her think carefully about the importance of The Hiding Man being a masked character – it’s described as a pale facial covering with dark stitched, sewn eyes and a mouth. That anonymity makes this lurking figure even more terrifying.
“There’s no expression, which is what’s so scary about a mask,” she explains.
The idea for this particular style of mask came from a sketch drawn by her father. It was originally intended to appear on the label of a candle she had made, dubbed The Witch House, from one of her many former entrepreneurial endeavors.
“I asked him to just draw me these creepy guys,” she said, noting that one image instantly stood out. “When I was writing this book, I saw that image again, and that’s really what inspired it; so I stole that from my dad. It felt like it wasn’t too campy or too out of left field, but also something we really haven’t seen before.”
For Woolsoncroft, true crime isn’t just a hobby, it’s personal. Her interest in the subject was sparked by the real-life disappearance of her beloved aunt, Carol, in Fort Myers, Florida, in 1984, more than a decade before she was born.
“I think being part of a family where there was such injustice and somebody was taken from my mom and my grandparents’ lives and seeing how that haunted them, I just always was interested in similar stories,” she said. “The first true crime I got into was true crime podcasts, and that just felt like a great thing that I could do was to start a true crime podcast and build a platform to talk about my own aunt’s case in hopes it would one day be solved.”
While the subject matter is heavy, Woolsoncroft and her podcast co-host and husband, Heath Merryman, often take breaks from the true crime beat and watch classic comedy films, go bowling or out to dinner with friends and family near their Los Angeles home. Woolsoncroft said she still likes to escape into a classic horror flick or a thrilling novel. She just finished “Bloom” by Delilah Dawson and said it had her on edge and cited Camila Bruce’s “You Let Me In” as being one of her favorites, “though disturbing on a psychological level as it intertwines childhood trauma with a fictional man she calls The Pepper Man, which I loved,” she added.
“Sadly, I don’t find a ton of books that scare me,” she said. “But one I read recently that stressed me out and made me run up the stairs in the dark was “Diavola” by Jennifer Thorne. The way she describes a yellow-haired woman in the mirror standing behind protagonist Anna is something I thought about every time I brushed my teeth or woke up in the middle of the night for weeks afterwards.”
With “Night Watcher” now under her belt, Woolsoncroft reports a second book is on the way. Unlike the horror movie vibe of “Night Watcher,” she said her next effort is more of a “horror-adjacent thriller.”
“I wanted to explore more the sides of mystery and thriller writing that aren’t super horror movie-esque, but it is creepier and has a lot of stalking because I seem fascinated with that trope,” she describes. “And it takes place by a lake, so it’s a scary lake-thriller coming next Summer.”