Dave, you’ve described yourself as someone whose sense of rootedness was disrupted early. From the time you were a toddler until you started school, you shuttled back and forth between your family in Silver Spring, Maryland and your grandparents in Martinsburg, West Virginia — two worlds with very different cultures, very different rhythms. You’ve called that tension your “pitchfork” — the thing that drives your writing. Can you unpack that for me? What does that back-and-forth childhood have to do with writing about Delaware crime?
My father was a West Virginia hillbilly who could build or fix just about anything. My mother was a Chicago girl who loved reading John Dos Passos. Country mouse and city mouse — the old Aesop’s Fable idea. They made their marriage work through 37 years, though. And yes, I spent my earliest years with my dad’s folks in Martinsburg. My twin sisters were born 15 months after I was, and my parents were simply overwhelmed with three babies in diapers. So sending me to the grandparents was how they dealt with it. My grandparents lived through the Depression and faced a hardscrabble existence their whole lives. But their house was filled with warmth. I easily absorbed Appalachian culture in a way my siblings never did. But I quickly learned that in Silver Spring, a Washington DC suburb filled with government workers from all across the country, that background was something to hide. I had to learn to code-switch — suppress the mountain accent, suppress the cultural markers. Fit in. That denial of rootedness is the pitchfork. One of the people in the book whose story I tell, Cheney Clow, literally went to war over which side of a state border his house sat on. That’s a man whose identity depended on geography. I understand that.
Your book spans nearly four centuries of Delaware crime. But you’ve said the organizing principle isn’t really chronology — it’s something more like a Whitman’s Sampler. When you step back and look at the whole collection, is there a thread running through these stories that surprised you? Something you didn’t set out to find but kept encountering anyway?
I had a civics course in high school that presented the justice system as an efficient, well organized, balanced organism. And sometimes, maybe most of the time, it is. But when you’re dealing with the human heart, there are always weak spots, corrupt individuals, within that system. And of course many criminals pick up the scent immediately and understand how to work the gaps. Aubrey McKay is a perfect example. He landed in jail in his early 20s on murder and rape convictions. But over time he appeared from the outside to be rehabilitating: he got his GED, he became the leader of a prison gospel choir, he led toy drives at Christmas. A credible façade. Local preachers and NAACP officials spoke out on his behalf. Meantime prison officials were being pressured to reduce overcrowding. These two issues converged, and the prison started granting McKay extended furloughs without supervision. McKay went on to commit the bulk of his crimes while on furlough. Then there’s the murkiest layer — the informant relationship. McKay was given protected status inside prison because he was willing to snitch on his prison mates. Not corruption exactly; it was a transactional arrangement the system depended on. The people who benefited from his insider tips had every incentive to look away from the warning signs. After several furloughs where his crimes went unchecked, McKay on his last furlough tried to escape for good. So you have: a monster, a system that needed him, advocates who were betrayed by their own compassion, and an escape that may or may not have had inside help. Nobody is purely innocent. Nobody is purely guilty except McKay himself.
McKay is a striking case, but reading the book I kept feeling like he wasn’t alone — like the system’s blind spots show up again and again across very different eras. Robert Hammond and Inez Brennan feel almost like bookends to McKay’s story. Did you start to see a pattern emerging as you researched these three?
Robert John Hammond Sr. is the inverse of McKay. Where McKay fooled institutions into trusting him, Hammond was known to every institution from childhood — reform school, jail, courts, psychiatric evaluation — and they failed anyway. Different failure mode, same outcome. Alonzo Hammond beats his wife. Young Robert watches. The reform school, the courts, the jail — every institution that touches Robert Hammond treats the behavior as the problem to be managed, not the household that produced it. Nobody goes back to the source. Arson, shootings, jailbreaks, the eventual murder of his wife Myrtle — these are what the institutions kept responding to, one incident at a time, reactively. They kept treating the eruptions without ever addressing the volcano. So is the Robert John Hammond story one about a monster, or about a society that kept mopping the floor without turning off the tap? Hammond at least had a reason. McKay’s character arrives in “Delaware Behaving Badly” fully formed. That gap between the two is genuinely troubling for a historian/storyteller who wants to present readers with the fullest picture. But the record, or lack of records, often obscures what can be told.
You’ve mentioned Hunter Thompson and Thomas Wolfe as writers you feel a kinship with — not stylistically, but in terms of worldview. Explain your draw to them.
Thompson grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, right on the fault line between Southern vernacular culture and urban ambition. Wolfe came out of Asheville, North Carolina and ended up at Harvard and then New York. Both carried those two worlds inside them simultaneously — the rural roots and the sophisticated circles — and rather than resolving that tension, they wrote from inside it. That feels native to how I write as well, and I’m sure my own Martinsburg/Silver Spring back-and-forth is the reason. The same outsider-insider pull of Thompson and Wolfe shows up most strongly in “Delaware Behaving Badly” with the story of Cheney Clow, who I mentioned a minute ago. The moral tension at the center of Cheney Clow’s life is that he seems to have treated loyalty as a moral absolute at the very moment the American Revolution turned that loyalty into a crime. He saw himself as faithful to a lawful order, not as a traitor. His neighbors increasingly saw him as a danger to the new republic. That makes him hard to sort neatly into hero or villain. He could look principled, stubborn, and threatening all at once. That, to me, is what makes him interesting. His story asks whether Delaware punished a murderer, a political enemy, or simply a man whose convictions ended up on the losing side of the Revolution.
You self-publish all your books, and you’ve been direct about that being a deliberate choice rather than a fallback. What does independence actually buy you when you’re writing a book like “Delaware Behaving Badly?”
What independence buys me, first of all, is control over judgment. With a book like ‘Delaware Behaving Badly,’ that matters. A story like Inez Brennan’s, for example, is gruesome, yes, but I included it because it does more than shock. Brennan was a Delaware farmwoman in the late 1940s who lured isolated, elderly men through newspaper personal ads and had them murdered for their money. Her saga opens onto a whole mid-century world of lonely-hearts ads, isolation, fraud, family manipulation, and the uneasy line between sensational crime and social history. A traditional publisher might not have cut that story outright, but an editor might well have pushed to soften it, shorten it, or make it less disturbing. Independence lets me make that call myself. I can decide that a story belongs because it reveals something important about the culture that produced it, even when the material is hard to read. That’s true across the board. Self-publishing gives me the freedom to follow Delaware where Delaware actually leads. I do not have to sand the book down to fit someone else’s idea of what regional history should sound like, or which stories are too odd, too dark, or too local. I can trust the reader with the full force of the material.
Delaware often gets treated as a footnote state — small, easily bypassed, more punchline than protagonist. Did writing this book change how you see that characterization?
Delaware’s reputation as a footnote state — a “quiet corner,” easily bypassed — is itself misleading. That characterization mistakes size for significance. European settlers have been living on this patch of land since 1638. The population at any given moment may be modest, but nearly four centuries of human activity adds up. Delaware has simply had more time to misbehave than most people realize. That’s why I built “Delaware Behaving Badly” across centuries. Patty Cannon’s kidnapping ring, the Dover Eight’s escape from slavery, and the Capano murder are not random grisly episodes. They reveal recurring patterns in how power, privilege, and justice have operated in Delaware. Writing the book also made me even less patient with nostalgia. The “good old days” never really existed. Human struggle, cruelty, and moral failure have always been with us. Honest history should not flatter the past. It should tell the truth about how people actually lived. There’s a verse in Ecclesiastes that I keep coming back to: “Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely.” That was written thousands of years ago, and it still needs saying.
After everything this book asked of you — the research, the difficult material, the stories that never fully resolved — what do you hope a reader carries with them after closing the last page?
Justice is rarely tidy, but paying attention is its own kind of accountability.
