These are the facts from the police blotter: In the early hours of July 22, in the quiet seaside town of Cape Coral, Florida, Joshua Henninger, 16, and Jeremy Chapman, 23, lured an acquaintance, 17 year-old Mariner High honor student Annamarie Randazzo, to Henninger’s home with a cell phone call. Once she arrived, one of them struck her. Both of them then tied her up, put her in her own car and drove to an unknown location where they both repeatedly raped her, then killed her with repeated blows. They then drove to a wooded area where they placed her body in an abandoned refrigerator and set her afire, then drove her car back to Cape Coral and set it to blaze in a vacant field.

Motive? As Henninger confessed when the police finally found her remains on August 6, they wanted to see what killing someone would feel like. They chose Annamarie because, at four feet eleven and one hundred pounds, she'd be no trouble. Filipinas like her and me tend to be small.

How I discovered this case has to do with the blogosphere and my desperate desire to make it in the romance genre. The mother of Chapman, you see, is Sheila Lynn Viehl, who in seven years has managed to publish twenty-nine books in the categories of contemporary romance, Christian romance, romantic thriller, romantic fantasy, and romantic science fiction. That her books are, overall, merely sketchy, formulaic and derivative escapist fare is an insignificant factor compared to her considerable value over the years to the self-styled writing community, of which I am a fringe member.

She is, from all reports, a nice woman. She is helpful to beginners. In the area of mutual stroking that is the unique engine of this genre, she is generous. And - until this incident - she has remained accessible online to everyone. It was this trait, in fact, along with her prolificness and cheery professionalism, that drew me to her blog, Paperback Writer, which until yesterday I kept on my own blog’s list of daily reads. On Tuesday morning the 9th I checked in at Paperback Writer as usual, and found an uncommonly grave posting:

“The press may or may not have a field day with this story. I don't know; I've never been in this position before,” it began, and then went on to recount  the story of Jeremy, her son, the one never mentioned in her official bios. His mental instability, his criminal record. Her long humiliating efforts to help him and stick by him through his encounters with the law. Her final decision, once he reached adult age, to cut ties with him. “I felt threatened by his  behavior...I did this to protect my two younger children, their father, and me.” It ended with the news she had gotten, that her son had just confessed to murder.

Within three minutes of this posting came the first comment, and it was supportive. Within twenty-four hours, over a hundred and fifty comments were in, almost all sympathetic - the few upsetting comments having been, understandably, deleted. I was tempted to add my own condolences. After all, I was also a mother with a son the same age, and with a history of mental illness (albeit war-rape trauma) in my family.

What stopped me was a strange omission I noted while scrolling through the comments: There hadn’t been one single mention of the victim by name (actually, victims - after killing Annamarie, Chapman killed his 66 year-old roommate).

Whereas, as I counted, there were no less than 28 uses of the word “hug” in the comments - as in “big hug”, “bear hug” and “you need a hug”.

Now, I’m not going to join the other camp, the one blinded by rage and grief, that is lashing out at Sheila Viehl for the crimes of her son. I believe that she did her best, that she is a decent enough person and that this incident will  stay with her for the rest of her life. I believe, too, that she has not played unfairly by not letting her fans and readers know about Jeremy before now. Authors are not obliged to be ruthlessly honest about their personal lives.

But cozy easy sympathy is the weakest of human virtues, inadequate at best, unctuous at worst. Since Tuesday, bloggers have been nauseating in their support of Viehl. One praised her for not getting “drama-tastic”. Another accused her detractors of being “subhuman”. Yet another composed a parable about little forest animals and a duckling who did a very bad thing. When compared to the blogs of Mariner High students, their rage and grief raw and real on the screen, from the time Annamarie was abducted to the time her body and her killers were found - “They burned her fukin car” - "Please bring my sister back!!!” - “I can’t go on” - those postings of praise take on a particular moral repugnance.

“You all offered the understanding and support that I needed so desperately today, and I'm so grateful,” Viehl posted yesterday. “A few others in the writing community have not been so kind, and I'm sure there will be more of  that. What these people say about me may seem vicious, but ultimately it's  meaningless. To them I'm not a person, but an opportunity. Don’t defend me to them... Keep us in your thoughts.”

Her only mention of the murdered: “Families, loved ones and friends of the victims are suffering, and some of them are taking that out on me. If you come across something like this out there, don't attack these people. They don't know me or my family, or what we're going through.” Now, even if you take into account Viehl’s likely shock and emotional numbness in the face of the situation, this still comes across as a measured, regally distant, unchecked by reality, and needlessly self-interested statement that teeters dangerously close to demagoguery.

If you think I’m exaggerating, think of of those 150 (or 500, if you count her other websites and personal email) comments that came unbidden, within hours, from her well-wishers. In the face of such loving support, how could it not be tempting and justifiable to almost any of us writers to want to come out, eventually, with a surefire bestseller - entitled, say, A Mother’s Anguish: Stardoc’s Creator Speaks Out on Her Troubled Son, or even to become the founder of a national support group called, say, Mothers of Murderers?

Because. Because. You have to remember. You have to remember. That on this day, at this hour, even as I am writing, Annamarie Randazzo’s charred body is lying in a coffin at a funeral mass in Florida, surrounded by her heartbroken schoolmates, her best friends, her sister Melissa, her parents.

That is the reality, and there is no percentage in seeking the crown to this particular court of pain when all you can ever hope to be is the retinue.

Twenty-nine books in seven years is an exceptional achievement, maybe even an enviable one. As it turns out it almost certainly came at a price. A lesser writer might defend the separation that was so clearly evident, might insist that the authorial distance must always be kept between the perfect world of a writer’s creative mind and the imperfect world of the reality in which she lives.

But it would be better to admit, with humility, the debt that all of us writers, whether of escapist fiction or so-called serious fiction, owe to reality: To let reality inform not only what we write, but how we write, and the choices we’re compelled to make in order to keep on writing.

The alternative is to build on sand, ignoring the fact that the concrete truck is about to pull up any minute. And that's not authorial distance. That is insanity.

Originally published in Literary Revolution and Altar Magazine, 2005.