From time to time, we introduce you, our readers, with a new Maine author. Today we’re excited to share a blog from Sharon Kitchens about her new true crime, The Murder of Dorothy Milliken.

Sharon Kitchens: When my editor first asked me if I’d consider writing a true crime book, I told him absolutely not. The genre, to me, felt macabre—a space more focused on the lurid details than the real people left behind. Yet, the morning after the call, I found myself settling into my favorite reading chair and pulling up the Maine State Police’s Unsolved Homicides webpage. A few clicks in, and I was reading about Dorothy Milliken, a woman found lying outside a laundromat in Lewiston at 4:45 a.m. on a cold November morning in 1976.

She had left home around 11 p.m., I read, something she often did—laundry was a late-night ritual for her. That detail made me pause. There was something so intimate, so vulnerable, about a woman alone in the quiet hours doing something as ordinary as washing clothes. I started scribbling lines of questions in a notebook.

Not long after, I reached out to a couple of people I know—both former detectives—asking them if I was completely out of my mind for thinking I might write this story. They told me I wasn’t and that I should—that I could bring attention to the case. One offered to connect me with a sergeant at the Maine State Police. That was the turning point. I met with the detective currently assigned to the case and then with Dorothy’s daughter, Tonia. In both meetings, I told them the same thing: I’ll walk away if you want. I wasn’t there to promise closure. I was there to listen.

Because for me, Dorothy is the story. She’s a full person, not just the victim of a violent act. A woman who lived, who loved, who people missed.

Throughout my research, I tried to be responsible. I hope I was. Every meeting I set up and every call or text I made, I was asking people to relive what may be the worst day of their life. Because details matter. The brand of cigarettes she smoked. The length of a high school senior class trip. The color of a shirt. These are the things loved ones hold onto. And when the press gets them wrong, the pain is real.

True crime, if done carelessly, can retraumatize people. My hope with this book was to tell Dorothy’s story with her family. With the understanding that these are real people and what happened to them decades ago still traumatizes them today.

There were limits, of course. Many of the original investigators had died or drifted into quiet retirement by the time I started asking questions. But remarkably, nearly four dozen people—friends, relatives, experts, classmates, neighbors, and former law enforcement—answered my emails and calls. Some opened doors I didn’t even know to knock on. Others helped me drag information previously hidden away into the light.

The Office of the Maine Attorney General and the Maine State Police would not allow me access to case files—even those of closed cases. They weren’t prepared for how far I would dig—or how much I’d find about what had been overlooked or pushed aside. That was deeply frustrating. But I got the chance to know Dorothy and the people who loved her. What I found wasn’t a cautionary tale or a cold case cliché—but a woman who adored her children, made people laugh, and gave more than she took. She loved Ringo Starr, had a sharp eye for fashion, and could drink coffee like a prizefighter—black, no sugar, no cream. She wasn’t just a headline. She was a total badass, really.