Sondra London

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please improve this article if you can. (April 2007)

Sondra London is an American true crime author who was declared by one local alternative weekly tabloid, Folio, to be the "Queen of Serial Killer Journalism".

Crime Library and others have dubbed her ^[1] "the Queen of Serial Killer Groupies" ^[2] ^[3].

1 Career
2 Television
3 Books
4 External links
5 References

[edit] Career

Born in Florida, she dated future serial killer Gerard John Schaefer in high school. She earned a bachelor's degree in English at New College, The Honors College of Florida. In 1989, she contacted Schaefer in prison and worked with him to produce Killer Fiction, which was originally sold by mail order by Media Queen Enterprises, and then later released in an edition published by Feral House. Her collection of articles by death row prisoners was published in "Knockin' on Joe: Voices from Death Row" by Nemesis Books in England. Schaefer and London eventually got engaged, but the relationship would be short lived. After striking up a relationship with convicted killer Danny Rolling, who had initially contacted her to request that she help him tell his story, London decided it was time to break it off with Schaefer.

She collaborated with Rolling in writing The Making of a Serial Killer: The Real Story of the Gainesville Murders, a psychological memoir which included Rolling's confessions to five murders, along with other capital crimes for which he had not been charged. It was illustrated by 50 pictures hand-drawn by Rolling in prison. The confessions were published in a three-part series appearing in the Globe. London was sued ^[4] by the State of Florida under the Son of Sam law, which had been declared unconstitutional ^[5] by the U.S. Supreme Court. The two eventually became engaged, but broke it off sometime before Rollings' execution.

Feral House published her study of vampirism, True Vampires, in 2004. ^[6] The book is illustrated by Nicolas Claux.

Keith Jesperson, a serial killer known as The Happy Face Killer, sent Sondra London a series of murder confessions, which she posted to her AOL Home page in 1996. A year later, then-Governor of Wyoming Jim Geringer called for a boycott of America Online, protesting that he found the items to be offensive. Although London voluntarily removed the pages in question, AOL banned her from the AOL domain, which in turn prompted an outpouring of support from all over the World Wide Web, including multiple offers of free server space. London thanked Geringer on Larry King Live for catapulting her website into the limelight^[7].

[edit] Television

In 2000, an episode of director Errol Morris' First Person television series centered on Sondra London. She has appeared on Dateline, Turning Point, Larry King Live, Geraldo, Leeza, A Current Affair, and Court TV in the United States; Channel 4 and BBC in UK; German and French cable, and Australian ABC. As of March, 2008, she is currently working on a French TV special- "American serial killers"