Until Murder Do Us Part
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Why I Write

4/20/2015

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If you’ve never put on headphones, sat in a dimly lit room, and listened to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, stop reading right now and go do it. The album is musical perfection, and experiencing it without distractions will take you on an emotional journey.

I’ve always believed that one of the best gifts that a person can give to another is to make them feel something. What makes art great, in my view, is its ability to make you laugh or cry or to make you feel joy, sorrow, inspiration, or loathing. Music (even genres other than rock & roll), theater, paintings, movies, and books achieve their highest purpose when they move you.

There are precious few opportunities as a lawyer to make people feel something other than anger or frustration. I have no artistic talent. The only musical instrument I can play is an MP3 player. My days of performing on a stage are long gone. But the desire to create some art that would hopefully evoke some feeling in others led me to write Until Murder Do Us Part.

I started with the premise of taking an attorney at the pinnacle of his career who has everything, stripping it all away, and exploring how he reacts. Michael Kingston is a new partner at an elite Washington, D.C. law firm. His life is destroyed in an instant when his wife is murdered in their bed, Mike is accused of killing her to be with his supposed mistress, and he comes to believe (or feign) that he killed her in his sleep. Whether Mike will survive the destruction of his wealth, family and career and emerge a stronger man to start a new life with his motherless daughter, or he will wither under the intense public scrutiny, creates the emotional roller coaster that I hope the reader will ride along with Mike.

Enjoy Until Murder Do Us Part, (best with Pink Floyd playing in the background), and always sleep with one eye open.

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The Worst Morning of My Life

2/18/2015

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  In 1997, I moved my young family to Orange County, California to start a new job with Rutan & Tucker, a large law firm in Costa Mesa. I worked in the Trial Department on business litigation cases. The attorneys and staff in the Trial Department were great to work with, and I made many good friends there.

The firm was very busy at the time, and I was hired in part to help handle the growing workload. Since I was a new attorney in the department, I didn’t want to get a reputation for turning away work. So I took on more projects than I could handle in a normal fifty-hour week. Most litigation projects also come with court-imposed deadlines, so there is limited flexibility in scheduling completion of your work.

During a particular two-month period, I was working an average of about 80 hours per week preparing a case for trial. The work was exciting but exhausting. The worst part was the time I had to spend away from my two precious daughters—a two-year-old and a newborn.

One morning, I kissed my wife and daughters goodbye and headed toward the door for another twelve-hour workday. My two-year-old daughter wrapped her arms around my leg, held on, and wailed, “don’t go!” I had court deadlines to meet, so I peeled her arms away and walked out the door.

Walking away from my daughter, who was distraught because of my continual absence, was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done and made that the worst morning of my life. From that point on, I made a more diligent effort to manage my workload better, so I wouldn’t have to spend so much time away from my family.

This experience led to one of the themes in Until Murder Do Us Part—the cost of sacrificing family for career. The incident was also the inspiration for a scene in Chapter 9 in which the main character, Mike, was visiting his daughter, Victoria, one weekend at her grandparents’ home in New Jersey, where she was staying while her father faced the criminal charges related to the death of her mother. When Mike had to leave Monday morning to face a court hearing on the murder charges against him, he had to pry himself away from his sobbing daughter and walk out the door. The scene closes with Mike’s realization that, “facing prosecution for murder would be easy compared to walking away from his daughter like that.”

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My Buddy Dreamed He Was Climbing a Rope...

1/13/2015

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In the early 1990s, I began to ponder writing a story about how a man might react to finding himself in the worst possible circumstances. It seemed that a man losing his wife, being accused of her murder, coming to believe he may have actually killed her in his sleep, and losing his career and wealth as a result, ranked pretty high for me on the Job scale of hardship. Would he crumble and give up on life or would he persevere in the face of adversity (unless he was guilty and planned to eliminate his wife).

While I continued to contemplate potential plot lines, the opening scene of the book, which was inspired by true events, landed in my lap. As I remember the story (and my memory is suspect after more than 20 years), my newlywed friend Matt told me he was having a nightmare one night in which he dreamed he was climbing a rope. As he clung to the rope in his dream, he was unconsciously choking his wife, Chris. Because she’d heard that it’s dangerous to awaken someone who is walking in his sleep, Chris tried to gently wake up Matt even as he was strangling her. We had a good laugh with Chris, whose life was literally being threatened, yet she was more concerned for her sleeping husband.

About a year later in my first year of law school, I learned that unconsciousness is a complete defense to murder. A man cannot commit a crime without some level of mens rea or intent. The sleepwalking plot device was complete: the wife of a man with a propensity for sleepwalking is suffocated in their bed one night—is he truly horrified that he might have killed his wife in his sleep, did he feign sleepwalking to get away with murder, or was he sound asleep while another monster smothered his wife? Find out in Until Murder Do Us Part.

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    Author

    Treg Julander is the author of the LDS legal thriller Until Murder Do Us Part and has been an attorney in private practice for over 20 years.

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