Where the Bodies are Buried

Fred Rosen is not used to being interviewed. “I’m usually the one who’s asking the questions,” he says. “And we’re not sitting down for a coffee together, since most of my subjects are on death row.”

The Woodstock resident has more than a dozen books under his belt and four more on the way. His métier is true crime, and the titles tell the story: Flesh Collectors, Body Dump, Needle Work, Blood Crimes, Gang Mom (aka The Evil Mother), Deacon of Death, Doctors From Hell. They are plump trade paperbacks with eye-catching covers trumpeting “16 pages of shocking photos!” and bold-faced tag lines like “Their ghoulish appetites drove them to crimes that only began with murder.” Rosen’s best-known title, the cult classic Lobster Boy, is about the murder of a grotesquely deformed sideshow performer by his abused wife and son.

So how does a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, the son of a Polish immigrant furrier and a clothing buyer, wind up writing about stiffs and circus freaks?

“Do you want the real story or the bullshit story?” Rosen asks, dropping a wink. Urged to stick to the real one, he nods his approval. “I hate being lied to,” he says definitively.

Fred Rosen is an entertaining talker. His speech buzzes with wiseguy Brooklynese, and he’s given to sweeping pronouncements, salted with four-letter words. Today he is dressed in an olive-drab sweatshirt and chinos under a fringed western jacket, a get-up that seems to be equal parts soldier of fortune and cowboy.

As Rosen relates it, the real story starts with depression. From adolescence to an eventual diagnosis at 40, he suffered from untreated clinical depression, the deep, underwater affliction known as dysthymia. “My father was depressed his whole life,” he remarks. “I should have known I’d wind up in a psychopharmacologist’s office.”

He stares out the window at a chilly spring rain, fraught with film-noir fog. “That’s what I felt like every day. This weather.”

Finally, a doctor at the Payne Whitney Clinic prescribed Paxil. “Within six weeks, I was a different person. Coming out of depression was a learning curve—I had to learn how to live with the normal mood swings a normal person has. But I wasn’t scared to write anymore. It was like a dam broke.”

In fact, Rosen had been writing all along. After graduating from University of Southern California film school, he moved back to New York and found work as a technical writer, specializing in photography. He edited Studio Photography magazine and wrote a photography column for the New York Times, which led to an eight-year stint as a journalism professor at Hofstra University. Somewhere in there he cranked out a number of treatments for films and a couple of novels. A contact set him up with editor Paul Dinas, who turned down Rosen’s novel, but made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

“I can still remember it,” Rosen says, setting the scene as he does in his books. “We were standing outside his office on Park and 33rd. It was a cold day in February, the wind was blowing, and he says to me, ‘Would you like to write a book about doctors who abuse their patients?’ My first response was no. I went to film school, you know? You dream you’re the future Bergman or something. And then I thought, what am I, crazy? I got nothing else going on.”