The Fullerton Furry Murders
Eight years ago I began investigating a triple homicide in Orange County. Now I can finally tell the story.
On September 24th, 2016, a Saturday morning in the suburbs of Fullerton, Orange County, a six-year-old girl called 911 to report a horrific scene. Her parents had been murdered as well as a houseguest who was staying on the sofa, each one shot in the head at close range. Her nine-year-old sister was with her, but she couldn’t hold it together to speak to the cops. So it’s the six-year-old we hear in court, her little-girl voice urgent and clear—“my dad is outside in the back yard dead, my mom is in the bed dead…” There have been two trials, one in 2018, and one in 2024. And each time, the 911 dispatcher burst into tears. In her 23 years in the job, this is the call that haunts her above all others.
I began reporting as soon as the news broke about the crime. It was initially the furry aspect that intrigued me—the execution-style homicides with the Disney-style costumes, a murder plot in a world of masks and alter egos. I’d read something about furries in a lurid Vanity Fair article many years before. So I knew that there was a kink aspect and that they had conventions, but that was about it. Now I had a reason to properly explore this subculture, which as you know from this newsletter, is one of my favorite things to do.
But I thought I’d be telling a different story by the end of it. In my experience, outsider subcultures like these often develop a quasi-Utopian quality in their attempt to both escape the mainstream and rebuke it, and when something goes wrong, something traumatic, it forces them to introspect and adapt, a dramatic process that can be constructive or the opposite. Either way, it’s revealing about the subculture itself. That’s the piece I expected to write when the details of this case came out—the story of how this insular and private community responded to a crime like this in its midst.
An Incredible Story
Instead, I’ve been drawn into something much more complex and challenging. So much so that eight years on, I’m still fully immersed. There are three conspirators, each one at that tender cusp of young adulthood, when they’re figuring out who they are and who they want to become. They wanted to escape their difficult lives and they saw each other as a means to do so. So when they came together, with their troubled backstories and their dreams for the future, it was like a perfect storm. The events took on a terrible momentum.
I won’t distill the story here. Impossible to do it justice. There are a few news reports out there—by the AP, the OC Register and the Daily Mail—but they scratch the surface. The true story has been missed, and it’s extraordinary. It’s not clear at all that justice has been done. I feel lucky to have chanced upon such a rich and faceted tale, an untold story with urgent public interest. It’s been a long road, lonely at times, but these are the stories we hope for, the ones that crystallize the moment we live in.
This crime draws together so many issues and threads that it creates a portrait of contemporary America, the roiling currents beneath the surface. A country where gun culture meets a mental health crisis. Where young people on the margins seek to define themselves through fringe groups. Where identities are fluid and fantasy blurs with reality. Masculinity is in flux. Culture wars rage. And a social justice movement grows in tandem with MAGA. A country coming apart in other words, in ways that we see more clearly through this prism.
But at the same time, it also has a mythic quality. Because this is a tragedy in the noir tradition whose themes of desire and manipulation could scarcely be more universal. A story about our search for identity, our longing for escape, and the aching gulf between who we are, and who we dream of becoming.
Eight Years And Counting
I know this because I’ve been speaking to the two accused murderers, Josh and Frank, perhaps more than anyone else in my life, outside of my wife. An odd experience that I don’t recommend, but nevertheless, I now know them better than I know a lot of people. Certainly better than Capote knew Perry and Dick from In Cold Blood. I’ve visited them in jail and in prison. We speak regularly, sometimes daily and it’s been this way for six years. These conversations have in turn directed me to various psychologists, soldiers, autism experts, and Bronies (“bros who like My Little Pony”). I’ve also grown close to the victims who are anxious for the truth to be told. I’ve attended every day in court, and recorded hundreds of hours of interviews.
It’s hard to overstate how much this story has consumed my life. Warped it in many ways. Or how much of this story I’ve consumed and now carry around, looking for a chance to finally set it down. I’m used to a magazine schedule, a turnaround. I’ve never pursued a single story for eight years like this, without publishing a word. But it’s my fault. I decided early on that I wanted to write the definitive story which meant waiting for both trials to conclude—and the second one kept getting delayed by 3 or 4 months at a time. So in that time, I kept reporting, kept burrowing ever deeper into this rabbit hole. And now I’m an overstuffed cushion. I’m pregnant with an eight-year-old.
So I’m happy to announce that I’m officially writing a book about all of this. It’s called The Fullerton Furry Murders and it’ll be with Kensington Books. The deal was announced on Thursday.
Book Number Two
By “happy” I mean “relieved” mostly. Not that it doesn’t feel good to post “some personal news” for once, and God knows I’m grateful, book deals are so hard to come by. But there’ll be no champagne corks, nothing like that. Because a book deal is a deal, not a book. And deals change. At the risk of sounding like Adrien Brody this is my second rodeo. And I was thrown off the first time.
It began with an absurd stroke of luck. Lottery level. Imagine an editor at Simon & Schuster cold-calling you to say, ‘hey, we’d love it if you wrote us a book!’ Well, it happened to me. I was immersed in a different subculture back then—polygamy. I’d made a documentary for Channel Four about the cult leader Warren Jeffs, and a few weeks after it aired, the biggest publishers in America asked me to come up with a polygamy-based book proposal so that they could sign off on it and send me a modest check. Bish bosh. I didn’t even have an agent.
There were champagne corks then, I promise you. Champagne and humble brags as I turned down freelance assignments: I’d love to but I’m just so busy writing this book for Simon & Schoooster… I went to Utah, had many adventures and then wrote a first draft which the editors loved. It was all going swimmingly.
But then the markets collapsed. It was 2008. And the suits at S&S decided to cut all first time authors, no exceptions. I received this bombshell in India where I’d recently been fired (long story), so this was my all-is-lost moment. Cue violins. But I had a finished book to sell, which isn’t nothing. So I put on the Rocky music and started Googling “fancy book agents in New York”. And I found Kate, my agent to this day, who somehow managed, in the rubble of the industry, to make a deal with Counterpoint, an indie press in the Bay Area.
Look, I understand that it was a tough time and that I was lucky to get a deal at all. But still, Counterpoint’s publisher Charlie Winton struck a nasty bargain. It seemed he had all the affectations of indie publishing but none of the attributes, and the financial crash was a wonderful opportunity for him to vulture in on writers who were already on their knees. So there would be no publicity, no marketing, no book launch, no events, no blurbs and no real effort to secure reviews. I would have to indemnify Counterpoint against lawsuits, while also funding my own legal read with an attorney of his choosing who duly charged me a fortune. It was a total carve-up. Charlie has retired now and I can only hope that Counterpoint is in more humane hands. But anyway, my book Secrets & Wives: The Hidden World of Mormon Polygamy, was published at last.
It’s Time
So this time it’s different. I’ve learned that announcing a book deal is like telling the world, “I’m heading out into the ocean in a canoe”. Everything can be taken at any time. All assurances may be broken. We paddle out with hope in our hearts, but not too much, not after the first time. It was a market collapse that killed my last deal and with Trump’s tariff wars, it might very well happen again.
What I’m saying then, is that there is only one thing I know for sure—I’m going to tell this story at long last, one way or the other. I’ll share what I can along the way, about the writing process and the research I’m doing (not unlike this piece about the furries). And if the book deal evaporates, then I’ll serialize it here on Substack. I can’t wait for you to read it.
Congrats Sanj! This was a great prelude to read. Very timely too.
You made me LOL a few times in here, Sanj. I'm just so thrilled for you and this book will be a big success. Excited to read it.