Donna approached me with a letter in the mail. I had already received a life sentence without parole and was transferred to the Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California, to begin the end of my life. Donna introduced herself as someone who had watched the various true crime shows that had been made about my case and trial. She also listed her law enforcement credentials with Homeland Security and her work with the Federal Bureau of Prisons and informed me of what she believed to be various discrepancies cited in these shows compared to the details in the public records she had pulled on my trial. At first, I thought nothing of it. I already had an appeals attorney who was preparing my first level of appeals, and I was receiving a lot of mail from true crime groupies, super-fans or haters, and religious nuts who wanted me to confess my sins and convert to Christianity. (Fun fact: I grew up in a deeply religious Korean Christian home; I say Korean Christian because that is its own brand of Christianity.) But in the letter, Donna mentioned she was writing her first book. She was trying to cash in on this tragedy, right? I felt like the whole story was already played out; there wasn’t any flesh left for Donna to get her pound from. 

I responded in part because she appealed to my ethnicity and cultural background, sharing that she also grew up in a home with Asian values. Every episode on my case was done through a White American lens, and for good reason—we are in America, and most of the true crime audience is probably White (at least based on the letters I received). More importantly, I had hoped to have something for my family to read and understand, as my ex-wife had already cut my children off from me. When my four children grew up and wondered who their father really was, maybe instead of just watching 20/20, Dateline, American Greed, or Oxygen, they could pick up the book and find a more balanced account of the ordeal, starting from when I was a young boy up to the day I became a killer.

Donna and I did not hit it off right away. At times, we both got testy trying to draw hard boundaries with each other. There were also long periods when we made little progress, whether it was on my end as a prisoner trying to survive and adapt to prison life or on her end with any health or personal issues. (There was a pandemic going on at the time.) However, with each passing correspondence, we formed a personal connection. Other reporters had also invested significant time to get me to sit down for an interview, only to have it heavily edited and my message left out. Still, I agreed to meet with Donna and sit down for a few days’ worth of interviews. The fact that she spent a considerable amount of her own time (the visiting process in prison is not easy) and money (she wasn’t working on ABC’s or NBC’s budget) to visit me spoke to me, and I ended up sharing a lot more of myself and what happened than I had planned.

I’m writing this foreword just to tell my original intended audience (my four children) that I am trusting Donna to be an unbiased storyteller of everything she has researched and learned in interviews over these past few years. Hopefully, you will get to know the person who loves you dearly and who has been apart from you all these years not by choice but as a consequence of my own actions. I wish I could go back to the day that completely altered the trajectory of all our lives and walk away from the situation instead of letting my ego push me to win and having it all go south. I am truly sorry for everything. And not just because I got caught and am in prison. I am sorry because I robbed you of a father who truly loves you and couldn’t give you that love on a daily basis. I am sorry because I also robbed another family of a son and brother to love. I can only dedicate my life to giving back to the world to begin making up for what I took. 

Ed Shin