Isabella Maldonado, ex-police officer and novelist: “You never forget the smell of a corpse at a crime scene”

2023-05-22 14:34:41

When he started writing, a literary agent told Isabella Maldonado (1965) that in order to represent her, she would first have to change her protagonist so that she was white. “He told me that he could never ‘sell it’ being, like me, a woman and a Latina,” recalls with a smile the writer of thrillers translated into 23 languages, who wanted to reflect on them her own experience after 22 years in the police forces. Americans and for this he created characters like Nina Guerrera, who as a young FBI agent evokes Clarice Starling from ‘The silence of the lambs’ and, due to his way of defending himself, like Lisbeth Salander from ‘Millennium’. This former Washington police officer and former captain of the Special, Criminal and Forensic Investigations Unit, graduated from the FBI ‘Enigma’ (Duomo), where he confronts her with the serial killer who gives her title. Besides, Netflix acquired the rights and will be Jennifer Lopez who embodies Guerrera in a movie.

“Being a woman and a Latina it was a challenge to get into the police. You always think you have to prove yourself because people doubt you. I experienced sexism and racism, yes. Once, at a crime scene, a woman told me she wanted to wait for ‘a real cop’. I had to make it clear to him that I was the real cop… And on my first day on the job an officer told me: ‘women have no place in police forces’, and he turned around and left,” Maldonado reveals by videoconference before adding that time took care of putting him in his place: “20 years later that officer was under my command, many layers below me. I think for someone with his mindset, going to work every day knowing that I was way above him should have been punishment enough…”

You have nightmares about your gun not firing, a victim trying to talk to you, or a killer chasing you

Isabella Maldonado, with the Fairfax County Police, before turning to writing. ASSIGNED BY THE AUTHOR

Nina is 16 years old when she runs away from a foster family and is kidnapped by an escaped rapist and murderer, Enigma. Eleven years later, he locates her through a viral video and to get her attention, he boasts of her new victims by launching a game of riddles on the networks. Maldonado studied serial killers at the FBI academy in Quantico. But for ‘Enigma’ he was inspired in part by a famous real case in which he worked and that left his mark, that of sniper WashingtonJohn Allen Muhammad, who with his stepson killed ten people in 2002 and injured twenty. “One of the murdered was an analyst from my jurisdiction -he recalls-. They shot randomly and nobody knew where or when. His goal was to cause panic and managed to paralyze the entire country with terror. because he was sending information to the media: encrypted messages, riddles, a tarot card”.

A wall when you get home

This is what Enigma does, but today, through social networks. “I reflect the challenge that all this represents for the police. How people can interfere in an investigation or generate false information. The first thing you investigate about a victim is their profiles on social networks,” says who also directed a forensic command. “You never forget the smell of a dead body when you’re at a crime scene. You learn that there’s no dignity in death. It’s hard. Many police officers build a wall for themselves and when they come home they don’t want to talk to their family about how their day was. That’s why there are so many divorces.” recounts to confess that they often suffer from nightmares. “One that no police officer knows that hasn’t had it is that in a lethal situation, when someone points at you, your gun doesn’t go off or it malfunctions. In some cases I’ve dreamed of a victim trying to talk to you, or with a murderer chasing you.”

resilience in Ukraine

Maldonado retired to start a family, although he admits that he misses something “the badge and the gun”. “I joined the police because I couldn’t stand injustice and I wanted to help victims of criminals. I knew I couldn’t change the world but maybe the course of someone’s life. Now, writing, I see that I have a bigger impact than I imagined I was surprised that they have bought the Enigma in Ukraine trilogy and in the networks there are young Ukrainian women who say they are inspired by how Nina fights, he faces terrible situations and overcomes them, he explains. With Nina I wanted to celebrate resilience, show how some survivors of painful trauma manage to transform it into something constructive and good for others.”

“Not everyone who is abused becomes a monster, which often seems to serve as an excuse to justify criminals.” This is emphasized by someone who has witnessed “acts of immense cruelty. Seeing so much dehumanization is disturbing.”