A Lovely Girl

About the Author

Deborah Holt Larkin is uniquely qualified to tell this captivating yet horrifying crime story. From a front row seat in her family’s living room, she lived the fear and disbelief that gripped her hometown in 1958.

Larkin holds a bachelor’s degree in American History and Literature from the University of California at Davis, and she studied creative writing at the University of California at San Diego. She has a master’s degree in the Education of Exceptional Children from San Francisco State University.

In her own words…

(the author’s inspiration to write the story)

My life-long interest in true crime stories began in 1958 when Olga Duncan vanished from her Santa Barbara apartment in the middle of the night. At the time, I was a passionate Dragnet and Nancy Drew fan. But when Olga’s brutally-beaten body was discovered a month later in a shallow grave on a lonely road near my home town, my focus shifted to the real-life mystery. I had a constant source of information from my father’s newspaper articles about the murder and his never-ending monologue around the house detailing the bizarre Ma Duncan case. I became obsessed with the true crime story. My mother tried to rein Daddy in with an occasional, “Shhh, you’re scaring the girls, Bob,” but he had few boundaries when it came to the news of the world. I hung on his every word because I wanted to understand about evil people and how to avoid them.

To me, this story is inextricably linked to a more innocent, unsophisticated era just before the dramatic changes of the 1960s, when we all believed that bad things didn’t happen in our own small towns if we all followed the rules. In between the carefully researched true crime procedural chapters, the thread of the story winds back to chapters of my coming-of-age memoir about our quirky family life and my dawning realization that sometimes terrible things can happen to good girls. That evil can hide behind a mask of normalcy.