Bettendorf native publishes 1st novel, sells film rights

It’s a true crime that most Americans are hungry to know all about killers, but not so much the innocent people they murder.

That fact motivated Bettendorf native Rebecca McKanna to write her first novel, “Don’t Forget the Girl,” which was published by Sourcebooks Landmark in June 2023. The book’s TV/film rights already have been optioned by Heyday Films.

In the new book, 12 years ago, 18-year-old University of Iowa freshman Abby Hartmann disappeared. Now, Jon Allan Blue, the serial killer suspected of her murder, is about to be executed. Abby’s best friends, Bree and Chelsea, watch as Abby’s memory is unearthed and overshadowed by Blue and his flashier crimes.

The friends — estranged in the wake of Abby’s disappearance, and suffering from years of unvoiced resentments — must reunite when a high-profile podcast dedicates its next season to Blue’s murders.

Tense and introspective, for readers of Megan Goldin and Heather Gudenkauf, “Don’t Forget the Girl” is billed as “an astonishing debut thriller that mines the complexities of friendship and the secrets between us that we may take to the grave.”

Among the rave reviews, Porter Shreve (author of “The End of the Book” and “The Obituary Writer”) said McKanna has “written a vivid, propulsive, sensational debut that’s both an indictment of our violent and toxic culture and a celebration of women and survivors and the essential role of collective memory in bringing about change.”

Her short stories have been anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories 2019and recognized as distinguished in The Best American Short Stories 2019. She has been published inColorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Third Coast, Joyland, and as one of Narrative‘s Stories of the Week, among other publications.

McKanna is an associate professor of English at the University of Indianapolis. She lives in Indianapolis with her husband and a mini-schnauzer named Hans Gruber.

Her LinkedIn bio says she teaches teach creative, professional, and nonprofit writing, as well as editing and literature courses. “In previous lives, I worked as a newspaper reporter, a nonprofit writer, a freelance editor, and a corporate writer for a financial services company. Each of these roles taught me different things about writing and the power it can wield, and I love passing those lessons onto my students,” she wrote.

In the new book, among her acknowledgments is thanking her Bettendorf Middle School English teacher, Greg Bouljon, who said she was going to become a writer.

“That always stuck with me and he was such a great teacher,” McKanna said in a recent Zoom interview with Local 4. “When you’re young and someone believes in you, it’s huge. I always really liked to write. The Midwest practicality of it, I studied journalism in college. I took like one fiction course – I didn’t think that was the thing for me.”

“I do remember her. I just finished the copy she sent me,” Bouljon (her old teacher) said recently. “Rebecca captures how victims are often lost as the media focuses on the killer. It was a good read. Rebecca can write. She develops her characters gradually as the chapters and plot unfolds. I am honored that she feels that I helped and encouraged her and her writing.”

Growing from Bettendorf and beyond

A 38-year-old Bettendorf native, who graduated from Bettendorf High and the University of Iowa (2007). McKanna earned her master of fine arts in creative writing from Purdue University, after working in the QC for Modern Woodmen of America (2003-2012) in corporate communications.

She interned for the Cedar Rapids Gazette newspaper for a semester while a senior at Iowa, and it was then she started writing her own short fiction stories.

“I always enjoyed doing it; I didn’t think I could do it, I guess,” McKanna said, noting she took creative writing at Bettendorf High School.

It was while she was at Modern Woodmen that she got into writing fiction.

“I’m an only child, so I had to play by myself and make up stories, so I always had a really vivid imagination, daydreaming,” she said. “The thing I really loved about journalism was hearing other people’s stories, but because I wanted to stockpile them and turn them into something else, create like a fictional piece.”

McKanna worked for the UI student newspaper, The Daily Iowan, and was the cops reporter for a while.

She’s taught at University of Indianapolis since 2017 and she teaches a Midwestern crime literature course.

“I just think there’s something about crime stories that show us a lot about who people are,” McKanna said.

Remembering a crime

There’s always a hometown crime case that people remember, and for her, it was the Trudy Appleby disappearance in 1996. The 12-year-old Moline girl was reported missing Aug. 21, 1996 and has never been found.

“It’s interesting how that sticks with you and you remember a person you never met,” McKanna said. Her father also was on a QC jury where a little girl had been killed.

Among famous crime books she’s taught are Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” (1966), Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917) and the 2012 graphic novel “My Friend Dahmer.”

McKanna said Purdue’s writing program was wonderful.

“What’s sad, though, is they’ve defunded that program basically, so now it doesn’t really exist,” she said. “They had such wonderful faculty and their students did really well. They had so many students that went on to be professors or publishing, or working in literary nonprofits.”

McKanna got her agent after the agent contacted her, having read one of her short stories.

“That’s kind of rare; usually somebody is going to want to read the book first, so the fact that she was willing to be in the trenches with me,” she said. “Having this person waiting for it really helped me get that first draft.”

Her MFA thesis was a story about a high school girl who was murdered, but more about the reaction from people at her school.

Set in Iowa City

That sparked the novel, “Don’t Forget the Girl,” which is set at the University of Iowa and around Iowa City, in the same period McKanna went there.

“I felt like, all the time novelists will set fictional stories in New York or wherever. I just thought, why can’t we do that with Iowa City?” McKanna said.

The infamous Black Angel at Iowa City’s Oakland Cemetery is the last place they saw their friend alive.

“It looks really sinister, and legends include – if you kiss under it, you’ll die, or if a pregnant woman touches it on Halloween, she’ll miscarry,” McKanna said of the 8.5-foot-tall statue. “There are all these really horrible stories. But the real story was, there was this woman whose son died and her husband died in short succession. And she hired this person to make this monument during her grief.”

The 1912 statue was originally bronze and it oxidized over the years, becoming black in color. When she worked at the Daily Iowan, they brought ghost hunters to the cemetery to see if there was paranormal activity at the Black Angel, and McKanna said there was not.

She had worked on her short story collection for five years, which included the story that became the novel, but she didn’t use much for the finished novel.

“It took me about nine months to write the first draft, but there were quite a few months of moving things around and puttering,” McKanna said, noting it was revised a couple times before being published by Sourcebooks, a women-led company.

Her agent thought they’d be a good fit, because the editor also went to University of Iowa.

Multiple perspectives

“Don’t Forget the Girl” is written from the perspective of multiple people (including the murdered girl), in times before and after the murder. Each chapter has headings from that person’s perspective.

“It’s not really unusual,” the author said. The dead girl who is forgotten in the media circus, forces the reader to get closer to her, “which I like that effect,” McKanna said.

Society always puts far more attention on killers than the victims, which she wanted to address in her book.

McKanna had written an essay about her fear and fascination with the notorious serial killer Ted Bundy (1946-1989), who had always scared her.

“He murdered girls my age, and over the years, I’ve read a lot about him, just because he scared me and I wanted to understand that,” she said. “The more I read about him, and other killers, they become so much less scary when you read well-done biographies about them. You see just how broken these people are, and they’re not glamorous or interesting. They’re just people who did horrible things, basically.”

“The more you learn about them, the less mythic they feel,” she said, noting she wanted to find out more about Bundy’s victims.

McKanna had her book launch June 20 in Iowa City (at Sidekick Coffee and Books), and she plans to do an event in Cedar Rapids in late August, but doesn’t have anything scheduled yet for the QC (her parents are still in Bettendorf).

A “Harry Potter” connection

When “Don’t Forget the Girl” was announced in the publishing industry, a couple literary rights agents from William Morris Endeavor contacted her agent, to represent the potential film/TV rights.

“They were wonderful and they sent it around to people. In the most surreal experience of my life, I had a Zoom meeting with David Heyman,” McKanna said of the producer of all eight Harry Potter films (and founder of Heyday Films).

“There’s this picture of my friend and I in high school going to the movie of the fifth Harry Potter book, and I’m talking to the guy who made those movies and it was just so surreal,” she recalled.

They optioned the TV rights, but McKanna said so many options don’t come to fruition.

“It would be awesome, but we’ll see, especially with the writers’ strike,” she said. “I feel really bad for the writers; I’d like them to get paid more.”

For more information, visit McKanna’s website HERE.