STRANGER THAN FICTION
Patterson, ‘48 Hours’ tackle Aaron Hernandez murder saga
J AMES Patterson’s genre-spanning novels have sold millions of copies worldwide and even spawned the CBS drama series “Zoo.” But it’s his newest book, a work of nonfiction, that’s taking him into new territory: true crime. “All-American Murder: The Rise and Fall of Aaron Hernandez,” written by Patterson and Alex Abramovich with Mike Harkvey, takes center stage on Saturday’s “48 Hours” (10 p.m./Ch. 2). The episode features Patterson delving firsthand into the life and death of Hernandez, the New England Patriots star who, in 2015, was convicted of killing an acquaintance, Odin Lloyd, in North Brattleboro, Mass. (In 2013, Lloyd’s bullet-riddled body was found in an industrial park about a mile from Hernandez’s house.) Hernandez, implicated in other shootings and murders dating back to his college days — he was acquitted of a double murder in 2017 — was sentenced to life without parole for Lloyd’s murder and hung himself in his prison cell last April. He was 27. Patterson visits SouzaBaranowski prison in Lancaster, Mass, where Hernandez committed suicide. The special also features interviews with, among others, Dr. Bennet Omalu, considered the world’s foremost authority on CTE, a degenerative brain injury caused by repeated head trauma. (A postmortem revealed that Hernandez had the most severe case of CTE ever seen in someone his age.) “I’m not into pardoning [Hernandez for the murder] vis a vis CTE,” says Patterson, 70. “Part of that is that he could be pretty coherent and competitive in-between however these murderous impulses came. It seemed like he was getting more and more paranoid. The night of the Odin Lloyd murder, the one he did less than a mile from his house, which is crazy, he left four shells right by the body, and the guy’s cell phone, which had [Hernandez’s] number on it. The rental car was rented in his name.
“It’s the kind of story worthy of a thriller approach, except it’s a true story,” says Patterson. “Maybe it’s too over-the-top; people would say, if I was writing this as a thriller novel, ‘C’mon, James, who’s going to believe this?’ It’s a stunning trail of violence from Florida through New England and LA.
“I learned, in talking to the detectives up in North Brattleboro, that there were 50 police departments all over the country” investigating cases linked to Hernandez, Patterson says. “The captain in North Brattleboro had been in that department for 18 years — there were six homicides in 18 years and this one was a monster. [The investigation] went on for months.”
The “48 Hours” special also includes an interview with college football coach Urban Meyer, who recruited and coached Hernandez at the University of Florida, Patterson’s interviews with witnesses and his face-to-face sitdown interview with Ursula Ward, Odin Lloyd’s mother.
“Doing in-person interviews for me was new and a challenge and it was stunning, just being up there in the SouzaBaranowski prison and the other prison closer to Boston, and being in the cell where [Hernandez] killed himself and talking to the warden and the cops,” Patterson says.
“But the most emotional interview was Odin Lloyd’s mother, Ursula Ward. I heard from somebody along the way what a great lady she was. I was supposed to be doing this ‘60 Minutes’-type of interview, but I’m crying and she’s crying.”