Lieutenant Joe Kenda spent 21 years chasing killers as a homicide detective and commander of the major crimes unit in Colorado Springs. After retiring from law enforcement, he starred in the true crime series Homicide Hunter: Lt. Joe Kenda, which features murder cases told through his personal experience. In his new series, Homicide Hunter: American Detective, Kenda trades in his own case files to bring forward astounding investigations from across the country. Both series air on Investigation Discovery (ID), the number-one true-crime channel available in more than 66 million homes, and are available to stream on Max.
Now, Kenda’s entering the next phase of his career as an author of hard-boiled detective fictional thrillers inspired by his career with his new book, First Do No Harm.
TSM: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your writing, and First Do No Harm?
JK: My name is Joe Kenda, and I was a policeman for 23 years out of Colorado Springs, Colorado. Almost twenty years of that, I investigated homicide. In that time, I investigated 387 murders. Of that, I solved 356. 30 went unsolved, leaving a solution rate of 92%. The 2024 average is pretty much consistent, and the average rate of solution is 52%, so I was quite a bit higher than that. I’m proud of my career. The result of that record-setting case rate produced the interest of a television network, Warner Brothers Discovery. They approached me about making a television show about my murder cases, titled Homicide Hunter, which lasted for 9 seasons and 144 episodes and played all over the world in a number of different languages. It’s still being played on repeat. It then produced a second program, Homicide Hunter: American Detective. Season 3 is currently playing on Investigation Discovery and on Max. I have finished filming season 4, which will be released in the future.
In addition to that, I’ve written books, [including] two nonfiction books. My first book was called I Will Find You. My tagline for the show was, “If you kill, I will find you.” So, I titled my first book after that. The second book was called Killer Triggers. I took 12 of my cases that had different motivations (because they all do). There is a ball of violence in all of us—what motivates a particular individual to set that ball into motion and make him kill somebody? What’s the trigger that moves that ball forward? I analyzed those 12 cases—actual cases, real people—who killed for 12 different reasons. I also read the audio version of both those books, which did very well in the marketplace because people like my voice for some odd reason.
Then, I decided to try fiction based on my own experience, my experience in homicide, how people kill, and why they kill. That first fiction book was called All Is Not Forgiven, which was about a guy who hires an assassin to kill his wife in order to get her money since she restricted his access to it.
The current book is First Do No Harm. Fentanyl is all the rage today, and it’s the worst thing to happen to the drug world since there’s been a drug world. Over the last two years, we’ve killed over 150,000 people with it. That’s an awful lot of people, and it continues to go on and on. The press and many people believe that fentanyl is something new—it isn’t new. It was something invented in the late 1960s as an intravenous anesthetic and it’s synthetic in nature. So you make it from common chemicals, and you don’t need complex components like you do to make heroin; you make this stuff cheaply. Some of the chemicals involved are the same chemicals involved in making ladies’ shampoo. The difference is how you combine them, and [they turn] into fentanyl, which is a hundred times more powerful than morphine and fifty times more powerful than heroin. The attraction to making it illegally is the cheap cost of making it, and the return is so great that the Mexican cartels have abandoned the production of heroin in exchange for fentanyl. So, if you were to make a pound of heroin, it would cost you $6,000 to buy the components, since they are all controlled substances. However, you can buy the chemicals necessary to make a pound of fentanyl through the U.S. Mail Service for $200. So, what would you rather do, spend 200 bucks or spend six grand? The result is that the profits are enormous. The difficulty is that it requires microscopic measurement for it to be useful as an anesthetic. As a microscopic measurement, they are mixing this up in laboratories in Mexico and taking a wild guess as to how much fentanyl they need to put in, resulting in people dropping dead the minute they try to ingest it.
So in the drug world, one of the things that is a problem—and the U.S. Medical Association admits this—is that 2.2% of anesthesiologists in the U.S. are addicted to narcotics. That’s a very small number. How do they come up with that number? They have no idea how many people are addicted to narcotics. They produced this small number to make it look better than it is. They don’t know. Nobody knows. They would like to know, and they would like to say that they know, but they don’t. So, if you’re an anesthesiologist, what do you have access to? All of the good stuff. So, you take some out, replace it with saline, and you’ve got your own supply for free. Then the patient suffers from pain, and you say, “Well, the patient is sensitive to pain.” No, he’s not; he was given a weakened anesthetic.
So, therein lies what I’m talking about in this book, which is about a guy who is blessed with a certain moral flexibility. He’s an anesthesiologist and also a drug addict. In the same manner as Breaking Bad, here’s a guy who decides to make his own drug supply. If the hospital catches him, he draws the attention of his competitors. Now, if the police pay attention to you, all they will do is arrest you. If you get the attention of the cartels, they’re gonna kill you and your bloodline without thinking about it twice. That’s how it works.
TSM: When you were speaking, you mentioned triggers, whether it’s triggers for violence, crime, or things of that nature. Where do the triggers for your ideas come from? On the same line of thought, where does the line between fact and fiction come into your work?
JK: It doesn’t come in at all. The only [fictions] involved are the names, so I don’t get sued. I changed all the names to protect the guilty, so they say. It’s all my experience; I’ve been involved in a hell of a lot of things. I’ve attended more than five hundred autopsies, where they turn a human body into a pile of garbage in 20 minutes flat. It’s not very scientific. Anyways, it’s about the facts.
TSM: Homicide Hunter did not cover all of the cases you solved. Why is that?
JK: I had my own rules. The only way I agreed to the television show was if they agreed to two things. No Hollywood crap—no car chases, gun battles, and girls with spray-on dresses and guns bigger than they are. None of that. The other thing was that there were certain cases that I wouldn’t present. I won’t do children and babies, I won’t do profoundly disgusting cases. I also won’t do something where we have an issue where the jury, upon hearing what the victim did for a living, wants to dig up the victim so they can kill them again. If the victim was an unacceptable person, that doesn’t matter to the police. No one has the right to play God. So, we would investigate cases involving reprehensible individuals. Nonetheless, somebody killed someone. There is no point in putting those cases on television because no one would watch.
The other problem is that there are some cases that solve themselves. In homicide, it’s referred to as a “grounder.” If you hit a ground ball to shortstop, they’ll get you out at first. You came, you saw, you arrested. There is no story. I eliminated a bunch of cases based on that. I did a whole bunch of other ones that I thought would be acceptable, interesting, and complicated, and show how you go from a shadow in the night to a first, middle, and last name.
TSM: How did witnessing these real-life cases, these real-life stories, unfold assist you in the transition to writing narratives? What is that parallel?
JK: What happens is that you start to write something and then throw it away six times. Then, you come back the seventh time and realize that it’s actually pretty good. You frame the story in the sense of, “What would happen in the real world? If this was a real case, what would happen?” You begin with that premise and ask, “How is this gonna go?” Well, it’s gonna go like how all real cases are gonna go. You have a number of different suspects: some look good, some bad, some look good for a while… back and forth. So you can employ that in the writing to paint a picture of a guy that looks like the key element. Then, you discover that he’s got nothing to do with it, which happens all the time. You cannot jump to conclusions, you have to go with the facts. The facts drive the theory; the theory does not drive the facts. Some people make that mistake—they make a decision based on what they think happened, and they try to make everything fit their theory. It doesn’t work that way. You don’t know what happened, you weren’t there. You came in after the fact.
It’s easy for me since I did it for a living. I don’t have to sit there and wonder what it’s like to see a dead body. I’ve seen a lot of dead people. In Colorado, the law is that if you die outside the presence of a doctor or a custodial medical environment, the police are summoned to determine method and manner. Was it an accident? A health situation? Natural causes? Suicide/homicide? [Those] were the four types of death for years, but in the 1980s, because of drugs, we had to bring in a fifth cause of death: accidental drug involved, which is when someone overdoses, not to kill themselves, but by mistake. Except the result is the same: death. So, that became a fifth cause of death.
That’s what the police do. I’ve looked at dead people five or six times a day, every day. Once in a while, it was a homicide. Sometimes it was posed as a suicide, but it was a homicide. You see, it goes back and forth, and you see a lot of different aspects of human nature. That’s what is helpful in trying to write about it. The first step is to realize that humans are capable of anything. You often hear people say that there is good in everyone. I disagree. Not everyone. Most, yes. But there are no hard facts in human behavior, no absolutes.
TSM: Are there any books that get the process for solving these cases right?
JK: Not any that I’ve seen, not any that I’ve read. Now, I tend not to read those things since I did it for a living. You wouldn’t read a book about a guy who works for a magazine, because that’s what you do. I read a lot of history pieces. I’m a fan of history, and I read a lot of that, especially about cultures, Western Europe, and the eighteenth century.
On occasion, someone will hand me a book and say, “Read this.” I go, “What’s it about?” “It’s about a murder.” “Oh, okay, really?” You read it, and you would think that, at least, the author would inquire of someone who is familiar with firearms before they name a firearm that didn’t exist in the time period this book was supposed to be about. Or, they might name a firearm that never existed. I remember one murder book where someone wrote a book about a serial killer who needed the appropriate tools to kill people… In the first couple of chapters, they mentioned that this guy used a 38-caliber shotgun. I thought, “Well that should be easy to find because there is no such thing.” So, just look for the guy that has this make-believe shotgun, and that’s that. It was absolutely stupid. You can’t make a phone call to a gun store? You can’t look up something—anything—that tells you about guns? I mean, I was concerned when I was writing this thing. I live on 22 acres with hundred-foot-tall trees; I’m not a big fan of hammocks. And I would be surprised if there was a DEA agent in a bear suit by the woods because of the research I’m doing about fentanyl. That didn’t happen. People don’t work on their own craft, and that’s really sad. You should at least have the sense that if you want to make this real, at least try to make it real. Do something simple, like finding out about a gun, or a knife, or whatever. And they don’t even do that. It’s disappointing.
TSM: Do you use writing as a form of therapy or more as a digestive tool to help you understand the experiences you went through?
JK: What I used it for was therapy. Not to try and understand, because I gave up trying to understand it a long time ago. You’re not gonna understand anybody; the human mind is a complicated piece of machinery. What I did was try to release some of the things I never talked about with my wife. You come home from work, and she asks “How was your day?” “Well, today I watched an eight-month-old baby get beaten to death with a ball bat.” You’re not gonna talk about that. You’re gonna say, “Today was quiet.” And then you want to try and swallow all that, and after so many years you can’t swallow any more. So I used Homicide Hunter as therapy, and I used the writing as therapy and to release some of my demons. Not all, but some. That’s why. It makes me feel better.
TSM: With so many different chapters of your career, what’s next for you? What can we expect?
JK: Well, I have a few things going on. I’ve got a proposal to do another book with a publisher. And then we’ll see, you know. We’re still working on television, so we’ve still got that going on. It’ll carry on from here at this point. It is amazing that people find this so interesting, but it’s human nature. I think people tire of fiction. They do. They want to read something, hear something that actually existed. The people in the cases that I present in Homicide Hunter are people you can identify with. It’s not some guy in a $6,000 suit and a private jet who has minions in $2,000 suits who work for him, or the professional criminals in the movie world. This is a guy who works at UPS or a grocery store where you work that is involved in this. Then you think, “Geez, I could have known that guy.” Yeah, no kidding. That’s part of the attraction to it, I believe.
TSM: Thank you so much for these really fascinating answers. This conversation was so enlightening for me. I really appreciate you taking the time.
JK: You’re welcome! It’s a part of life that no one gets to see. And it’s just as well that they don’t because they’ll discover a couple of things. Life is random. No one likes to think about that because it’s scary. Don’t worry about the bullet that has your name on it; worry about the one that says, “To whom it may concern.”
For more interviews from the Strand Magazine, click here: https://www.mysterycenter.com/category/interviews/
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