Exploring Kentucky’s dorm room murder

Writer returns to his Southern roots to recount a crime

William Van Meter will never write a true crime book like “Bluegrass” (Free  Press, $24) again. Not on his life. Not if you begged.

“I really don’t want to do a book like this again at all,” Van Meter confesses a day before his book release party in which indie goddess Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power), a friend of his, will be making an appearance. “I kind of went crazy while I was doing it. I gained so much weight; it was unbelievable. It was like an Arby’s explosion.”

Admittedly, he chose some gritty material to cover — an account of the 2003 murder of Katie Autry, a young college student who was raped, stabbed, and set on fire in her Bowling Green, Ky., dorm room. “I saw the murder as this kind of decisive moment in the town’s history between B.C. and A.D.,” says Van Meter, who grew up in Bowling Green.  “This is the loss of innocence and this is the new world we’ve entered.”

More than the gruesome details of the crime, Van Meter wanted to emphasize the socio-economic subgroups that converged in the investigation, leading to a confrontation between two suspects from vastly different backgrounds.

“I see the three main players as being representative of Kentucky as a state of mind by being a place of contrasts,” says Van Meter. Having spent the last 15 years as a New Yorker, Van Meter returned to home to investigate how this heinous crime was emblematic of the metropolitan development of his once-rural hometown. Though he was met with door slamming and verbal beatings while trying to conduct interviews, his narrative style reads like a classic novel. There was so much rich material, he was careful to avoid any embellishments.

“I read ‘In Cold Blood’ [by Truman Capote] and he made up so much of it — but I don’t buy that he has such a complete, perfect memory. That’s such a crock of s---.”