Claudia Rowe is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist and author of THE SPIDER AND THE FLY: A Reporter, a Serial Killer and the Meaning of Murder. It focuses on her five-year correspondence with a man who murdered eight women, exploring questions about cruelty, denial and her own life-changing obsession with the case.

Claudia’s writing has been published in The New York Times, Mother Jones, Women’s Day, the Huffington Post and The Stranger, among other magazines and newspapers. She currently covers education as a staff reporter at The Seattle Times.

Claudia’s work covering race, class and juvenile justice, including an award-winning series on violent youth gangs, is driven by an effort to understand motivation, especially that which appears most extreme. She is a frequent radio guest and public speaker on journalism, ethics and the delicate tension between subject and interviewer.

Books by Claudia Rowe

The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder

by Claudia Rowe - Memoir, Nonfiction, True Crime

In September 1998, young reporter Claudia Rowe was working as a stringer for the New York Times in Poughkeepsie, New York, when local police discovered the bodies of eight women stashed in the attic and basement of the small colonial home that 27-year-old Kendall Francois shared with his parents and sister. Rowe became consumed with the desire to understand just how a man could abduct and strangle eight women --- and how a family could live for two years, seemingly unaware, in a house with the victims’ rotting corpses. Reaching out after Francois was arrested, Rowe and the serial killer began a dizzying four-year conversation about cruelty, compassion and control.