Dani Amore: On January 7, 2012, I was back in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, where I had once lived years ago. The occasion was a long holiday break visiting friends, one of whom had invited me to a party to watch the Lions (or the Lie-Downs as the locals call them) take on the New Orleans Saints in an NFL Wild Card playoff game.
With only a few friends at the party, I was introduced to a lot of people I had never met before.
One of them was a woman named Jane Bashara. A friend of mine was talking to her, and my friend waved me over, introduced us, and the three of us had a brief chat. Jane talked a lot about being a recent empty nester, with her youngest child now off to college. I remember thinking how tired the woman looked. Dark circles under eyes, sagging shoulders, her skin somewhat sallow. She had the look of a tired Mom who had just finished a major life milestone: getting her kids off to college, and was now, perhaps, facing the next chapter of her life.
There was a man sitting behind Jane. He caught my eye because of how unusual he looked. He was a big man, stuffed into light blue polyester pants, a white polyester shirt with blue flowers, and a white belt. And I say stuffed because both his pants and his shirt looked at least one size too small – and with a fairly sizeable paunch, the look was not flattering. He also had substantial mutton chop sideburns. All I could think was that he looked bizarre, like Randy Quaid’s character in the movie “Christmas Vacation.” He was in charge of the betting “squares” for the game. He had his sheet of paper in one hand, and a wad of cash in the other. At one point, while we were talking to Jane, he got up and walked past the three of us without a glance.
After we had finished talking to Jane and continued circulating around the party, I asked my friend, “Who is that strange-looking man?”
The reply: “That’s Bob Bashara. Jane’s husband.”
Two and a half weeks later, Jane’s body was found in the back of her SUV, parked in an alley in Detroit. She had been strangled to death.
The greater Detroit area is still a very divided community, so naturally the first reports suggested Jane had been abducted leaving work downtown. There were the usual hysterical calls to bring in the National Guard, that the city of Detroit was out of control with violence.
But a few facts immediately came to my mind. A woman is the most vulnerable to violence, especially domestic, at key life moments. For instance, when she becomes pregnant. Or threatens to leave a relationship. Or, in the back of my mind, when the last child leaves for college and one of the spouses decides it’s time to move on.
I couldn’t help but remember my initial impression of Jane’s husband. And when the subsequent unfolding of Jane’s case occurred, I wasn’t all that shocked.
It turned out to the kind of sordid story you would expect in a hardboiled crime novel. In a nutshell, it appears that “Big Bob” hired a man to kill Jane so that he could collect the insurance money and buy a house for himself and his girlfriend, a woman he engaged in S & M with in a “sex dungeon” in the basement of a bar he owned called The Hard Luck Lounge. Reportedly, Bob and his girlfriend had found a third woman, nicknamed “Obedient Slave” who was going to move from Portland to join them in the new house they would buy with Jane’s insurance money.
However, the developmentally disabled hit man turned himself in and Bashara then tried to have the hit man killed. While the case against Bashara for Jane’s murder is still being built, the second murder conspiracy was apparently pretty clear as conversations in which Bashara discussed having the hit man killed were secretly recorded. He just pled guilty to that charge. You can read the latest on the case here:
http://bit.ly/P77vTGFor me, as a crime novelist, the case was especially disturbing. As someone who regularly contemplates crime and plans fictional homicides, it was deeply unsettling to come face-to-face with such a horrible crime. It’s a reminder of why I don’t often read true crime books and prefer fiction. In fact, one of the reasons many people read crime fiction is to ultimately see good triumph over evil.
In the case of Jane Bashara, I can only hope that justice will ultimately be served.
Dani Amore is a novelist living and writing in Los Angeles, California. In addition to Murder With Sarcastic Intent, Dani is also the author of The Killing League, Dead Wood, and Death by Sarcasm, among others. You can catch up with Dani on her blog, Deadly Sarcasm, as well as on Twitter.
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Justice is on Her way! I hear Her, can you? 
Everyday, at some point, for a split second, I still go to my phone to text or call you. I will never stop missing you, Jane. I love you.
