The Middle Eastern folk tale of Scheherazade unspools in the opening pages of “Some Girls,” Jillian Lauren’s 2010 New York Times bestselling memoir recounting her experiences as a sex worker in the harem of the Sultan of Brunei.
More than a decade after that book was published, Lauren herself became a kind of Scheherazade in “Behold the Monster: Confronting America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer." But instead of spinning tales to keep a murderous king from spilling the blood of innocent women, she lured another murderous despot — Sam Little, who confessed to murdering 93 women — into telling the stories of those he had already killed, in an effort to save their memory from police cold case files.
By her account, that effort — which over the course of almost five years took her everywhere from maximum security prisons to courthouses and the homes of victims’ bereaved relatives — just about broke her.
