Sue Russell is an award-winning journalist and author based in California. She has written over 1,500 articles for publications including the Washington Post, New Scientist, Salon.com, PSmag.com, Miller-McCune.com, American Legion, Alternet.org, GE’s Healthymagination.com, Healthline.com, and the UK’s Independent, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Express, and Sunday Times. A former Contributing Editor to Success Magazine, Hong Kong Tatler and Asia Tatler magazines, her work also has appeared in international publications like Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and Irish Tatler.
Russell writes about crime, criminal justice, forensic science, wrongful convictions, animal rights research and law, missing persons, female gangs, health and medicine, social and women’s issues. She has covered bias and fingerprints, eyewitness identifications, false confessions, flawed arson investigations, conviction integrity units, wildfire research, and violent crimes against police, plus child food allergies, migraine, biofeedback, influenza, diabetes, GERD and IBS, geographical profiling of infections.
Her fact crime book Lethal Intent, a “true crime classic,” is a biography of executed serial killer Aileen Wuornos who shot seven men to death in Florida and was executed in 2002. It was reissued fully updated in paperback and eBook in December 2013. When 2014’s Serial Podcast phenomenon swept the US, Lethal Intent was on Business Insider’s list, “11 True Crime Books You Should Read If You’re Obsessed with Serial,” alongside Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter. Former FBI agent, pioneering profiler and best-selling author, John Douglas, called Lethal Intent “Shocking, sad, revealing and deeply researched…”
Along with illustrator/co-author Elizabeth Williams, Russell wrote The Illustrated Courtroom: 50 Years of Court Art (CUNY Journalism Press, 2014.) It was named to Kirkus Reviews’ “Best Books of 2014” and was a Times Literary Supplement pick for “Books of the Year 2014.” With iconic artwork from five award-winning court artists, it takes readers into trials like those of Jack Ruby, the Black Panthers, Charles Manson, Patty Hearst and Michael Jackson.
Russell has been a guest on television and radio shows both sides of the Atlantic — and beyond. She has appeared on the A&E channel’s Biography and Oxygen Channel's Notorious, Investigation Discovery Channel’s Deadly Women, Jane Velez-Mitchell’s Issues, CNN and HLN broadcasts, and on Britain’s This Morning and Good Morning Australia.
BOOKS: Lethal Intent, Pinnacle Books USA. Book of the Month Club selection. (Published in the UK and Australia as Damsel of Death.) The Illustrated Courtroom: 50+ Years of Court Art (co-author) CUNY Journalism Press 2014, Redwood Publishing LLC 2022. How to Buy & Sell (just about) Everything (contributor) Free Press, USA. Star Mothers: The Moms Behind the Celebrities, Simon & Schuster, USA, & St. Martin’s Press, USA (hardback & paperback.) (Co-authors: Cher’s mother & Phyllis Quinn.) Sensual Beauty: co-author with Britt Ekland. Sidgwick & Jackson, U.K., Merrimack, USA (hardback & paperback.) Russell also edits and ghostwrites books for others.
Member: Authors Guild, IRE (Investigative Reporters & Editors).
Need help with your book? Contact Sue about her Editing and Writing Services.
Sue’s Television and Radio Appearances
Look out for Sue on TV in the Biography program about Aileen Wuornos which can be seen on the A&E Channel and The Biography Channel. Sue appears throughout this compelling documentary and in other Wuornos documentaries.
Sue’s television appearances include the Investigation Discovery channel’s Deadly Womenseries, truTV’s Catherine Crier Live and CNNfn’s The Flipside.
