Whodunit? Find Out at the First Hamptons Mystery and Crime Festival

Armchair detectives, this one’s for you.

The inaugural Hamptons Mystery and Crime Festival — also known as the Hamptons Whodunit — is poised to take over downtown East Hampton Village later this month and if circumstantial evidence is any gauge, it could be the start of something with legs.

Attendees will have the opportunity to hear from upward of 46 authors — including Michael Connelly — film and television creators, true crime experts, law enforcement experts and journalists at dozens of speaking events and book signings downtown from Thursday, April 13 through April 16. In between the talks, the festival will offer numerous ticketed and free activities throughout the village highlighted by a forensics role-playing challenge that will have participants solving a fictional crime.

“Almost everyone we’ve invited to participate has said yes and the ones who could not said they want to be here next year,” said Village Trustee and festival co-founder Carrie Doyle. “I mean, there’s such a thirst for true crime and murder mystery programming … the genre has just exploded, and we are so excited to tap into that for the village.”

A New York Times bestselling author herself, Doyle said the idea for the festival came to her while she was campaigning for the Village Board last summer and voters repeatedly asked her what she would do to increase all-season activities for year-round residents. After discussing it with a few others, including Pam Mallory and co-founders Jackie Dunphy, Lisa Larsen and Mayor Jerry Larsen, the idea for the Hamptons Whodunit began to take shape.

“At the core of it is the desire we all have to bring more people into East Hampton Village,” Doyle said. “Once we started with the idea it just took off.”

One of the featured events expected to draw a crowd is a conversation with the hugely popular author Michael Connelly, and a book signing to boot. Connelly is a former journalist turned novelist and author of the Bosch series and Lincoln Lawyer series — both of which have been adapted for film and television. He will speak with the festival’s Founding Honorary Co-Chair Alafair Burke at East Hampton High School on Saturday night, April 15.
Burke is also a bestselling author and President of the Mystery Writers of America. She is the co-author of the “Under Suspicion” with Mary Higgins Clark.

The weekend itinerary is laden with author talks, cold case discussions and true crime conversations, but there’s a lot more planned than speakers. Organizers took great pains to ensure there would be several activities offered and perhaps none more active than the “Who Killed the Mayor Crime Scene Challenge,” a kind of mashup of a murder mystery and an escape room. It is being produced by Forensics World, a Long Island-based company that creates simulated crime scenes featuring physical evidence for educational and entertainment events.

Forensics World CEO Dave Tricamo will be on hand and said attendees should look forward what his team is bringing to the festival.

“If you come to this, expect to be challenged, have fun and learn something,” he said during a recent interview, fresh off an 8-hour planning session for the East Hampton event.

Participants will be taken through a 90-minute role-playing game of sorts, during which they will get a briefing in a squad room, visit the fictitious crime scene, collect evidence, analyze that evidence, read case files, identify a suspect and draft an arrest warrant. Tricamo, a former police detective, said he and his team of law enforcement and forensic science experts, have spent months writing the “script” for the event to ensure “it flows just right” for the attendees.

“They’re going to go through a complicated, robust experience here and find out it’s not as easy as it looks. There’s going to be some real education there,” he said. “We’re not just throwing around fingerprint powder.”

Tricamo, who has visited East Hampton many times, said he thinks the festival has the potential to really take off given the seemingly endless public thirst for all things true crime.

“It’s a cottage industry, on so many levels really,” he said. And the Who Killed the Mayor event is a chance for those amateur detectives to “see how they do under the (crime scene) tape.”

In addition to the forensics exercise, the Hamptons Whodunit invites the public to the free Goody Garlick Tour, a graveyard gathering hosted by Town Crier Hugh King in the cemetery on James Lane. The tour will be offered all three evenings. For even more action, the festival is hosting two themed escape room challenges at the East Hampton Library. One is based on the Netflix phenomenon “Stranger Things,” the other on Plum Island Animal Disease Center.

Not to be outdone, Mayor Larsen, who is also the former police chief, will take a group of the curious on a “Hamptons True Crime Bus Tour” on Saturday.

Some of the events and panel discussions are ticketed, others open to the public. As of this writing, the cocktail party and bus tour have already sold out and 200 event tickets have been sold overall, with the number steadily climbing, Doyle said. As of press time, most of the author events were expected to take place at the Thomas Moran house. Ticket and location information is available, and regularly updated, on the festival’s website hamptonswhodunit.com.

The festivities kick off, as all respectable East End events do, with a cocktail party. This one is expected to include most, if not all, of the scheduled special guests and panelists, moderators and dozens of authors, filmmakers and true crime experts milling about the Maidstone Club from 6 to 8 p.m. on Thursday, April 13.

Friday will feature a full day of panel discussions and one-on-one conversations with an array of 21 authors of both fiction and nonfiction mystery and true crime works, including New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jewell, who wrote the novels “The Family Upstairs,” “Then She Was Gone,” and “Invisible Girl.” Jewell will sit with moderator Abby Endler for a program called “Dark Secrets, Twisted Families.”

Endler is a senior publicist for Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House and the creator of the crime fiction Instagram account Crime by the Book. She will also be moderating four panel discussions throughout the weekend.

Two of the festival’s guests of honor will appear in back-to-back conversations about their work Friday afternoon, starting with internationally acclaimed author Anthony Horowitz and honorary co-chair of the event and author AJ Finn.

Horowitz is a well-known novelist who was been commissioned to write two new Sherlock Holmes novels and three new stories for James Bond by the Ian Fleming Estate, and has written numerous fiction series, standalone murder mysteries and television series in the U.K. He will talk about his work with Finn, whose “The Woman in the Window” novel sold millions and was turned into a 2020 feature film of the same name starring Amy Adams, Julianne Moore and Gary Oldman.

The last of the discussions held Friday, “My Sister Is No Killer: A True Story of Justice,” will feature Betty Frizzell, a former police chief from Missouri whose entire career has involved law enforcement and criminal justice reform. Her personal life, too, was impacted by crime when her sister was convicted of murdering her husband in 2013. The family tragedy inspired Frizzell to write “If You Can’t Quit Cryin’ You Can’t Come Here No More,” a memoir that was later the basis of an episode of the Netflix series “I Am a Killer.”

Frizzell will sit down with another New York Times bestselling author, Dave Wedge, who has penned six acclaimed true crime books on such infamous cases as the Boston bombers, Whitey Bulger and the murder of John Lennon. His “Boston Strong: A City’s Triumph Over Tragedy,” co-written with Casey Sherman, was adapted to the film “Patriots Day.”

Saturday’s lineup is slated to include nine more speaker and author sessions on topics including organized crime. Former New York City Police Chief Ray Kelly and attorney David Berg will talk with CBS News stalwart Steve Kroft about their experiences. Berg is a well-known defense attorney who successfully argued a case before the Supreme Court and later participated in litigation against then President Donald Trump related to the 2020 elections. In 2013, he wrote “Run Brother, Run: A Memoir About a Murder in My Family,” which detailed his brother’s death and the case against the man who was accused of — and acquitted of — killing him, infamous Texas hitman Charles Harrelson.

The conversations and panel discussions continue Sunday with five sessions, including a talk about the 2001 murder of Ted Ammon in his East Hampton Village home. The lead prosecutor in the case against convicted killer Daniel Pelosi, Janet Albertson, will discuss the case with local writers Dan Rattiner and Steven Gaines. Later in the day, Berg will lead a talk “The Elusive Long Island Serial Killer on Gilgo Beach,” with former New York City Police Department cold case investigator Joseph Giacalone and documentary filmmaker Joshua Zeman.

Optimistic and excited, co-founder Doyle said she hopes the public embraces the festival and sees its potential.

“This is the only event of this kind in the Northeast, at all. We have so many incredible authors — 10 on the bestsellers list this year alone,” Doyle said. “This is the year you want to come and have this intimate experience because I think this could become the next Hamptons (International) Film Festival.”