Robins Island –A Key Location in my Thriller– Becomes a Real-Life Crime Scene

In my new thriller, Fool Her Once, Robins Island is a key location. The tear-shaped blob in the middle of Peconic Bay between the North and South Forks of Long Island becomes a crime scene about half-way through my novel. It’s where a body washes up on the rocks on the west side of the island.

It is also the location for the climax of my thriller in which my female protagonist, Jenna Sinclair, an investigative reporter, confronts the real antagonist of the story.

Imagine my surprise, then, when just this week Robins Island became a real-life crime scene with police descending on it in full force. Only a handful of local newspapers covered the story about poachers with  allegedly criminal intentions sneaking onto the private island .

For decades the island has been a quiet 435-acre jewel of a nature preserve of  woods, birds, albino deer and just one family living there. Occasionally. Earlier this year the New York Post tried to uncover some of its mystery.  But the island remains virtually inaccessible.

It belongs to billionaire hedge fund manager, Louis Bacon. He bought it in a bankruptcy court in 1993 for $11 million,  pledging to maintain it as a nature preserve.

Of course, because the island features prominently in Fool Her Once, I had to research it as closely as I could. Even regular readers of this blog probably won’t recall that I posted about that research back in August 2017. Joe and I chartered a motor boat and captain and asked him to motor around the island.

Below is my photo of Bacon’s  150-foot yacht, the Hyperion (which didn’t fit into the frame of my iPhone camera when we were upclose), moored just off the east coast of the island.

Robins Island Becomes Real Life Crime Scene

Until last week ( and until my thriller) the island was crime-free.

But last week police from Southold Township were summoned to Robins Island when an employee of Louis Bacon’s came upon two trespassers armed with hunting weapons. The employee found the two men after first discovering motion-sensitive cameras fixed to tree trunks throughout the preserve. The cameras were of the type that uploaded to an off-island source which last week remained unidentified.

According to the Southampton Press, “the poachers had stashed hundreds of pounds of provisions, camping gear and hunting equipment in the dense woods.” The equipment included two 45-pound barbell weights affixed to chains. A small boat and several latrines were also found in a remote area of the island.

A representative for Louis Bacon speculated that some of the cameras were so close to the Bacon residential compound on the island that it was also possible the family was being watched as part of a home invasion plan.

The two hunters were issued summonses for hunting without licenses and for trespassing.

“I Could Kill You”

The two men who were arrested on the island later accused the employee who found them of threatening their lives with a shotgun which he fired. The employee told police he fired the shotgun to alert other employees that he had found the trespassers.

But one of the trespassers told the police that the employee had said: “I’m going to kill you” and “I’m going to bury you on this island where no one will find you.”

Funny! (Not haha!)  That’s exactly what the antagonist in Fool Her Once thinks when he’s telling himself he’s not a psychopath. This is the paragraph from my novel:

“So, no he wasn’t a psychopath. A psychopath would have killed Jenna when he had the chance on Robins Island. Right there, he’d had the chance to kill her and bury her where her body might never have been found. The island was part nature preserve; her grave could have gone undisturbed forever.”

If you can’t wait to find out what end the antagonist planned for Jenna instead, you can be among the first to know on March 1, 2022 by preordering Fool Her Once  here and here.