MANSFIELD, Ohio – Most people are lucky enough to land one of their dream jobs. For Stacy Dittrich, she’s landed two.
By day, Dittrich works as a deputy with the Richland County Sheriff’s Office. By night, she enters an entirely different world as an author and law enforcement media consultant.
Dittrich is the author of the CeeCee Gallagher five-book thriller series about a female detective. She has also written two true-crime novels and a memoir about working as a female police officer.
Naturally, Dittrich’s books are largely inspired by her life, where she has been deeply immersed in law enforcement since birth. Dittrich’s father and three uncles began their respective careers as police officers in 1969 after returning from Vietnam.
Dittrich said she knew from a very early age that police work was something she wanted to do. The Lexington graduate frequently accompanied her father to work, and began investigating her own “crimes” as an 8-year-old kid with a hand-me-down kit of fingerprint powder, a microscope, and handcuffs.
“When I first started college I actually thought I was going to be an attorney,” Dittrich admitted. “But that didn’t appeal to me as much – I’d had the excitement and hands-on experience of being a police officer, so that’s where I decided to go.”
In addition, writing came naturally to Dittrich from a young age. She started reading at age 4, and from then on was rarely seen without a book. Coupled with a fascination for police work, Dittrich’s reading material naturally gravitated toward crime novels.
In 2004, after a particularly grueling day at work, the idea of writing her own novels came to Dittrich.
“I had a really interesting case on duty – it’s hard to say ‘mind-boggling’ in this line of work, but it truly was,” she remembers. “I mentioned the story to my husband and I thought, this is something you’d read in book. I said this would make a great story, and he said I should write it.”
She knew next to nothing about writing novels, so Dittrich sat down and began researching how to write a novel. By way of self teaching, she finished her first CeeCee Gallagher novel “Murder Mountain” in 11 months. After a month of sending the manuscript to a number of publishers, Dittrich was pleasantly surprised to receive several offers for publication — as well as representation.
With her first novel behind her, writing came much easier to Dittrich. While her first book was shipping to publishers, Dittrich wrote the second and third CeeCee Gallagher novels in nine weeks.
“I was a writing machine,” she said. “It was such a stress reliever from work to come home and blow up my keyboard on my computer.”
Dittrich’s writing career quickly took off as she wrote the final two novels in the CeeCee Gallagher series. She left the sheriff’s office for a few years to focus full-time on writing and media commitments, speaking as a “talking head” on shows such as “The Nancy Grace Show,” “The O’Reilly Factor,” “E! True Hollywood in Crime,” and hundreds of radio stations nationwide.
Later, Dittrich’s publisher suggested she start writing true-crime novels. Dittrich did write two true-crime books, “Murder Behind the Badge: True Stories of Cops Who Kill,” and “Searching for Sandra: The Truth Behind the Murder of Sandra Cantu – The Angel Who Captured America’s Heart.”
But her third true-crime book “Have You Seen Me?” a compilation of the nation’s most high profiled missing children’s cases in history, still sits as an unfinished manuscript on her shelf.
“I can’t do it anymore,” Dittrich said. “My home office felt like a tomb when I was writing true crime. My fiction series I hammered out, I enjoyed it, but true crime was like sitting and writing a 350-page police report.
“A lot of my friends are very well known true crime authors and I tip my hat to them, I don’t know how they do that. It’s very dull to me, but that could also be because of my career, I don’t find that exciting to write and I don’t read it anymore by any means. But I have to step out of my shoes and think back to where I loved true crime before I became a police officer.”
In 2002, Dittrich received the Victims of Crime Award from the state attorney general. In 2009, she earned a commendation from Ohio State Rep. Margaret Ann Ruhlfor her writing achievements.
These days, Dittrich is back to work with the Richland County Sheriff’s Office and spending less time writing and more time with her daughters, ages 13 and 19. Her 19-year-old daughter is currently in college to become a teacher; her 13-year-old is adamant about becoming a police officer, much to her mother’s dismay.
“Things were different when I started out as opposed to the way things are now in law enforcement. It’s not something I care to expose her to internally and externally,” Dittrich said. “I love my job and love what I do, it’s just not something I would care to have her do. But she’s very headstrong like me, and I guess if she pushes it at some point we’ll have to support her decision.”
However, Dittrich is not ready to put away her writer’s pen just yet. In fact, it was her daughter that inspired Dittrich to venture into an entirely different genre – horror.
“Without tipping my hat, there’s a place where I walk that’s an eerie, dark, chilling place with these creepy cabins, and I could never think what to do with that,” she said. “It was something my daughter said that I had a burst of a book that I haven’t had in years.”
Right now the book is still in the research phase, where Dittrich puts her detective skills to work and gathers as many facts as possible to make the story as realistic as possible. She said she also is working on character development, deciding whether to write the book from a first-person perspective similar to her CeeCee Gallagher novels, and writing chapter summaries.
“But with every chapter summary I’ve ever done, the published book has never started the chapter summary,” said Dittrich with a laugh. “Once I start writing it takes on a life of its own, and that’s what I love about writing.”
Though she’s somewhat worried about losing a portion of her audience with a move to a different genre, Dittrich is most excited about sparking her love of writing once again.
“Fans of my books are willing to give me a shot in a different genre, and I’m hoping I’m into something completely different that takes me away from all that,” she said. “I really am actually excited about it, and I haven’t been excited about a project in a long time.”
