About
San Diego newsrooms
Cathy Scott was born in San Diego. Her first full-time newspaper job, in 1987, was at Beach & Bay Press. She went on to the La Jolla Light and The Vista Press and wrote for the Associated Press and The San Diego Union-Tribune. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Redlands in 1990.
The Las Vegas crime beat
In 1993 she joined the Las Vegas Sun as a crime beat reporter and stayed until 1998. She was the paper's police reporter when Tupac Shakur was shot in Las Vegas in 1996, and her book on the case came out the next year. In January 1997 she was at the scene of the killing of mobster Herbert “Fat Herbie” Blitzstein. Assignments on crime and the military also took her to Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Panama.
From newspapers to books
After the Sun she freelanced for The New York Times and Reuters and wrote true crime books and biographies, among them The Murder of Biggie Smalls and Murder of a Mafia Daughter, about the unsolved killing of Susan Berman. For five years, until September 2005, she taught journalism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. That month she went to New Orleans to cover the animal rescue after Hurricane Katrina, which became the book Pawprints of Katrina.
Crime, She Writes
In 2012 and 2013 she wrote the blog Crime, She Writes, subtitled “author . journalist . blogger”. She wrote about cold cases such as the murder of Susan Berman, the Tupac Shakur case, Las Vegas crime and Nevada's wild horses. “Even though I now write fulltime as an author, I’m still a journo with ink in my blood,” she wrote in 2012.
Today
She writes on crime for Psychology Today and has appeared on Dateline NBC, the Today Show and “The First 48.” Her latest book, First Lady of Murder, a biography of the true crime author Ann Rule, came out from WildBlue Press in 2026.
Photos
Author photo