Citizen Jane (book)
1999 non-fiction work by James Dalessandro
Citizen Jane is a 1999 true crime non-fiction book by James Dalessandro about the real-life efforts of a woman to track down the con artist who murdered her aunt.
In 2009, the book was adapted into a Hallmark Channel film starring Ally Sheedy, Meat Loaf, Sean Patrick Flanery, and Nia Peeples.
Plot summary
Jane Alexander was a sheltered, attractive widow living with her large, close-knit family in her small hometown of Truckee, California. For six years, she had been living with Tom O'Donnell, her charismatic and handsome boyfriend. He had used wit, charm, and tales of adventure to borrow money for extensive home business operations and investing.
Gertrude McCabe, her favorite 88-year-old aunt, was gruesomely murdered in San Jose in 1983, a case that baffled San Jose PD. A break came from newly assigned police detective Jack Morris, whose investigative genius would soon solve the case. It was a difficult case to crack, but the motive was clearly something personal. McCabe was bludgeoned, choked with a bicycle lock, stabbed over two dozen times in her neck and back with a knife. Morris soon convinced Alexander that the killer was her boyfriend, and after O'Donnell disappeared with over $10,000 of her money and left her near bankruptcy, Alexander embarked on an epic journey to track down and outsmart the wily con artist. After 13 years of collecting evidence, Alexander and Morris managed to convict O'Donnell of first degree murder.
“Citizen Jane (book)” enters the record as 1999 non-fiction work by James Dalessandro. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Citizen, Jane and book can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3201830. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2009 and 1983.
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This entry incorporates text from “Citizen Jane (book)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.