Nonfiction
Axton Betz-Hamilton
Axton Betz-Hamilton is the author of The Less People Know About Us: A Mystery of Betrayal, Family Secrets, and Stolen Identity, which received the 2020 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. A Portland, Indiana native, she graduated from Jay County High School, where she was a member of the Academic and Speech Teams. She was also a 10-year member of Jay County 4-H. Even though she is a native of Portland, she spent much of her free time as a child in Winchester, Indiana, skating at the Starlite Skating Center and making holiday fruit baskets at the Winchester Marsh store.
Betz-Hamilton earned a B.S. in agricultural economics and an M.S. in consumer sciences and retailing, both from Purdue University. She also earned a Ph.D. in human development and family studies from Iowa State University and a graduate certificate in family financial planning from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Currently, she is an assistant professor of consumer affairs at South Dakota State University. She and her husband, Robert, have six cats.
2020 Nonfiction Winner: The Less People Know About Us: A Mystery of Betrayal, Family Secrets, and Stolen Identity
In this powerful true crime memoir, an award-winning identity theft expert tells the shocking story of the duplicity and betrayal that inspired her career and nearly destroyed her family.
Axton Betz-Hamilton grew up in small-town Indiana in the early ’90s. When she was 11 years old, her parents both had their identities stolen. Their credit ratings were ruined, and they were constantly fighting over money. This was before the age of the Internet, when identity theft became more commonplace, so authorities and banks were clueless and reluctant to help Axton’s parents. Axton’s family changed all of their personal information and moved to different addresses, but the identity thief followed them wherever they went. Convinced that the thief had to be someone they knew, Axton and her parents completely cut off the outside world, isolating themselves from friends and family. Axton learned not to let anyone into the house without explicit permission, and once went as far as chasing a plumber off their property with a knife.
As a result, Axton spent her formative years crippled by anxiety, quarantined behind the closed curtains in her childhood home. She began starving herself at a young age in an effort to blend in–her appearance could be nothing short of perfect or she would be scolded by her mother, who had become paranoid and consumed by how others perceived the family. Years later, her parents’ marriage still shaken from the theft, Axton discovered that she, too, had fallen prey to the identity thief, but by the time she realized, she was already thousands of dollars in debt and her credit was ruined. The Less People Know About Us is Axton’s attempt to untangle an intricate web of lies, and to understand why and how a loved one could have inflicted such pain. Axton will present a candid, shocking, and redemptive story and reveal her courageous effort to grapple with someone close that broke the unwritten rules of love, protection, and family.
