Elizabeth Hatcher True is a retired Computer Programmer/Analyst. She graduated from A.C. Flora High School in Columbia, South Carolina. After spending two years at the University of North Carolina – Greensboro, she transferred to the University of South Carolina where she graduated in 1972 with a B.S. in Mathematics.

How, you might ask, did she go from Computer Programming to writing books? Well … that’s a long story. In a nutshell, she was editor-in-chief of the high school newspaper and on the yearbook staff. She enjoyed the creativity of writing and programming. Though she had planned to become a mathematics teacher, a tutoring experience prompted her to seek a different vocation. So, bingo – Computer Programming. She began her career typing her programs on keypunch machines and feeding the cards into an IBM computer that filled an enormous climate-controlled room. Thirty years later, she ended her career as a freelance programmer in Minneapolis, Minnesota developing systems for networked PC’s.

Upon retirement, a family event exposed the vulnerabilities of senior citizens – over-medication, predatory conservatorships and unscrupulous lawyers. Suddenly, she had a story to tell. So, she returned to her high school interests. Her passion for South Carolina’s colorful history, led her to create a detective who used her knowledge of the past to solve the crimes of today. She joined writers’ groups, went to writing clinics and completed two mysteries, Where Law Ends and Tyranny Begins.

Always intrigued by her father’s family and the secrets that they hid, she next decided to research their past and begin a third book. When she started on the journey to tell the story, she had a vague idea of what lay ahead. But what she learned became far more compelling than what she had imagined. Her third, yet unpublished, book Distortion: A True Family Portrait, is a narrative nonfiction story of an ordinary family. No one was famous. They were not spies or heroes or people of extraordinary talent. All were simply living their lives as best they could. But, without a doubt, it is a universal story – one that plays out every day in households around the world.
 
She says that her three greatest accomplishments are her two sons and her 50-year marriage to the man she met at a keypunch machine.