toledoblade.com --

The set is supposed to be a high-rollers' room in an Atlantic City casino. Actor Eric Roberts, playing the part of a casino pit boss, is keeping a close eye on a blackjack table.

From off to one side, a beautiful woman in a striking red dress approaches him. It's actress Anne Heche, who is portraying Roberts' love interest.

In the background, barely in the camera's frame, is a regular-looking guy who's pretending not to notice Roberts and Heche just a few feet from him. But he notices, all right. He's waiting to see what they do next, what they say.

He already knows, of course, and not just because he read the script. He wrote the book.

Paul Janczewski, a native of Toledo, is the co-author of a true-crime story titled Fatal Error. Published in early 2003, the book, which made the New York Times bestseller list, has been made into a television movie.

Renamed Fatal Desire - for legal reasons, Mr. Janczewski says - the movie was filmed last year in Nova Scotia, and is scheduled to premiere at 9 p.m. Monday on the Lifetime cable channel.

Mr. Janczewski, 57, is a graduate of Central Catholic High School and the University of Toledo, where he earned a bachelor's degree in journalism. He's worked at different newspapers and is a courts reporter for the Flint Journal, a daily paper in Flint, Mich., which is where he came across the case that inspired his book and the subsequent movie.

Anne Heche in Fatal Desire.

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In 2000, Mr. Janczewski covered a murder trial in which a local woman, Sharee Miller, was accused of orchestrating the murder of her husband, Bruce, who was shot to death in 1999.

Prosecutors alleged that Miller met a Kansas City man on the Internet and began an affair with him. Her lover was Jerry Cassaday, a divorced former cop with alcohol and drug problems who was working at a casino in Reno. She convinced Cassaday that she was stuck in an abusive marriage - which wasn't true, but he didn't know any better.

She eventually talked him into driving to Flint, where he killed her husband with a single blast of a shotgun.

After the murder, Cassaday went to Kansas City and waited, expecting that he and Miller would soon be together. But instead, she shut him out completely, refusing to respond to his e-mails and telephone calls. She even began seeing another man.

Finally, consumed with guilt and realizing that he'd been played for a fool, Cassaday killed himself in Kansas City. But he left behind plenty of evidence that tied Miller to the crime.

With the help of that evidence, much of it explicit e-mails that Cassaday had saved, Miller was convicted in 2000 of murder and conspiracy. She received an extended jail sentence, which she's serving at Scott Correctional Facility, a women's prison near Ann Arbor.

During the trial, Mr. Janczewski encountered a fellow courts reporter named Mark Morris from the Kansas City Star, who had been sent to Flint to cover the case because of its Kansas City connection. During breaks in the trial, the two reporters talked a lot about the case, agreeing that it would make a good book.

"It had everything," Mr. Janczewski recalled in a telephone interview last week. "It had sex, it had murder, it had suicide, it had deception, it had the Internet. All these ingredients, you mix them up and boom! Here comes a good book."

About a month after the trial concluded, Mr. Janczewski received a call from Mr. Morris, who asked him for some information on the case.

"He said he was going to write a book about it," Mr. Janczewski said. "And I said, 'Well, I'm going to write a book about it, too.' So we talked, and finally decided that combining our efforts for one book would be a lot stronger project than each of us working individually on it."

Mr. Morris took a leave of absence from his newspaper and went to Flint to work with Mr. Janczewski, who burned up much of his vacation time while the pair worked 15 and 16-hour days, interviewing dozens of people and going through countless evidence boxes.

"One good thing is that Sharee and Jerry spent so much time on the Internet that there were hundreds and hundreds of pages of e-mails between them," Mr. Janczewski said. "So we had a lot to work on. We had their own words."

When the paperback book Fatal Error came out in early 2003, it made it onto the New York Times bestseller list.

"It was in a category called Nonfiction Paperback, and they list 35 books in that category," Mr. Janczewski recalled, "and we were No. 30. It was there for one week, and one week only, but for the rest of our lives, we're New York Times bestselling authors."

After the book's publication, the case was featured on television several times, including spots on Inside Edition, American Justice, the Courtroom Television Network, and more. The book was shopped around to various film producers, and finally found a taker in Lifetime, a cable network owned jointly by Hearst and Disney whose programming is targeted primarily at women.

Before filming began last year, Mr. Janczewski and Mr. Morris asked the producers if they could go to Nova Scotia and watch their book being transformed into a movie.

"We told them we wouldn't get in the way, we wouldn't be pains-in-the-butt authors, we wouldn't second-guess anybody," Mr. Janczewski said. "Then we pushed the envelope a little bit more: 'How about if you use us as extras, you know?' How cool would that be? And they did!"

Which is how both Mr. Janczewski and Mr. Morris found themselves standing in the background in the casino scene with Roberts and Heche.

"There's Mark and I, holding pretend drinks with pretend ice cubes, pretend talking," Mr. Janczewski said. "They made me take my glasses off because of the glare. But he's the tall one, and I'm the shorter guy. Look for us."

The real names in the book were changed to avoid legal entanglements, Mr. Janczewski said, so Sharee Miller became Tanya Sullivan, her husband, Bruce, became Mark Sullivan, and Jerry Cassaday became Joe Donnelly.

Mr. Janczewski said he got a chuckle out of some of the characters' names chosen by the scriptwriter. "He names the victim Mark, after Mark Morris, my co-author, and one of the other characters, a casino dealer named Paula, is named after me," he said.

"So our names are not only in the opening credits, and then at the very end of the movie we're listed as technical advisers, and our faces are in the movie, but our names are actually used for characters. Even though mine was feminized, I'll forgive them for that."

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