MARBLEHEAD — Phyllis Karas spent decades as a journalist investigating crimes, interviewing killers, and writing about the aftermath of violence. But the story she struggled the longest to tell was the one that had been sitting inside her own family for generations.

“I just had to stop and say, ‘Okay, stop covering it up, stop writing other people’s stories and get down and write your own family’s,’” Karas said. “It was time.”

That decision led the longtime Marblehead resident and award-winning journalist to write Curse of the Blumenthals, an extensively researched account of her family’s history, beginning with their immigration from Eastern Europe and following two tragedies that would shape generations of descendants.

The first came on May 14, 1935, when a drunk driver crashed into a car carrying six members of the Blumenthal family, including three children. The crash killed Karas’ grandmother, uncle, and cousins and became a defining event that relatives simply referred to as “the accident.”

“My mother would always date things: ‘That happened a year before the accident,’ or, ‘That happened 10 years after the accident,’” Karas said. “It was such a time setter, yet I knew so little about it.”

For years, Karas knew the tragedy existed but did not understand its full scope. While researching the book, she uncovered newspaper coverage, photographs, and details that had never been discussed openly within the family.

“People didn’t talk in those days. They didn’t talk about painful things,” she said. “We all knew so little.”

The second tragedy came nearly two decades later. Ronnie Blumenthal, the son of Karas’ uncle Barney, was born months after the 1935 crash and was viewed by relatives as a symbol of hope after enormous loss. In 1954, at 18 years old, he pleaded guilty to the murder of his father’s seamstress, who was allegedly having an affair with his father. The crime became another painful chapter in the family’s history, known simply as “the incident.”

Karas said her own experiences covering crime made it impossible to ignore the similarities between the cases she was writing about professionally and the trauma her family had carried privately.

“As I was writing these stories and hearing about the jail sentences that these men received, the murders and all the different painful aspects of their past, it began to sound slightly familiar to me,” she said. “I realized I was writing these stories, and so much of it was true in my own life.”

The project took Karas nearly four years to complete and required extensive archival research. 

She searched decades-old newspaper records, tracked down photographs, and relied on conversations with cousins to piece together memories that had been fragmented by time.

“There were many sleepless nights where I’d find a little fact and then go over it with my cousins,” she said. “We constantly said, ‘Do you remember this? Did you hear this?’”

The work also brought Karas back to the kind of reporting that defined her career. A former journalism professor at Boston University, she has written for publications including the Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, Vogue, and the Boston Herald, and co-authored the New York Times bestseller Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger’s Irish Mob.

Earlier in her career, she also worked as a reporter for The Daily Item, where she said she developed skills that shaped the rest of her work. While looking through old papers, she rediscovered that she won a first-place feature writing award from the newspaper in 1979 for a three-part series on teenage pregnancy.

“I really loved writing for The Item,” Karas said. “I had some fabulous experiences, and I credited a lot with my future writing and my career. I learned so much.”

Although the book examines some of the darkest moments in her family’s history, Karas said one of the most meaningful parts of writing it was ensuring the people lost in the 1935 crash were remembered.

“It makes me feel so good when I open up a page, and I see Alan Halpert, age six, Barbara Halpert, age 10,” she said. “They’re there in print, and you read their names, and you remember them.”

The story, she said, is also one of a family that remained connected despite everything it endured.

“When you lose six members of your family, you better make sure you never lose another one,” Karas remembered her mother saying.

Curse of the Blumenthals is available at Salt Water Books in Marblehead, Copper Dog Books in Beverly, Barnes & Noble, Hudson Booksellers, Target, Amazon, and many more.