Symbols and Traces

From April 8 to May 7, 1992, six people were killed in five small retail businesses across Indiana, Kansas and Missouri. The case acquired a highway name, a composite face and the aura of a roaming phantom. I rebuilt it from the stores outward. The strongest thread is not the nickname. It is the ammunition and firearm evidence that investigators used to connect otherwise separate homicide files...

In December 2022, a sixty-five-year-old Philadelphia mystery changed shape. The child once reduced to a label—“the Boy in the Box”—was publicly identified as four-year-old Joseph Augustus Zarelli. That announcement closed a question that had shadowed the case since 1957. It did not close the homicide. I returned to the file because the identification is often described as though the entire myst..

At first, the case seemed to have a center. Two bicycles lay beside a recreational trail near Meyers Lake in Evansdale, Iowa. Searchers gathered there. Divers entered the water. The lake was lowered. Maps, dogs, boats, volunteers and aircraft converged on the last physical objects that ten-year-old Lyric Cook-Morrissey and eight-year-old Elizabeth Collins had left behind.But the center was false..

Haverhill, New Hampshire | February 9, 2004 | Current through August 2026Maura Murray did not disappear from a locked room. She disappeared from an open road during the short interval between a neighbour reporting a crash and an officer reaching an abandoned Saturn. I rebuilt the case around that empty-car interval, then tested how much the winter landscape, witness timing and later searches can..

Oakland County, Michigan | 1976-1977 | Current through August 2026Four children disappeared from ordinary suburban routes. Each was gone long enough for an abductor to turn a moment of contact into days of hidden captivity. I reopened the Oakland County Child Killer file by measuring those missing intervals as four separate clocks, then asking what kind of place, vehicle and routine could keep a..

Glasgow, Scotland | 1968–1969 | Current through August 2026The most famous man in this case may be the least securely established fact in it. “Bible John” has a nickname, a face and a personality, yet all three were assembled after the last of three women was killed. I reopened the file by taking that figure apart: first the three deaths, then the taxi journey, then the links that turned separat..

Southeastern Virginia | 1986-1989 | Updated August 2026For nearly forty years, four couples were arranged into one dark sentence: the Colonial Parkway murders. Then DNA began adding periods. In 2024, Virginia authorities identified Alan Wade Wilmer Sr. in one of the four core cases. In January 2026, the FBI identified him in a second. Those breakthroughs solve two crime scenes and name four vict..

Las Cruces, New Mexico | February 10, 1990The killers tried to leave a silent room. They shot seven people, lit papers on a desk, and walked out of a bowling alley with less than five thousand dollars. But at about 8:30 that Saturday morning, a twelve-year-old girl reached a corded telephone. Her call carried two things through the smoke: the urgent fact that people were still alive, and a time-..

Speedway, Indiana · November 17–19, 1978Four young employees vanished from a restaurant that still held their purses, loose change, and the shape of an interrupted closing shift. The most important crime scene was therefore available in the first hour. It was also the scene investigators did not preserve. My reconstruction begins with that absence—not because the early mistake explains every lat..

Albuquerque, New Mexico · An evidence-bound reconstructionThe desert did not solve the West Mesa murders when it gave up its dead. It preserved a location, a pattern of concealment, and eleven identities waiting to be restored. What it did not preserve was a name for the person who brought them there. This is my reconstruction of the case from the ground outward: first the trail, then the excava..