o2005

For 46 years, the man who killed Linda Voss lived just 11 miles from where he left her. He raised a family in Ainsworth, Nebraska. He ran a hardware store. He shook hands with half the county at church potlucks every summer. All the while, a single strand of hair sat sealed in a small … Read more

On February 9, 1999, a fresh layer of snow covered a neighborhood in Newman Lake, Washington. More than three and a half inches had fallen the day before. When a fire broke out at a home on North Blue Skies Road, no one realized the snow would become part of an attempt to conceal one … Read more

On September 13, 2003, the sky over Candler, North Carolina, was clear and bright, with late-summer sunlight spreading across Interstate 40, one of the busiest freight corridors in the eastern United States. Candler, on the western edge of Asheville, was a quiet, small community at the time, where truck stops, stores, and restaurants operated around … Read more

On the night of August 30, 1957, Officer Thomas "Tom" Whitaker left his home in Corpus Christi, Texas, for his usual night shift. He never arrived. What followed was one of the most confounding missing-person cases in Texas history, a mystery that would remain unsolved for nearly half a century. Tom was 36 years old, … Read more

In June 1970, Brunswick, Missouri, was a small farming community where families knew their neighbors and life moved with the seasons. Along a rural road outside town, Daniel and Caroline Whitmore lived in an old white farmhouse with their 18-month-old daughter, Emily. Daniel was 28, Caroline was 30, and the couple had spent four years … Read more

In the fall of 1982, Aurora, Colorado, was a quiet working-class community east of Denver. Young families filled one-story rental homes near construction sites, woodshops, and military bases. On the city's east side, children played outside until porch lights came on one by one. The Mercer family lived in an old rental house with a … Read more