When she was a little girl, a stranger used the one thing he shouldn’t have known—her father’s love of fishing—to nearly walk her out of a crowded Oklahoma bowling alley.
Her father’s scream stopped him in time. He was never caught.
Forty years later, LaDonna Humphrey—now a cold-case investigator who has spent her career searching for other people’s missing daughters—turns that same skill on her own case. She releases a composite sketch. She reopens court records. She finds men who almost fit and watches hope collapse each time a date or a location doesn’t line up.
What starts as a search for one man becomes something larger: a map of how many ordinary men moved quietly through the same small towns and how many families never got the answer she’s still chasing.
The Man at Hilltop Lanes doesn’t end with an arrest. It ends with a harder, truer question: what do you do with a story that refuses to close?
Part memoir, part cold-case file, told by a woman who has spent her life on both sides of that question.
The Man at Hilltop Lanes releases on July 17, 2026. Order yours today!
The solution to the Zodiac serial killer case is both clear and controversial. There's one man who fits the puzzle: a letter writer, bomb maker, and code creator who lived in the area during the Zodiac murders. He had easy access to the crime scenes and had a psychotic break around the time the Zodiac's terrible killing spree began. This man was not only a genius-level mathematician but also skilled at disguising his handwriting, leaving no fingerprints, and crafting incredibly difficult ciphers to tease the police and the public with his hidden identity. His name is Theodore J. Kaczynski.
Kaczynski was shaped by the MK Ultra project at Harvard University and became one of UC Berkeley's youngest math professors, a job he detested. He committed his first Zodiac murder during the winter break of 1968 and struck again just after resigning from his teaching position in July 1969. His criminal signature, which included writing letters and creating codes, continued in both his criminal careers as the Zodiac and Unabomber.
"EXPOSED" takes you through all the evidence presented in the first two books, "HUNTED" and "PROFILED," and methodically links the Zodiac and Unabomber cases using handwriting, codes, locations, literature, cultural references, and other unexpected details. It makes a compelling case that Kaczynski cannot be dismissed as the Zodiac, one of the most notorious serial killers in history. If you're a fan of crime thriller books, this is a gripping exploration of a controversial theory about the Zodiac killer's identity.
The Zodiac serial killer claimed the lives of at least five young victims between 1966 and 1974, and mocked the police with telephone calls, taunting letters, and encrypted messages. Thousands of men have been accused; nearly 2,500 have been investigated. Yet the Zodiac has never been identified.
This painstakingly researched and meticulously detailed compendium to the Zodiac serial killer case by True Crime author Mark Hewitt presents the crimes and their effect on a community, including the various sides of the many disputed issues within the case.
HUNTED: The Zodiac Murders is the true story of America's greatest criminal mystery. This indispensable companion book is accessible to anyone interested in joining the pursuit, exploring a mystery, or witnessing the police response to an appalling crime spree.
Following up on the meticulously detailed research of HUNTED: The Zodiac Murders (Book 1), PROFILED: The Zodiac Examined (Book 2) goes beyond the case files to develop a comprehensive criminal profile that examines the personality, psychology, physical characteristics, and motives of the Zodiac. Based in the same detailed research of HUNTED, PROFILED sticks to the facts and articulates at every step how the conclusions of the profile were reached.
At the time the Zodiac was committing his crimes, the term “serial killer” had not yet been coined, and psychological profiles were practically unknown. Now, using 21st century crime analytics and a sophisticated understanding of serial killers, it is possible to create a comprehensive profile that may help identify the kind of man who could commit these terrible crimes and get away with it for decades, despite an overabundance of evidence that should have pointed directly to him.
Join the search for the killer as the evidence is compiled and analyzed in PROFILED: The Zodiac Examined.
IT’S TIME TO PUT YOUR CRIME SOLVING SKILLS TO WORK
Just between us, we know you like true crime investigations. You’ve seen every episode, heard every podcast, and now you can name the killer in the first five minutes of that cable show you’re watching… again. But how many times have you yelled at the screen, “YOU GOT IT ALL WRONG!” Well, Barney Doyle is here to tell you that they probably did.
Reckless Speculation about Murder takes on some of the most infamous unsolved cases in recent American history. From the murders of JonBenét Ramsey and Kathleen Peterson to the shootings of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, your host Barney Doyle will lead you through the evidence, give you all the facts (even the inconvenient ones), and let you decide for yourself who committed these infamous atrocities.
Disregard what you thought you knew about these crimes. Fill up your coffee cup (or wine glass), turn down Forensic Files, and take a fresh look at these notorious murders.
This is the Second Edition with an additional chapter on the Jeffery MacDonald case.
The Murder of Teresa Halbach
Before we go on, I should warn you that I am going to spend some portion of this book ridiculing criminal attorneys. I can’t help it. They are a ridiculous group of people. They are among the most educated and intelligent people we have in this country and have devoted their lives to civil service. They should be revered like doctors or astronauts, but instead they are derided like old-timey carnival barkers. The burden of proof is entirely on their shoulders, yet prosecutors are mocked as buffoons if they lose a case. Prosecutors who are too successful are portrayed as heartless henchmen for an oppressive government machine. Defense attorneys are villainized for protecting criminals even though we all understand it is their exact job to protect the rights of their clients, who are mostly criminals, and they would be disbarred for giving anything less than an honest effort.
But that’s the job they chose and most of the absurdities of the criminal justice system were created by their hands. They stacked one absurd brief or motion on top of another for two centuries until our courts were trapped in a slog of arcane case laws and nonsensical gibberish that only lawyers and sovereign citizens pretend to understand. I’ll give you a couple of observations from a decade I have spent as an occasional guest of the court: The judge is God in the courtroom, but God’s will can always be appealed to a council of higher deities; logic is suspended for the sake of ritual; and at least three jurors haven’t paid attention to a word the last witness just said.
Since I know that I am a weak man who will take numerous unprovoked shots at the attorneys involved in these cases, I do feel compelled to admit a couple of important things that I have noticed about attorneys. In their own little way, they always seem to tell the truth. I’ve seen doctors lie. I’ve seen clergy lie. I’ve seen my mother lie. I can’t recall seeing an attorney lie in court. Despite their reputation to the contrary, as a whole, attorneys seem to have a real commitment to their own narrow concept of truth. That’s not to say that they won’t mislead the shit out of you with an argument, because they will absolutely do that. But you can be sure that the argument is based on some truthful fact. Listening to attorneys is a lot like negotiating with the devil. They aren’t going to lie to you, but pay very close attention to the words they choose. Second, they tend to be much better mannered than you expect a professional arguer to be. I’ve heard horror stories about attorneys being jerks to witnesses on the stand but I’ve never actually seen it. I’ve always been treated with respect and decency when I testified. I’ve had my work criticized by defense attorneys while I was on the stand and that stung. But they were never jerks about it and the criticisms were always reasonably valid (probably why they stung).
So there you are, that’s a quick guide to attorneys from Barney Doyle. They virtually always tell the truth, even if only in a very literal and lawyerly sense of the word “truth,” and they aren’t nearly as bad as all of the jokes would have you believe.
I say all of that because we are going to talk about the tragic murder of Teresa Halbach and we can’t do that without reviewing the trial of Steven Avery. The defense attorneys who represented Avery, Dean Strang and Jerome Buting, became a pair of modern day Atticus Finches to a throng of worshipers on the internet after a flattering portrayal in the Netflix documentary Making A Murderer. The prosecutor, Ken Kratz, resigned in disgrace over allegations that he made unwanted sexual advances towards several victims in domestic violence cases that he was prosecuting.
In Avery’s trial, each side presented a theory on this case and the two theories were mutually exclusive. Lots of times in a murder trial the defense won’t present a theory, they will just poke holes in the prosecutor’s theory. Other times the defense will accept the bulk of the prosecutor’s theory without argument and try to insert doubt through insanity, self-defense, accident or some other gray area in the law. The Steven Avery trial was the rare case where the prosecution and the defense offered specific theories that directly contradicted each other. One of them, at a minimum, has to be wrong. What we think happened to Teresa Halbach depends largely on who we are going to believe, the modern day Misters Finch or an alleged sexual predator. I know whose side you want to take on this one. Hell, I know whose side I want to take on this one. But as I mentioned before, attorneys virtually always tell the truth in court. So let’s wade through all of this contradictory truth and see if we can’t figure out what actually happened.
Also, before we go any further, I want you to take a moment and consider your own interest in these cases. I love true crime stories. You love true crime stories. Lots of people love true crime stories. There is nothing wrong with loving true crime stories. The subject matter is macabre, but that doesn’t make it off limits for decent people like us to discuss. We don’t love murder and we certainly don’t want to celebrate murderers. If anything, our love of true crime is mostly borne of an obsession with finding the truth and holding murderers accountable. The crimes we are going to look at, like the murder of Teresa Halbach, were devastating events to a lot of innocent people who cared about the victims. And that is before you even account for the horrors that the poor victims themselves suffered. We recognize the tragedy, hate the suffering, and love the story still. We are searching for the truth among muddied details in most of these cases, but we are never confused about where our sympathies lie. The victim is the most important person in every one of these stories. Even though we enjoy studying these crimes, we still wish they had not happened in the first place.
And I know a lot of you developed your interest in these things in relation to some personal tragedy in your own life. Studying horrific crimes is, for some people, a coping mechanism for dealing with trauma. I’ve seen more death and violence in my life than I ever imagined I could handle. These murder stories should stir up a lot of terrible memories for me. But they don’t. They allow me to dissect the horrors of this world from a comfortable arm’s length away, secure in the knowledge that I can always just close the book or the laptop at any time. It’s a weird way of distracting yourself from the boogieman under your bed by reading about the boogieman three states over. It shouldn’t work, but it does.
That said, we all have those true crime cases that hit too close to home. If any of these cases are like that for you, or if, God forbid, you personally knew one of the victims, please just skip that chapter. You won’t miss anything important, I promise, and you’ll catch up on the next case.
Also, now is an appropriate time to offer my sincere thanks to Skip Topp and his friends over at stevenaverycase.org for compiling the trial transcripts and all of the supporting exhibits from the Steven Avery trial. Trial transcripts are public records but are usually prohibitively expensive, so I am very grateful that they acquired and shared them. The facts below come from those transcripts, several other motions filed by attorney Kathleen Zelner and, to a much lesser extent, the Making A Murderer documentary.
Teresa Halbach was a 25-year-old photographer living in semi-rural Wisconsin. She was relatively new to the business so she shared studio space with another photographer and supplemented her income by doing freelance photography for an Auto Trader magazine. If you aren’t familiar with Auto Trader, picture Craigslist car ads compiled in a free newspaper that was available in a filthy display box outside of every gas station. If you aren’t familiar with newspapers, imagine printing a collection of articles from the internet onto awkwardly large and absurdly thin paper that you could take with you to the bathroom. If you don’t remember articles, they were like memes but with 800 to 1,000 words and sometimes no picture.
On Halloween day of 2005, Teresa Halbach was taking photos of vehicles for three different customers in and around Manitowoc County, Wisconsin. One of those customers was a man named Steven Avery who lived in a trailer at the Avery Salvage Yard. Everybody agrees that Teresa visited the Avery Salvage Yard that day. And everybody agrees that Teresa’s burned remains were found in a burn pit behind Steven Avery’s home several days later. But what happened between those moments is fiercely debated.
The prosecution’s version of events:
Teresa Halbach had taken photos at the Avery Salvage Yard on several occasions before. She complained to a coworker about Steven Avery’s peculiar behavior. She said that Avery once met her at the door wearing nothing but a towel.
On October 31, 2005, Avery called Auto Trader magazine and specifically requested that Teresa come take photos. Avery gave the Avery Salvage Yard address, but gave the name B. Janda instead of his own. Avery’s sister’s name was Barb Janda and the vehicle that Teresa was supposed to photograph belonged to her. Avery had Teresa’s cell phone number and called her twice before she came out to the salvage yard. Both times he used *67 to block his name and number on her caller ID. She didn’t answer either call. He called again later in the day, presumably after her visit, but did not use *67 on the third call.
Bobby Dassey lived in a trailer at the Avery Salvage Yard with his mother (Barb Janda) and brothers. He saw Teresa taking photos of his mother’s van that afternoon, then saw Teresa walking toward Avery’s trailer. Bobby took a shower and left to go hunting. He saw Teresa’s green Toyota Rav4 parked out at the property but did not see Teresa anywhere when he left.
Multiple witnesses reported seeing a bonfire and/or a fire in a burn barrel at Steven Avery’s residence on the afternoon and/or evening of October 31. The statements conflict as to the exact time of the fires, but consensus seems to place them at around dusk into dark.
Friends and loved ones did not see or hear from Teresa after October 31, and her mother reported her as a missing person on November 3 in Calumet County Wisconsin, where Teresa lived. Police accounted for her whereabouts up to where she visited the Avery Salvage Yard, then the trail went cold.
A large search party of citizen volunteers, organized by Teresa’s ex-boyfriend and her roommate, combed the countryside looking for Teresa and her missing Toyota Rav4. Teresa’s second-cousin located the Rav4 semi-concealed among the junk vehicles in the Avery Salvage Yard. The car was locked and partially covered with debris.
Police were notified and responded immediately. The Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office was on scene first, but the investigation was turned over to the Calumet County Sheriff’s Office because of a conflict of interest. Standby for details on the conflict of interest because it makes up the bulk of the defense’s theory.
The Rav4 was hauled off on a wrecker to the Wisconsin crime lab. Lab technicians found Avery’s blood on the back of the gear shift and on the passenger side of the center console. His DNA, from a non-blood source, was also found under the hood on the latching mechanism. A small amount of Teresa’s blood and hair was also found in the rear cargo area of the Rav4.
Through a series of searches over the course of several weeks, investigators found Teresa’s bone fragments in a burn pit outside of Steven Avery’s trailer and in a burn barrel outside of the Janda home. They also found charred remnants of Teresa’s camera and cell phone in a burn barrel outside of Steven Avery’s trailer. Inside the trailer, investigators found a key to Teresa’s Rav4 in Avery’s bedroom and a fired bullet with Teresa’s DNA on it in the garage. The key also had Avery’s DNA on it.
Investigators interviewed Avery’s nephew, Brendan Dassey, several times over the course of a few months. He initially denied knowledge of what happened to Teresa, but eventually confessed to helping Avery rape and kill Teresa then burn her corpse.
The defense’s version of events:
An adult female (not Teresa) was brutally raped on a beach in Manitowoc County on July 29, 1985. DNA eventually showed that the rape was almost certainly committed by a man named Gregory Allen. But a poor investigation and a mistaken eyewitness identification led to the wrongful conviction of Steven Avery.
Avery was freed in September of 2003 and rightfully sued the bejeezus out of the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office. Either by winning the lawsuit or by agreeing to an out-of-court settlement, Avery was going to receive a huge settlement from the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office after 20 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit. Circumstances changed when Teresa Halbach went missing the same day she visited the Avery Salvage Yard.
Among the officers deposed in Avery’s lawsuit against Manitowoc County were Lieutenant James Lenk and Sergeant James Colborn. Even though the investigation was turned over to the Calumet County Sheriff’s Office, Lenk and Colborn each participated in searches in which crucial evidence was discovered.
As is custom, investigators kept a log of everybody who came in and out of the crime scene at the salvage yard. There was one day when Lenk signed out of the scene log, but there was no entry for him signing in.
The Rav4 was found parked with the battery disconnected. There was a car crusher at the salvage yard not far from where it was located. The car crusher did not belong to the Averys, but they were known to use it on occasion.
One day prior to the actual discovery of the Rav4, Sergeant Colborn ran a license plate check of the vehicle through his dispatch. The majority of license plate checks are conducted by radio, but Sergeant Colborn ran this particular license plate check by cell phone.
Steven Avery’s trailer was searched three separate times before the key was discovered in his bedroom. It was discovered by Lenk and Colborn, who were searching under the supervision of a Calumet County detective. Lenk spotted the key on some slippers beside Colborn, who theorized that the key had fallen out of a small bookshelf while he was moving it. The key was also by itself, with no accompanying house keys or office keys.
The bullet with Teresa’s DNA was not discovered until months after the first search, and was discovered by Lenk. The garage had been searched multiple times before that, including a search that yielded fired .22 cartridge cases (or shell casings, as the cool kids call them).
The lab technician who identified Teresa’s DNA on the bullet deviated from her usual protocol on the test. Whenever technicians test for DNA, they also run a simultaneous “control” test to show that there was no contamination. On that particular control test, the sample was contaminated with the technician’s DNA. That usually isn’t a big deal. They throw out the test and try again. But the DNA test on the bullet consumed the entire sample, so she was unable to run another test. In all probability, the test shouldn’t have been considered valid for court purposes.
There was already a vial of Steven Avery’s blood in a box of evidence at the Manitowoc County Clerk of Court’s office. The Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office had keys to the Clerk’s office, and Lenk was aware that evidence in Steven Avery’s original rape case was held there. Lenk had previously ordered one of his deputies to send some evidence from that box to the crime lab for testing. The vial appeared to have been opened at some point.
The vial of Avery’s blood had an anticoagulant called EDTA in it that is used to preserve blood samples in liquid form. The FBI tested Avery’s blood from the SUV and determined that it did not have EDTA in it, which would seem to refute the notion that the blood in the SUV was planted by law enforcement. The FBI only tested three of the six samples from the SUV, however. And the defense introduced an expert who suggested that there were problems with the test that the FBI used.
Teresa’s bones were discovered in both the burn pit in Avery’s backyard and a burn barrel near the Janda residence. There was also a third site near the Avery property where burned bones were discovered, but the crime lab was unable to determine if they were also bones from Teresa. At a minimum, either Teresa was dismembered and burned at two sites, or her burned bones were moved at least once before they were discovered.
The Avery Salvage Yard also had a commercial incinerator on site. It was not used to dispose of Teresa’s body.
Before we continue, I want to tell you a little story. I am not particularly handy but I am very cheap. Consequently, I do a lot of projects around the house that should be hired out to the professionals. I built a laundry room one time that didn’t have a straight edge or 90-degree angle in it. It wasn’t obvious to the naked eye, so I didn’t really care. Until I tried to buy a door. Door manufacturers make a lot of different sizes, but they are virtually all perfect rectangles. My opening was not. I shimmed and jimmied it every which way I could, but you can only be so precise when you don’t have straight edge to orient off of. It’s in the wall now, but I don’t trust that door to hold out a stiff draft.
The prosecution and the defense both have timelines for when they say Teresa was at the Avery Salvage yard, but they are built on imprecise and contradictory witness recollections. I don’t have any more faith in their timelines than I do in my laundry room door.
So now that we’ve laid that groundwork, let’s do a little reckless speculation about what happened to Teresa Halbach.
I love the care and craft that went into Dean Strang and Jerome Buting’s defense. A man wrongfully convicted of a rape he didn’t commit is released from prison only to be framed for murder. Lieutenant Lenk is lurking in the shadows of every search with another piece of fraudulent evidence. His henchman, Sergeant Colborn, covers for every misdeed in a zeal to preserve the reputation of his beloved department. Scientists at the Wisconsin Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation cast aside their sacred oaths to jump into the conspiracy. Maybe the police are protecting the real killers. Maybe the police are the real killers. I love everything about this story. As fiction, it’s a winner. As an actual explanation for what happened to Teresa Halbach, it just doesn’t work for me.
It sucks that the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office participated in the investigation. They wouldn’t have asked Calumet County to take over the investigation if they didn’t believe there was a conflict of interest. Ideally they shouldn’t have even participated in the search. But practically speaking, they had to. It was a ridiculously large crime scene. The Avery Salvage Yard is 5 acres with over 4,000 vehicles and a dozen buildings. The Calumet County Sheriff’s Office was a 30-officer department trying to run a massive investigation in somebody else’s county. You could search that salvage yard around the clock for a week with a hundred trained investigators and not cover everything. Conflict of interest or not, Manitowoc County was going to have to lend a hand in that search.
James Lenk and Andrew Colborn did not have any reason to frame Steven Avery. They weren’t being sued. They had nothing to do with the investigation that led to Avery’s wrongful conviction. Neither man even worked for the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office at that time. They were deposed in Avery’s lawsuit because a phone call from a neighboring agency about Avery was misdirected to Colborn while Colborn was working in the jail. He properly directed the caller to the Sheriff’s Office detectives and had no further involvement in the matter. Lenk was deposed because Colborn told Lenk about the phone call. Neither man was at the slightest risk of being held personally liable in a lawsuit from Avery.
You could argue that loyalty to the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office might motivate Lenk and Colborn to frame an innocent man. You could argue that, if you enjoy losing arguments. Police don’t give a shit about their departments. It’s just an employer. The job is dangerous. It doesn’t pay that well. And police jobs are a dime a dozen. No police officer in the world is going to commit a felony to protect the reputation of their department or save the department from a lawsuit. Certain unscrupulous police officers might be willing to commit a felony to protect their own reputation or save themselves from a lawsuit, but not the department. Especially in a sheriff’s office, where the top guy is some politician that half the department didn’t even vote for and who could be gone at the next election.
But since we are recklessly speculating here, let’s follow this thread a little ways. If Steven Avery didn’t kill Teresa Halbach then who did? She didn’t have a boyfriend that we know of. Her ex-boyfriend, Ryan Hillegas, was still in her life in some capacity and would make for an obvious suspect. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me in reviewing the trial transcripts, the investigating officers ruled Hillegas out as a suspect fairly early in the investigation. I found a lot written about him on the internet, but nothing from any source that I would consider credible.
Avery hired attorney Kathleen Zellner to represent him on his appeal, which took place after his Making A Murderer fame. She has been very bold in proclaiming Hillegas as the actual killer. I wish I could afford to hire this woman to write the forward for this book. She is a marvel. You and I do a decent job of recklessly speculating about murders; Zellner is a master at it. Where we are bound by logic and decency, Zellner transcends reason and scoffs at decorum. We trust experts who have studied science while she directs doctors who invent science to conform to her theories. We are skeptical of witness statements that can’t be corroborated. She tells you exactly who is lying, why they are lying, and why anything that contradicts her theory is also a lie. We restrict logical inferences to only those things which can be logically inferred, and then we dampen those inferences with an acknowledgment of their uncertainty. Zellner can draw you a straight line from Teresa Halbach’s murder to Ryan Hillegas’ guilt using any small witness statement or piece of evidence and her own unique brand of deductive reasoning.
At the risk of infuriating Avery’s supporters by shortchanging the “newly discovered evidence,” I am going to abridge Zellner’s theory for you here:
Ryan Hillegas was a jealous and abusive boyfriend. None of Teresa Halbach’s friends or family ever mentioned anything about Hillegas being abusive, but the guy she shared a photography studio with did. He told detectives that, years ago, Teresa mentioned having an abusive ex-boyfriend. Therefore, Hillegas is a murdering woman-beater.
Teresa Halbach had a secret life where she was taking nude photographs, sleeping with her roommate and sleeping with a married man. Hillegas killed her because he was jealous. (I couldn’t find the affidavits that Zellner used to support the claims about Halbach’s personal life. For what it’s worth, true or not, it was shitty the way she used those “facts” to degrade the victim. And if I had to bet based on the rest of her arguments, I’ll take “or not” over “true” in a landslide.)
Hillegas told investigators that damage to the brake light and bumper on Halbach’s car was months old. No insurance claim was ever filed, so obviously Hillegas was lying to cover up the fact that he is a murdering liar.
Hillegas was an unemployed nurse at the time of the murder. He had the time to commit the murder (unemployed) and the advanced medical training (nurse) that would be required to plant Steven Avery’s blood in Halbach’s car.
The door to Avery’s trailer was unlocked. We can be certain of this because Avery said so himself in an affidavit and had absolutely no reason to lie. Obviously, since the door was unlocked, Hillegas snuck into the house and used his advanced nursing training to sneak Avery’s blood from the bathroom sink to Halbach’s car to frame Avery.
There were no phone calls made from Hillegas’ phone during the time of the murder (as calculated by Zellner). This was because his hands were occupied strangling Halbach to death. There were also no phone calls made at various points over the following few days because his hands were occupied with burning Halbach’s body and framing Steven Avery.
Investigators took photographs of Hillegas’ hands during the initial investigation. Those photographs showed scratches on the back of his left hand. Other photographs taken of Halbach during her lifetime showed that she had fingernails. Forensic pathologist Larry Blum prepared an affidavit saying that he was certain, “to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty,” that the scratches were caused by fingernails. Furthermore, he believed that they were caused by Halbach’s fingernails while Hillegas was strangling her. He deduced all of that from photos of Hillegas’ hands and reenactments he conducted with female staff members in his office. Presumably, Zellner didn’t require the doctor to carry the reenactment all the way through cremation.
Another doctor, Lawrence Farwell, has invented a technique he named “brain fingerprinting.” He is a Harvard-educated neuroscientist whereas I am but a humble state-educated police officer, so I will defer to Dr. Farwell as to the matter of whether or not the brain has fingers. But through brain-fingerprinting, Dr. Farwell can measure scientifically whether or not a person has knowledge of something. He measured with 99.9 percent certainty that Steven Avery didn’t know how Teresa Halbach was killed. Other neuroscientists have pointed out that Dr. Farwell’s claims seem farfetched and that his research doesn’t really adhere to the standards of what we consider “science.” But they are probably just bitter that they didn’t discover all of those fingers on the brain before he did.
I can’t recommend reading Zellner’s motion for a retrial highly enough. She torched every single person involved with the case, including Dean Strang and Jerome Buting. My favorite passage is when she asserts matter-of-factly that Sergeant Colborn conducted a clandestine illegal search of the Avery salvage yard with Hillegas’ help.
“The headlights were from Sgt. Colborn's personal vehicle and he had a friend of Ms. Halbach with him to search the Avery property without a search warrant because he did not have probable cause to be on the Avery property at that point in time.”
She just flat out says that a sworn police officer committed multiple felonies as if she were pointing out that the sky was blue. Her proof? Colborn called in for a license plate check on Halbach’s vehicle and he used a cell phone instead of his radio. And she could hear a voice in the background say “it’s her.” Colborn obviously made the call while trespassing at the Avery Salvage yard and the voice in the background couldn’t have been anybody but the lying, murdering, evidence-planting Hillegas.
As you might have imagined, the judge was unpersuaded and denied Zellner’s motion for a new trial.
Perhaps by the sequel you and I will be audacious enough to propose Zellner’s type of fantastically imaginative speculation, but we aren’t there yet. For now, let’s bound our recklessness in at least the realm of plausibility.
I think that Steven Avery killed Teresa Halbach. His blood was in her vehicle. His DNA was on her hood latch. Her car key was found in Steven Avery’s bedroom with Steven Avery’s DNA on it. A bullet with Teresa’s DNA was found in his garage and it was fired from a .22 caliber rifle that was found hanging in Steven Avery’s bedroom. Her bones were found in a burn pit outside of his house. Her cell phone and camera were found in a burn barrel beside his house. Each and every piece of that evidence is pretty damning.
I know you have concerns about the integrity of some of that evidence. Rightfully so. The bullet wasn’t found on the first search and it probably should have been. The story of how the key was found is a bit perplexing. It’s really weird that her bones were found at multiple locations on the Avery property. I will grant you all of those things. But murder isn’t a perfectly logical act and you will drive yourself mad trying to understand the how and why of every little thing the killer did. The kind of person who would brutally murder an innocent person is the kind of person who would do a lot of other peculiar stuff as well. Moving bones? It obviously made sense to the killer at the time because bones were moved. Maybe somebody moved the bones in an attempt to frame Steven Avery for the murder. But that person would have had to stage all of the other evidence as well, and the logistics just don’t seem possible to me (unless the police killed her, which is absurd). The most logical explanation I see is that Steven Avery moved the bones for reasons that probably made sense to him at the time. Steven Avery’s blood was in the car because Steven Avery bled in the car. Steven Avery’s DNA was on the hood latch because Steven Avery touched the hood latch when he disconnected the battery. The key was eventually found in Steven Avery’s room because Steven Avery hid the key in his room. The bullet was found in the garage with Teresa’s DNA on it because that’s where the bullet was fired. I admit that it lacks the imagination and flair of Zellner’s and Strang’s theories, but it fits the facts a lot easier.
So if we accept that Steven Avery was the killer, then why did he do it? They weren’t romantically involved so it wasn’t a case of domestic violence. Teresa was early into her photography career while Avery was in line for a huge settlement from Manitowoc County, so robbery doesn’t make any sense. Neither of them was involved in a street gang nor were they distributing narcotics. There is no reason to suspect self-defense, murder-for-hire, silencing a witness or any of the other oddball murder motives that occur in rare instances. I’m going to step out on a pretty sturdy limb and guess that it was sexually motivated. You knew that already, didn’t you? One step ahead of me as usual. But just for the sake of being thorough, let’s analyze it a little bit.
Making A Murderer would have you believe that Steven Avery was wrongfully convicted of rape because he looked a lot like the actual rapist and the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office bungled the investigation. In truth, Steven Avery was wrongfully convicted of rape because he looked a lot like the actual rapist, the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office bungled the investigation and Steven Avery’s behavior made it really easy to believe that he would rape somebody.
According to a report by Kurt Chandler in Milwaukee Magazine, Avery was convicted of burglarizing a bar when he was 18 and burning a cat alive several months later. I haven’t seen the court records or police reports from either of those charges, but they fit into the general pattern of Avery’s life. In September of 1984, a neighbor reported that Avery had been harassing her for months. When she drove past his house on the road to her own home, Avery would run and stand on the side of the road naked or stand at the front of his car and masturbate in plain view.
In his report, the investigating detective noted, “He has field glasses on the house and he knows just when she will be driving past the residence. At this point he will then run out to the road and do his tricks.”
In January of 1985, Avery was arrested for running a woman’s vehicle off the road and pointing a rifle at her. In April of 1985 he was accused of repeatedly driving by another woman’s house and shouting obscenities. In May of 1985 an 11 year old girl in a neighboring community was kidnapped and raped. Avery was never charged with the crime, but officers noted that he fit the physical description of the suspect and was identified by a witness as fishing in the area at the time. In June of 1987, Avery’s wife accused him of sending threatening letters from prison. In September of 2004, one year after being released from prison, Avery’s girlfriend accused him of domestic assault.
It’s a tragedy that a rapist was left on the streets because of Manitowoc County’s shoddy investigation. Gregory Allen, the actual rapist, was free for another ten years and committed atrocities that we likely won’t ever even know about before he was eventually caught for another rape. It’s infuriating. But let’s be honest, there were going to be concrete and bars in Avery’s future eventually anyway.
If the earlier reports of Avery’s roadside self-gratification were true then it’s not a stretch to think that he later developed a fixation on Teresa. The 1984 police report accuses Avery of targeting a specific female with his roadside shenanigans, going so far as to watch her house with binoculars so that he wouldn’t miss her. I’ve never known prison to do a really good job of curing perverts of their impulses. Sometimes it does teach them to conceal those impulses better. A man waving his weiner at a woman from the side of the road could just be a few years in prison away from learning to cover himself with a towel when he attempts to shock his future victims.
You and I may disagree on this one because I seem to think it’s a bigger deal than everybody else does, but I believe it is very relevant that Avery made two phone calls to Teresa using the *67 feature before she arrived at his house and one call afterward without using it. What legitimate reason would he have for blocking his number? This was in the early 2000s. I’m suspicious that a man Steven Avery’s age even knew about *67. A middle-aged guy in Wisconsin in 2003 who dismantled junk vehicles for a living was not aware of *67 unless he was using it for nefarious reasons. I didn’t know about *67 until 2006, and that was only because I became a police officer and saw it used for nefarious reasons. I am also nearly two decades younger than Steven Avery.
The phone call afterwards without *67 shows he had a plan. When she was reported missing and they checked her phone records, he could point to that call as proof that he hadn’t made the two blocked calls earlier. Obviously that fell apart when they checked his phone records, but those things happen when simple people attempt complex crimes. I said he had a plan, but I never said it was a good one.
It is also relevant that this happened while Steven Avery’s live-in girlfriend was in jail. I won’t go so far as to say that it is necessarily evidence, but it is an interesting fact nonetheless. If Steven were truly innocent, how unfortunate for him that Teresa was murdered while his alibi wasn’t available. But if he’s guilty, of course he would plan it for a time when his girlfriend was away.
OK, I’m satisfied that Steven Avery probably killed Teresa Halbach and that it was a sexually motivated crime. Now let’s get a little reckless with the speculation. Let’s theorize how it happened.
The autopsy revealed two bullet defects in Teresa’s skull and the .22 caliber bullet fragment located in the garage with Teresa’s DNA on it was fired from a .22 rifle found in Steven Avery’s bedroom. It’s fair to say she was shot. But where did it happen and what led up to it?
Bobby Dassey testified that he last saw Teresa walking toward Steven Avery’s trailer. Assuming she made it inside, what happened next? None of Teresa’s blood was found in the trailer, so I think it’s fair to say that she was not shot in the trailer. A gunshot wound to the head is bloody, even with a smaller round like a .22 caliber. I just can’t envision a scenario where Steven Avery would be able to clean up all of that blood without leaving a trace. If she was on carpet when she was shot, the blood would have soaked into the carpet pad and the subfloor. Even if she were on linoleum or tile, the blood would have spread over such a large area that it would almost certainly have made it into cracks and crevices that Avery wouldn’t have been able to clean. And that isn’t even factoring in the spatter that would have hit the walls. It is really hard and requires time and effort to make an indoor bloody murder scene disappear, and Avery would have been in a big hurry.
The bullet with Teresa’s DNA was found in the garage so it makes sense that she was shot in there. In Zellner’s appeal she made a very big deal out of the fact that the bullet did not have any bone fragments embedded in it. For reasons that confound me even on multiple readings, Zellner was convinced the lack of bone material on the bullet somehow proved that Avery didn’t shoot Halbach. There seem to be two pretty obvious explanations. The first being that her expert might be full of crap. The second is that the bullet found in the garage might have passed through Teresa without striking a bone. A .22 is a small and fast-moving bullet, so I doubt the round found in the garage was one of the rounds that hit Teresa in the head. Forensic pathologists have explained to me in the past that .22 caliber bullets are notorious for ricocheting off bones around the inside of a person’s body without ever exiting. I have a tough time believing that a .22 caliber bullet that penetrated the skull in one spot would still have enough momentum to make it out the other side and onto the garage floor still intact. But there are a lot of places where a round could pass in and out of a human body without striking bone, and we have no idea how many times Teresa was actually shot.
So if she was shot in the garage, then that raises the question of why none of Teresa’s blood was found in there. If you were to get upset with old Barney Doyle for some undoubtedly legitimate reason and punch me in the nose, I’d bleed all over the bare concrete floor in my garage where I am typing this. So as not to upset my wife and risk another punch in the nose, I’d wipe that blood puddle up with a shop rag before it stained the floor. If you came back a month later and sprayed a crime scene product called Luminol on the floor, the spot where that puddle had been would light up, especially under an alternative light source. Then you wouldn’t have to hit me again, you could just point to the floor and remind me to watch my manners.
Crime scene technicians used Luminol in Steven Avery’s garage and saw a stain come out that was about the right size to be from a gunshot wound to the head.
So with the same scenario as above, what if old Barney Doyle didn’t feel comfortable leaving puddles of DNA everywhere and decided to clean up that blood puddle with bleach instead of just wiping it up with a shop rag? What happens if you come back a month later with a bottle of Luminol this time? The spot still lights up, but because of the bleach not the blood. Bleach kills everything in the blood that reacts with the Luminol, but the bleach itself causes a reaction.
The evidence technicians in Steven Avery’s garage used a presumptive blood test on the stain and determined that it was not blood.
So what if we discussed our problems like adults and you never punched old Barney Doyle in the first place? I’m clumsy and it is a garage, so I have at various times spilled brake fluid, antifreeze, medicated shampoo and Heinz 57 sauce on the floor. You bring the Luminol over and what happens then? First, I ask where you are getting all of this Luminol. After that, I have no idea. There are a lot of things that react with Luminol. Maybe the floor lights up, maybe it doesn’t.
So maybe the Luminol lit up in Steven Avery’s garage because he used bleach to clean up blood on the floor or maybe it picked up on something else. Either way, I don’t understand how he managed to shoot Teresa in the garage multiple times without making a giant bloody mess. It was a cluttered garage and clutter has a way of catching blood spatter. If she were standing when she was shot in the head, the blood spatter would have originated five-and-a-half feet off the ground and high-velocity spatter should have traveled all over the clutter. So I don’t think she was standing up when she was shot. And I’m not entirely convinced she was conscious at the time, if alive at all.
Back to Teresa in Steven Avery’s trailer. If she was shot in the garage, then what happened between the trailer and the garage? Obviously Avery could have been waiting with the rifle and walked her into the garage at gunpoint. That would explain why there was no sign of a big bloody struggle in the trailer. But we agreed earlier that this was a sexually motivated crime. What would he get out of it by walking her out to the garage and shooting her?
They found a set of shackles in Avery’s house when they searched it. They were kinky shackles and he claimed that he purchased them to spice things up with his girlfriend. I would have thought that sex with a portly middle-aged felon would have been all of the spice a woman could ask for, but I guess I’m a prude. At any rate, Avery could have met Teresa at the door with the rifle and ordered her into the shackles. Teresa’s DNA wasn’t found on the shackles, but maybe Avery was the type of gentleman to clean his sex toys between uses.
The theory that I keep coming back to, even if I can’t fully articulate why, is that Avery strangled her. I hate the theory because it would have been a painful and terrifying way for Teresa to die. I’d feel better knowing that Avery lured her out to the garage with some clever ruse and that she died instantly and painlessly from a gunshot to the head that she never saw coming. But I have this gut feeling that the sick son of a bitch strangled her to death. Let me outline it for you and see what you think.
During his interview with police, Steven Avery was adamant that Teresa never came in to his house. That is a bold claim to make if it wasn’t true. Police recognized the opportunity to catch him in a lie and tried to scare him off that story. There is so much trace evidence that could be left behind when a person is in a house. Police laid out how hairs, fibers, fingerprints and DNA evidence works and Avery had to have recognized what it would mean if they found anything linking Halbach to his trailer. It would have been so easy for Avery to just say that she stepped in the trailer for a minute to collect his money or leave a receipt. Then he would have had an excuse if they found any traces of her in the trailer. But he didn’t waiver. He insisted she was never in there. Maybe he was bluffing because he was that confident in how well he cleaned the place. But I think he was telling the truth. I don’t think Teresa was in there.
Avery said he followed Teresa out to her car to give her the money for the photo shoot. He described talking with her at the driver’s side door. This would have been in plain view of anybody who was passing by on the roadway or looking out the window of his sister’s house. It would have been too risky for him to walk out there holding a rifle. He could have knocked her unconscious by smashing her over the head with something, then thrown her in the back of her own car. But that would have also made a bloody mess. There was a small amount of Teresa’s blood and hair in the rear of her car, but not consistent with having her head split open from a crushing blow.
I think Avery strangled Teresa at the door of her car, either with his hands or with some sort of makeshift ligature. He could have done it quickly and would have been mostly concealed from view by the vehicle. When he was done, he could have thrown her into the rear of her car and moved the car into his garage. If she nicked her head on something during the struggle or while he was moving her, it could have opened up a minor cut that would have left a small amount of blood and hair in the back of the car.
Once in the garage, Steven Avery could have acted on his sexual intentions while Teresa was bound, unconscious or already dead. I don’t care to speculate on what Steven Avery did here. I’m going to think happy thoughts about what prison is like for murderers and skip to the end.
Like a million other guys in the midwest, Avery was a deer hunter. As such, he had undoubtedly used his garage to dress a dead deer before. From experience, he surely knew that he could make cleanup easier and prevent a bloody mess by strategically placing plastic or newspaper and putting Teresa in a convenient spot before shooting her. And if she was already dead from the initial strangulation (which is the theory I choose to believe because there is less torture and suffering involved), then the gunshots would have produced minimal blood loss anyway.
“Why would he shoot her if she was already dead?” you ask. I refer you back to my earlier analysis: Weird people do weird stuff sometimes and we won’t always know why. Or you can go with the alternate theory that she didn’t die until he shot her, but I’m writing this so I am going with the lesser of two horrors.
From that point, it’s pretty straightforward. Over the next two days he hid her vehicle in the salvage yard, hoping it wouldn’t be found before he had a chance to do something more permanent, and burned her body and all of the evidence in the burn pit and burn barrels around his house. He didn’t use the car crusher or the incinerator because he rarely used either of those things in the course of his job and didn’t want his brother and father asking questions like “What car are you crushing?” or “What the hell are you burning in that incinerator?” while he was at the center of a missing person investigation. Eventually the plot was discovered, and Dean Strang became an unlikely heartthrob through Netflix.
OK, OK, stop screaming at me. We’ll talk about Brendan Dassey. This was a terrible story to begin with, and it isn’t going to get any better if we bring Brendan Dassey into it. But since you insist, here it is.
Brendan Dassey confessed to assisting his uncle Steven Avery with the rape, murder and disposal of Teresa Halbach. He was convicted. That conviction was overturned. Then it was upheld. Then depending on the day of the week, he is either free pending an appeal or back in jail.
Dassey told a story that was, according to the prosecutor, so rich in detail that it could not possibly have been made up. Dassey only could have gotten those details from being involved. In the professional opinion of old Barney Doyle, the confession is absolutely made up and the details Brendan Dassey gave don’t match the crime scene at all. But what do I know? I wasn’t there for the investigation and, even if I was, we have already established that I am a moron. Maybe he did do it after all.
Brendan was 16 years old at the time of the murder and lived with his mother and brothers next door to Steven Avery. Like everybody else in his family, Brendan was interviewed by police several days after the murder. He gave a story that was complete and utter horseshit, which put him on the police radar. His initial story was that he didn’t see Teresa at the Avery Salvage Yard, but then he might have seen her, but then he definitely saw her leaving and driving away. Police rightfully suspected that Steven Avery had coached Brendan on what to tell them, and the details of his story crumbled under the slightest bit of scrutiny.
Several months later, police did a follow up interview with Brendan at his school. This time Brendan said that he saw Teresa’s body in the burn pit behind Steven Avery’s house on Halloween night while Avery was having a bonfire. He said that he was scared of Steven and didn’t want to get him in trouble, so he didn’t say anything.
The police came back and interviewed Brendan two more times. In those interviews, Brendan claimed that he actually first saw Teresa tied to Steven Avery’s bed. Avery told Brendan to rape Teresa, which he did, then Steven slit Teresa’s throat. They loaded her body into her car, for some unknown reason, and then burned her in the burn pit.
This was the story that got him convicted and I don’t understand how. I will grant the prosecutor that it was rich in detail, but the details seem like nonsense to me. If Steven Avery slit Teresa’s throat on his bed then there would have been blood all over that room. Blood would have absolutely soaked into the mattress. The prosecutor argued that Avery burned the sheets, and that was apparently good enough. Also, while Teresa’s car was supposedly in the garage, why in the hell would they put her body in it? It’s not like they drove her fifteen feet to the burn pit. And there was only a small amount of blood in the back of her car. If she had her throat slit there would have been a lot of blood leading all the way from the bedroom to the car, and there is no way Avery could have cleaned that up well enough to hide it from the crime scene technicians.
I was working on a cold case homicide a few years ago where two men were wrongly convicted in the 1990s. A key piece of evidence was the testimony of a supposed co-conspirator, who was mentally challenged. While I was reviewing the transcripts of his police interview, I was struck by how completely off the guy’s story was. He didn’t get a single detail right that the investigators didn’t tell him first. I met the investigators and knew them to be good men. I also knew that they firmly believed they had the right guys, right up until DNA proved otherwise. It’s a really bad feeling when you aren’t making progress in a murder case. It gets downright desperate if the case is high profile. Put enough pressure on an investigator and they will start to see things that aren’t there and find meaning in things where there is none. I know why they believed what that guy was telling them, but with the benefit of time and distance it was clearly garbage.
I say that because I got a very similar sense reading the transcripts of Brendan Dassey’s interviews. While I don’t believe Dassey was as slow as his defense attorneys alleged, he was a sixteen year old kid and not a particularly smart one. He was a textbook candidate for a false confession. As I read his confession, I was troubled by how much of his story was either wrong or common knowledge. It seemed like the only time he got things “right” was when he was agreeing with statements that the investigators made.
Police were right to make him a suspect because he was clearly lying on the initial interview. I actually believed most of the second interview, when he described seeing the body in the fire. It was logical, it didn’t contradict the known facts in any meaningful way, and it seemed like he was providing the information not agreeing to it. But I don’t believe the rest of his confession and I certainly don’t think it was believable enough to sustain a criminal conviction.
Plus, his confession contradicts our strangling theory and we have entirely too much invested in that to give up now.
That’s not a bad start huh? We believe Steven Avery killed Teresa Halbach, acting alone. We have concerns about the integrity of some of the evidence, but ultimately not enough to come to a different conclusion. We think he attacked her in the driveway near her car and shot her in the garage, without ever taking her into his home. I think she was strangled and shot, but you aren’t certain if you agree with that or not. We think Brendan Dassey learned about the crime after the fact, possibly seeing Teresa’s body in Avery’s burn pit, but that he loved and/or feared his uncle too much to say anything initially. We would hire Dean Strang and Jerome Buting if we were ever accused of murder. And this book would be a thousand times better if it were written by Kathleen Zellner.
I hope all of our cases go this smoothly.
25 Frozen, 1 Thawed (Murder and Mayhem in the Midwest) takes readers deep into the heart of unsolved and unforgettable crimes from America’s Midwest—cases as haunting as the winter nights they were born from. Through meticulous research and vivid storytelling, veteran journalist Bob Cyphers unravels the chilling details behind murders, disappearances, and mysteries that refused to fade with time.
From the quiet streets of St. Louis to small towns where everyone knows everyone—and no one will talk—these true accounts lay bare the human stories behind the headlines. A young mother gunned down steps from her home, her life cut short by a killer who may have been closer than anyone guessed. A teenager snatched from a bike ride and never seen again, her absence still echoing through her community decades later. A journalist-in-training whose promising future ended in a shallow creek, leaving two suspects and questions that still divide a town. And a sorority sister found beaten on her own front lawn just before Christmas break, in a case that still unsettles a college campus.
Blending compassion for the victims with a reporter’s drive for facts, Frozen doesn’t just revisit the evidence—it brings readers into the emotional center of each story. These are not distant, cold cases; they are stories of lives interrupted, families searching for truth, and communities forever changed.
“Welcome to the Incident Room. This is your Case Briefing.”
Congratulations on your first day as a police detective. You have been partnered with an experienced detective who will walk you through some of the toughest and most infamous crimes in American history. You will visit the crime scene, review the evidence, search for clues, interview witnesses, read the news reports, and decide with your partner who’s the most likely culprit and send the case off to the DA’s office. This is true crime in real time.
As you gain experience, you will be given more autonomy in investigating the cases. Your partner will be there to guide and observe you, but it will be up to you to not only decide who to prosecute, but also name the famous case based on the facts and circumstances. Your investigative skills will be challenged, and so will your knowledge of historical cases throughout the decades, from the late 19th century to the present.
Follow the evidence wherever it takes you, don’t jump to conclusions, and use the experience you gain through these investigations to make your case. Even if you recognize the case and think you know the answers, think again. These cases were selected to challenge and surprise you.
Now get to work.
5.0from 1 reader
Why All the Misdirection?
It is a cold December morning, and you roll up on the address, a house in an affluent suburb. The large custom homes in the neighborhood are decorated for the holidays. The patrol units are already there. The call is a kidnapping.
You have been partnered with Theodore “Ted” Miller for many months now and Ted has always taken the lead on your cases. Ted is short and stocky, balding on top and greying on the sides. He has always been a no-nonsense by-the-book detective and has been an effective mentor, providing you with a great deal of investigative knowledge.
You and Ted are still in the unmarked unit when Ted says, “Okay, we are going to put all that experience, education, and knowledge you have to work. I am going to test you. I am going to ask you your opinion throughout the case. I am going to assess your observation skills, your critical thinking, and your assessment of human behavior. I am going to let you take the lead on this case. You ready?”
“Yes, I am ready,” you say.
“Let’s go.” You and Ted open your doors and get out of the vehicle. Ducking under the crime scene tape, you walk up the front driveway.
You pause for a moment to look at the front yard. You both stand there and carefully observe the scene. noting that there are no foot tracks on the lawn or in the snow. The snow is sparse in some areas and does not completely cover the front lawn. Standing next to you, Ted asks what you think. You say, “Uh, if someone was traversing this area, leaving or coming into the residence, they should have made some impressions in the snow or in the wet grass.” You then inspect a window low to the ground. The window is slightly open, perhaps broken as it does not close completely, and when you look inside it appears to lead to a basement.
Ted asks your impressions. “What do you think so far about the outside of the residence?”
You say, “Erm, well, uh… I don't think anyone really came this way as there are no tracks in the snow, and even if the snow is scattered a little it doesn’t seem like anyone came in or left this way or went into or out of that window.”
Ted smiles and you proceed to the front door and walk up a couple of steps. The front door is ajar, and you carefully step inside. Just inside the front door is a small foyer, a living room is to your left with a fireplace in the corner, and the staircase leading to the upper floors is straight ahead.
You are introduced by a patrol officer to the lady of the house, the mother of the kidnapped child. Her name is Sylvie Garnier. She corrects the pronunciation, “Gar-nee-yay.”
Mrs. Garnier is, of course, very distraught and her face shows anguish. She is wearing a red, black, and grey fleece jacket and black velvet pants, an evening outfit. You ask to see the basement. She is cooperative and takes you past the stairs leading upstairs and around a corner to a set of stairs leading down to the basement.
You walk down the steps to the basement, and you ask to see the window that you inspected earlier. The woman leads you straight ahead into a room that has some toy train sets. You proceed into the next part of the room where there are storage racks along the walls, and shelves with art supplies.
She points to your right, and you see there is a piece of luggage below the open window. Sylvie mentions that the suitcase came from another area in this room where the luggage is normally stored. You move close to the window and inspect it further. The window is high on the wall towards the ceiling of the basement, and you see that it has a small portion of glass that is broken. You also see that the dust is not disturbed and there is a spiderweb that is still intact. Sylvie leaves you and goes upstairs, and you stand and survey the rest of the basement storage room.
“What do you think?” Ted asks you.
“Uh, well… there's no way, in my opinion, that anyone took a young child or would even think they could take a young child out through that window, especially by using that unstable piece of luggage. It also does not look disturbed other than being moved to that spot. My impression of that piece of luggage is that it is staging. It was put there to throw us off the track by the kidnapper. It was not used to enter or leave through the window.” You further state, “The point is not to say that the window was used by the kidnapper. It could have been. The point is everything in visual evidence says that it wasn’t.
“By the way,” you add, “I noticed that she has on makeup, and it looks like she is wearing what she wore last night to a party. And her hair is still together.”
“Interesting. That’s good. I might not have noticed that,” Ted says.
You go back upstairs and turn right into the kitchen off the main living room to find Sylvia there leaning against the kitchen counter. The first thing that strikes you is the black and white checkered floor. There is a lot of clutter on the counters of the kitchen, perhaps from recent meals. It is a small narrow kitchen with doors on either side and another door to a breakfast room.
You stand in the kitchen with Sylvie, who is looking very cooperative and expectant, as if waiting for your questions. You look over at Ted inquisitively. Ted says, “This is all yours, go ahead.”
Out of curiosity, thinking perhaps it was used in the search for her child, you ask about a flashlight sitting on a counter on the other side of the kitchen. “Uh, was that flashlight used last night or recently?”
The flashlight is large, heavy, black, and cylinder-like, like a policeman’s, typically known as a Maglite. From where you are standing it looks like an ordinary flashlight—no damage, nothing unusual about it.
Sylvie says, “I don’t really know where the flashlight came from. I believe it was given to us by a neighbor, erm, or someone. I am not sure why it is out and in the kitchen.”
You have an instinct that leads you to ask about a bowl with a spoon in it on the kitchen counter. “Is that bowl from yesterday?” you ask, initially as a matter of mere conversation, because there are a lot of various plates and dishes there.
“My son, before going to bed, often has a dish of milk and pineapples.”
“Did he have a bowl of pineapples last night?” you ask.
“No, he fell asleep on the way home last night. And we put him right into bed. Both of them fell asleep on the way home and we put them right into bed.”
You stand there in the kitchen looking at your feet for a second. Then you look at Sylvie and say, “Okay, now, where was the ransom note left?”
She guides you and Ted out of the kitchen through the door on the other side. Straight ahead, you notice what appears to be a home office. You follow her as she turns to your right and leads you down a short hall to the bottom of a spiral staircase. “This is where I found the note as I came down this morning.” These seem to be the back stairs, not the main stairs that are near the front door.
“Not the front stairs?”
“This staircase leads up to our bedroom and this is the way I come down every morning.”
“Was the ransom note found right at the bottom of these stairs?”
“Yes, right there,” she says, pointing.
You look around and see that there is a desk to your right, and to your left, there is a door that goes to a mudroom and eventually out to the garage.
You ask her, “Where did they get the writing pad and pen?” and she points out a drawer in the small desk to the right of the stairs. There are pens in a cup on the top of the desk.
You open a drawer in the desk and see some writing tablets. You take out a tablet, carefully handling the edges, thumb through it, then put it down on the desk. You do the same for the next tablet below it. You pick up the third tablet down in the drawer and stop after opening the cover. You inspect the first page, then pick up a pen and use it to turn to the second page. You inspect that page. After continuing to handle the tablet carefully, you put it down on the hall desk.
Ted sees the change in the look on your face and says, “Let’s step in there for a second,” pointing to the door that leads into the mudroom.
You walk into the mudroom so you and Ted can have a little conference. Ted asks you, “What do you think?”
As you begin answering Ted you draw a sketch of the first floor.
“I think…. First, back to the kitchen. It’s interesting about the bowl of pineapples. It was there but she said that her son did not have it the night before. And then there’s the big flashlight that she said she didn’t know how it got there in her kitchen. Also, it seems strange that the ransom note was on the back stairs. How did the kidnappers know she, or anyone, would come down those stairs to find it, and not the main staircase?”
When you retreat back to the hallway near the stairs, Sylvie is no longer there. You proceed down the hallway past the office, through the kitchen and a couple of rooms, to a police officer standing alone in a dining room.
“The note?” Ted says to the officer and looks over at you.
“Right, yes, can we see the ransom note, officer?” you say.
The officer hands you the note and you both view it together, quickly reading the long, rambling, three-page ransom note within plastic covers.
“What do you see?” Ted asks.
“Um, I think this would have taken a long time to write. It looks like a tablet was used and then placed back into the drawer underneath two others. One page shows indented writing as practice and the next page shows the indented writing of the full note. That writing looks like one of those pens on the desk, and they apparently put the pen back in the cup. The wording in the note is just weird. The requested amount is strange. Not a hundred thousand dollars but one hundred eighteen thousand dollars. Why is that?”
“What’s the deal with an ‘attaché’ and ‘exhausting delivery’?” Ted adds.
“Yeah, I don’t know. It says they will call between eight and ten this morning, so I guess we wait.”
You and Ted move over to the other door, and you can see from the dining room into the living room where the victim’s father, Jean-Claude Garnier, is there talking with another man. The officer followed you there.
“Who is with Jean-Claude?” you ask the officer. He tells you that is a friend of Jean-Claude’s, Mr. Rivers, who has come over to help. “That’s… that’s not supposed to…”
“Has anyone talked to the young boy?” you ask.
The officer responds by saying, “No. Jean-Claude prohibited it. No one wanted to go against that.”
Just then you see Jean-Claude and his friend leave the room, walking out the other door toward the stairs.
A minute later, Jean-Claude rushes back into the room carrying a bundle and places it on the living room floor. It is their daughter. The mother races into the room, along with Mrs. Rivers, Sylvie’s friend who has just arrived, as well as Mr. Rivers, and they all crowd around. You hurry over to them and observe what you can in the chaos.
You raise your voice. “Wait! Everyone move back! Do not touch anything! Don’t touch anything.”
Sylvie is kneeling down next to her daughter’s body. Sylvie’s friend, Mrs. Rivers, is trying to hold her back, but she is also kneeling, touching the child’s face with the back of her palm, and crying out.
You move in close and kneel down on the other side of the little girl. She is obviously dead, her body pale and stiff. She is wearing a long-sleeved shirt made of white sweatshirt-like material with an embroidered star on her chest. She is also wearing a pair of white long-john-type bottoms.
Her hands are out over her head with a white nylon cord lightly bound around her right wrist and flowing away from it. There is a similar cord around her neck that has a small, broken paintbrush twisted into it like it was used to tighten the cord.
“Please everyone,” you declare, “I know this is going to be difficult, but we need to preserve the evidence.” Everyone is frozen in place staring at the child on the floor. A white blanket that had been wrapped around her is now laying on the floor next to her.
“Officer,” you say, “please try to keep everyone from touching anything… get CSU on the way and make all the necessary calls.” You don’t want to seem callous by asking for the coroner in front of the family. You turn to the people there and ask, “Where was she?”
“In a room in the basement,” Mr. Rivers says.
“Show me,” you say, holding onto his elbow. “Please, everyone, don’t disturb anything while we’re gone.”
Mr. Rivers takes you and Ted back to the front entryway and down the stairs that lead to the basement. You follow Mr. Rivers down the stairs. This time, instead of going straight ahead into the train room, you walk through another door to the left that leads down a small passageway within the boiler room where there are several pipes and a water heater. It is relatively dark down here, the only light coming from a small window high on the wall above a chest freezer.
Mr. Rivers reaches up above the door, releases a latch, opens the door to a room straight ahead of you, and says, “In here.”
“Nobody checked in here before?” you ask.
“I did. Sort of. I looked in and it was very dark. This whole passage was very dark, and it is difficult to walk around down here. See,” he says, pointing, “the light switch is way over there. It is hard to find.”
You look around the room and see some racks with wine bottles. “That blanket?” you ask about a white blanket on the floor.
“She was wrapped in it.”
“And the nightclothes?” you ask, referring to a small pink nightgown lying spread out on the floor next to the blanket.
“That was just there.”
“What is that piece of black tape on the floor?”
“Oh yes, Jean-Claude pulled that off her mouth just before he picked her up.”
You move toward the back corner of the wine cellar and spot a red pocketknife on the floor. Ted’s eyes widen.
“Mr. Rivers, this pocketknife, did Jean-Claude bring that down to cut the cords?”
“No, that was already laying there.”
“Hmm,” Ted says.
“Have you seen it before?” you ask.
“I think I have seen young Bobby with it a few times.”
“Thank you. Okay, so you two just came down here and found her?”
“Yeah, it was kind of weird. Jean-Claude said, ‘I’m going to search again,’ but he came straight down here, opened the door, turned on the light, and saw her. And, ah…”
“What is it, Mr. Rivers?”
“Well, I swear he gasped before he turned on the light.”
“Thank you, Mr. Rivers.” He slips away down the passage.
“Good job,” Ted says. “You got a lot out of him. Let’s go back upstairs.”
You leave the wine cellar, go down the passage, and, stopping near the stairs, you draw a sketch of the basement.
After finishing your rough sketch you walk up the stairs to the first floor.
Jean-Claude, Mr. Rivers, Sylvie, and Mrs. Rivers are all standing in the living room. Mr. Rivers has his hand on Jean-Claude’s shoulder and Mrs. Rivers is hugging Sylvie.
You approach Sylvie and Mrs. Rivers. “I’m so sorry. May I talk to you for a bit?”
“Do you really have to?” says Mrs. Rivers.
You say, “Yes, I’m sorry, I must.”
You move past the fireplace and into the front room. Ted is standing next to you now, facing Sylvie and Mrs. Rivers.
Sylvie says, “All right.”
“Could we go over last night again, please?”
“Yes, we came home, she was asleep, and we put her to bed. I put a brand new pair of underwear and a sleep top on her, covered her up, and she went to sleep in her bed.... Then I got up this morning and found the note. And…” Sylvie puts her face into Mrs. Rivers’ shoulder.
“I’m sorry. But I have to ask,” you say, “Where was the blanket kept?”
“Oh, that was in the dryer.”
“Where is the laundry room?”
Mrs. Rivers answers for Sylvie. “The laundry room is down in the basement. To the left of the stairs.”
“The laundry room is near the craft room?”
“Yes. It is near the train room and storage area down there.”
Just then there is some noise at the front entryway. You look through the living room and see more officers arriving.
You meet them at the door. You look at Ted and then bark orders. “Alright, it looks like this is a murder. CSU, photograph everything, tag, and bag. Officers, scour this house for anything that might be evidence and protect it for CSU. Make sure the perimeter of the house is taped off. Officer Jackson, wait for the coroner and protect the evidence on the victim. Try to keep the family away. All right now. Everyone, let’s get to work.”
You look over at Ted and see him smile. “That was impressive,” he says.
***
You and Ted are sitting in your cubicle at the office, reviewing the case reports.
“The family has refused any interviews,” Ted says. “They got a lawyer as soon as we started the second search of the home.”
“Here is the 911 call. Listen.” You play the tape. “911 what is your emergency?”
“[Garbled] – Police.”
“What’s going on ma’am?”
“644 14th Street.”
“What’s going on there ma’am?”
“We have a kidnapping. Hurry please.”
“Explain to me what’s going on. Okay?”
“There. We have a… there’s a note left, and our daughter’s gone.”
“How old is your daughter?”
“She’s… she’s six years old. She’s blonde, six years old.”
“How long ago was this?”
“I don’t know; I just got the note, and my daughter’s gone.”
“Does it say who took her?”
“No, I don’t know. There’s a… there’s a ransom note here. It says SBTC Victory.”
“Do you know how long she’s been gone?”
“No, I don’t. Please, we just got up and she’s not here. Oh my god. Please.”
You stop the tape and add, “Dispatcher says she thought she heard voices, a young person’s voice, at the end there but couldn’t make out what was said. It is hard to tell anything.”
“Ah, the ‘ransom’ note. Quite bizarre if you ask me,” Ted says.
You have it in front of you and say, “It reads:
Mr. Garnier, Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals that represent (spelled wrong) a small foreign faction. We respect your business (misspelled) but not the country that it serves. At this time, we have your daughter in our possession (misspelled). She is safe and unharmed; if you want to see her again, you must follow our instructions to the letter.
You will withdraw $118,000. Make sure you bring an adequate size attache to the bank. I will call you between 8 and 10 am tomorrow to instruct you on delivery. The delivery will be exhausting so I advise you to be rested. If we monitor you getting the money early, we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money and hence an earlier pickup of your daughter.
Any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter. You will also be denier her remains for burial. The two gentlemen watching over your daughter do not particularly like you, so I advise you not to provoke them. Speaking to anyone about your situation, such as Police, F.B. I. , etc., will result in your daughter being beheaded. If we catch you talking to a stray dog, she dies. If you alert bank authorities, she dies. If the money is marked or tampered with, she dies. You will be scanned for electronic devices and if any are found, she dies. You can try to deceive us but be warned we are familiar with Law enforcement countermeasures and tactics. You stand a 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try to outsmart us. Follow our instructions and you stand a 100% chance of getting her back. You and your family are under constant scrutiny (again misspelled) as well as the authorities. Don't try to grow a brain Jean-Claude. Don't underestimate us, Jean-Claude. Use that good, southern common sense of yours. It's up to you now Jean-Claude! Victory! S.B.T.C.
“There are just so many things that are weird about this note,” you state, then continue, “First, it seems like it was written by someone that lived through the time of Patty Hearst and the SLA, the Chicago Seven, and all that. Like what is SBTC?”
“And what is ‘respects the victim’s business’ and ‘get some sleep’? Or ‘be rested’? What kidnapper says that? It is the middle of the night. They would already be asleep.” Ted sighs.
“It also seems like the misspellings are easy words but then they correctly spelled words like ‘adequate,’ ‘attaché,” and ‘hence.’ Hence!” you say, laughing.
“And,” you continue, “the talking to a stray dog, she dies, alert the bank, she dies. Along with don’t grow a brain. Doesn’t that sound like it is straight from the movies?”
“Yeah, it does. And the note implies ‘they’ are a group by saying ‘we’ but then the writer forgets the ruse and writes an ‘I’ and ‘my.’”
Then Ted adds, “The $118,000 is strange. Not one million, not 100,000. I checked and the $118,000 is exactly Jean-Claude’s recent bonus.”
Turning the pages, you say, “The whole ransom note is three pages. I checked with a friend at the FBI, and they think this is the longest ransom note on a kidnapping case in history.”
“What does Documents say?” Ted asks.
“Ah, yes. Documents. They say the note would take about 20 minutes to write. But they also say, unfortunately, that the broad fiber-tip pen distorts the minute details. And that they can eliminate everyone else in this case but not Mrs. Garnier.”
“Yeah,” Ted says, “but can you imagine the pressure a document guy would be under to ID someone in this type of case? I know I wouldn’t want to do it. He is wise to just report that it is very similar, and they can’t eliminate her.”
“Here is the postmortem report,” you say. “It’s nine pages long.” Flipping through the various pages, you continue, “A lot of doctor speak, but it comes down to strangulation as the cause of death. There was that ‘garrote’ around her neck. There is a large hemorrhage on the scalp, a blow that caused a brain injury to the head that most likely occurred before strangulation or death.
Ted says, “Here on page seven, it says, ‘small intestine contains fragmented pieces of fruit material which may represent fragments of pineapple.’
“There is one strange line on page nine that I am not sure what it means,” you say. “It says, ‘focal interstitial chronic inflammation.’”
“Looking at the evidence reports,” Ted says, doodling on them with a pencil, “I see that they found the other part to the broken paintbrush used for the garrote in a plastic craft tote box near the wine cellar.
“And they found some fibers similar to Sylvie’s clothes on the tape that was supposedly over her mouth. It says the fibers on the tape are consistent with her fleece jacket.”
“I also see here in the report that upon examining the tape, they got the impression that it was put on the victim after death. They are not sure, but it looks like it.” You say, “I’ve got a report here. I don’t know how much credence to put into these neighbor interviews, but one neighbor remembers seeing lights on during the night and a light off in the front room that is usually on all night.”
“Another neighbor remembers hearing a scream at about two a.m.”
“You know,” Ted says, “according to dispatch, only four minutes elapsed from the 911 call to police arrival, and yet the parents were both dressed.”
You add, “Yeah, they were fully dressed in what looks like something they wore the night before, at that. Why lie about getting dressed in the morning?”
Ted adds, “Then there is the blanket that was in the dryer. Who knew where that was? And wrapped around her just like a mother would do.”
You respond, “And why lie about the pineapple thing? Why lie about what she was wearing when she went to bed?”
“The staging here is quite weird. It is like staging within staging,” Ted says.
“Listen,” you continue, “if you are in the middle of a kidnapping, you don’t write a three-page 20-minute ransom note while you are in the house. You don’t leave the note by the back stairs. You don’t kill the victim in the house. And you don’t fake or stage an elaborate kidnapping to disguise a murder.”
“That’s the way I see it,” Ted agrees. “If you accept that there has been a lot of staging, staging always means misdirection, and you have to accept there has been lying, like lying about putting her right to bed. Lying is always done by the guilty, so it must be someone in the family who committed the murder. No intruder would stage the suitcase, the garotte, the tape, the long ransom note, et cetera.”
“That’s right. It’s not only staging, but also evidence fabrication. It is unlikely the craft-made garotte is what caused the strangulation. It was fabricated to account for it. The note, the tape, the luggage, the cord—all fabricated.”
After a long pause, Ted says, “Well, we have hashed out the evidence. Overall, what do you think?”
“Here is what I think,” you say. “This is speculation, but I think the children didn’t go right to bed and were not asleep when they got home. Bobby was given some pineapple and milk. For some reason, the little girl took the bowl from him and ate some of his pineapple. He got angry and hit her, perhaps with the flashlight, or maybe she was pushed against the sink. She didn’t die right then but maybe went into convulsions caused by the brain injury. In order to get her to be quiet and stop squirming, he strangled her, and she died. He probably did not intend to go that far. Then the parents came in and saw the situation. Like I say, speculation.”
“But to blame it on an intruder they used the rest of the night to create this ruse. They were in a state of panic knowing that they had just lost their daughter and did not want to also lose their son. They put the suitcase under the window, made the garotte from Sylvie’s craft supplies to account for the strangulation, placed her in that semi-hidden wine cellar, and lightly tied her hands. They got the blanket out of the dryer, and for some reason placed a nightgown next to her. Then they sat down and used the notepad and pen at the desk to write the long ransom note. Including the exact amount of the bonus.
“Then, after everything was prepared, things were put back in their places like the pad and pen, except they forgot about Bobby’s Swiss Army knife and the flashlight. After perhaps even disposing of a couple of items like the tape and the cord, Sylvie called 911. Because they never undressed, they were fully dressed when the first officer arrived four minutes later.
“They would not let anyone talk to Bobby, for good reason. When no one found the victim after a few hours, Jean-Claude couldn’t stand it any longer. So, he went down into the basement and brought the victim upstairs.”
“I’ve got one for you,” Ted says. “What about the DNA they found on the underwear?”
“Sylvie said it was a brand-new package. It’s not in fluid so it is most likely touch DNA. I’m betting it would match a packager in a factory somewhere. If they never get into the system, we may never know whose DNA it is.”
“Yeah, but it’s DNA. People are going to pay a lot of attention to that,” Ted reminds you.
“I get it,” you say. “You got to look at this from a total perspective. If we have a case where you have a murder, a gun is at the scene, a bullet matches the gun, a casing matches the gun, a suspect owns that gun, he is seen that day with the gun, the suspect hated the dead guy. So, all the evidence we have points to that guy. And let’s say they discover foreign DNA on the gun, Should you throw out all your evidence and not prosecute the guy because of the foreign DNA? No. Here, once you recognize the staging and all the things meant to misdirect us actually came from right there in the house—the flashlight, the garrote, the blanket, the note, the pens and pads, even the luggage are all from within. Nothing really points to the outside. Except the DNA.”
“You can’t let one thing overrule everything else.”
“Right you are. But I know this is going to be hard for the DA to come to grips with,” you say. “We’ve got this prominent family who just lost their daughter, and perhaps their son committed the crime. To what end will charging the young boy accomplish? He’s a minor, so we know how that goes. If you charge the parents for their part, that would look really bad politically because they just lost their daughter. To what end would that bring justice for the murder?”
“I sure wouldn’t want to be in the DA’s shoes,” Ted adds with a finality.
Dead Girls Do Talk releases on September 22, 2026. Order yours today!
Before their words became evidence, they were simply trying to understand their own lives.
They wrote in diaries and journals. They saved letters, emails, text messages, calendars, and private notes. They documented relationships, fears, unwanted attention, escalating control, and ordinary moments they never imagined would one day be examined by detectives or presented to a jury.
In Dead Girls Do Talk, investigative journalist and true crime author LaDonna Humphrey examines cases in which women’s own words survived the violence committed against them and changed what investigators, families, and courts understood.
Fifteen-year-old Candice Parchment recorded an attempted sexual assault she was too frightened to report. A mother’s private diary helped reopen the suspicious death of Robin Gilbert after twenty-one years. Julie Jensen left behind a letter she hoped would never be needed. Susan Powell’s voice survived across journals, emails, videos, calendars, and the scattered records of an ordinary life. And at the center of Humphrey’s investigation is nineteen-year-old Melissa Witt, whose diary may still contain vital context surrounding her unsolved 1994 murder.
Drawing on nearly a decade of investigative work, interviews, police records, court documents, academic research, and victims’ personal writings, Humphrey reveals why evidence often begins long before the crime scene. These private records do not replace forensic science or prove guilt on their own. They preserve relationships, behavioral patterns, warnings, and changes that hindsight might otherwise distort or erase.
Dead Girls Do Talk refuses to reduce murdered and missing women to bodies, headlines, or supporting characters in stories about the men who harmed them. It restores the person before the mystery and asks us to recognize a devastating truth:
These women were not waiting to be heard after they died. They were asking to be heard while they were still alive.
