The Woman in Blue releases August 28, 2026. Order yours today.
On Labor Day weekend, 1956, a six-week-old baby vanished from her carriage inside a crowded Sears department store in Hamden, Connecticut. Five days later, three boys fishing at Lake Whitney found her—sealed in a potato sack, weighted down with a rock.
For nearly seventy years, the disappearance of baby Cynthia Ruotolo has remained one of Connecticut's most haunting unsolved crimes. Investigators had several leads, but one stood out—a mysterious woman in a blue dress, seen in the Sears parking lot that afternoon. Composite sketches were drawn. Files were opened and reopened. The woman was never found.
James Peinkofer was investigating a different Connecticut case—the shaken-baby killings of nurse Virginia Jaspers—when he came across the Ruotolo file and noticed something the original investigation missed: this wasn't the family's first infant death. It wasn't their second, either.
Drawing on autopsy reports, forensic analysis, and firsthand interviews with surviving family members, Peinkofer reconstructs the case from the inside out—and lays out a methodical, evidence-driven argument for what really happened and why investigators were looking for the wrong woman from the very beginning.
The Woman in Blue is a cold case reopened by someone who knows exactly what to look for in the silences of an old autopsy report—and a sober reckoning with how many "accidents" get filed away because no one asked the right question at the right time.
