Girl, 11 by Amy Clarke (grave mercy TXT) 📗

Anne:

With all due respect to those publications, your podcast is the reason this story is even back in the papers at all. Everyone else has moved on. They did their duty by putting a feature and a call for information in the papers last year, but that’s it. You’re the only one who is investigating this thing for real, trying to find the guy who did this. The police got the information first, of course, but there’s no match for the woman’s DNA in CODIS, the national DNA database. They’re working with a forensic genealogist now to trace the family tree and find the woman’s relatives. This method has helped solved a lot of high-profile cases recently, but some of the databases used early on have made it harder for law enforcement to access people’s DNA results, so that has slowed the process. They may well find a close enough match to locate her relatives and identify her, but it could take months—maybe years. In the meantime, I think progress can be made. That’s why I contacted you.

Elle:

What do you think this means, personally? I know you said it’s outside your area of expertise, but if you had to guess.

Anne:

Well, it lets us know that the woman probably wasn’t just a random victim TCK killed to confuse detectives. She was known to him for at least a year, since she had proximity to Carissa before she was killed. Unfortunately, all other potential forensic evidence was burned up along with the house, and there was no male DNA found on any of the victims’ bodies, so we have nothing to compare to the man in the cabin with her. I performed the same test on his bones, and the results have been entered into CODIS too. They didn’t come up with a match, which means he was likely never arrested before his death. That doesn’t rule him out as being TCK, but it doesn’t necessarily make him likely to be the killer either.

Elle:

Because most serial killers start with low-level violent offenses and petty crimes, like stalking or burglary, right?

Anne:

That’s what I understand, although it’s not my area of expertise. Now, TCK could have done crimes like that and just never got arrested, but it’s something to consider. But for those who are so confident the man in the cabin was TCK, there is one other key piece of evidence that you should be aware of. As best we can tell, the DNA belonged to a man in his forties. This corroborates initial age determinations our office made after examining his skeleton.

Elle:

That’s . . . huge, actually. Every expert profile developed on TCK determined he was late twenties or early thirties. Even if the profilers were wrong, the statistics bear out that most serial killers are in that age range. Why was the age of the man in the cabin never made public?

Anne:

By the time they provided the age estimation of his skeleton, the media fervor surrounding the TCK case had died down. There were no killings in 2000, and then the eyes of the nation were on New York City and the nightmare surrounding the terror attacks on 9/11. The few papers that did report the findings buried the information in later paragraphs, and even if people did see it, they didn’t seem to think it mattered. The consensus among law enforcement was that the profiles must have been wrong. Everyone was more than happy to believe he was dead. It was easier—neater—to imagine that TCK took his own life after killing his partner and setting fire to that cabin. The murders stopped, after all.

Elle:

The question I always get when I posit that TCK is still alive is, “Well, then who was the man in the cabin?” I have to be honest, it’s one question I have a hard time answering. I’ve imagined dozens of scenarios, but I can’t seem to come up with anything I feel confident in. Do you have a theory?

Anne:

It’s pure speculation, of course. Like you said, it’s probably something we will never know unless and until they catch the killer. But if I had to guess, I’d say there are two options: one, TCK killed a man—someone known to him or a stranger on the street—or two, he robbed a fresh grave to steal a decoy. Either way, the public and law enforcement have fallen for it for two decades.

[SOUND BREAK: Skype ringtone chiming and then being answered.]

Elle:

What have you got for me, Tina?

Elle voice-over:

After I interviewed Anne, I got in touch with Tina Nguyen, whom you might remember from previous seasons of Justice Delayed. She’s my intrepid producer-slash-researcher extraordinaire.

Tina:

I looked into all the missing persons records in the Midwest for men in their thirties and forties, like you asked. You wouldn’t believe how short the list is. I opened up the timeframe to eighteen months on either side of the cabin-burning incident, but still. I only turned up about a hundred names.

Elle:

Middle-aged white men don’t go missing without explanation very often.

Tina:

Lucky them. I tracked down a few of the guys, even though their case files were still open. Contacted the local departments to make sure they knew where they were. They seemed surprised, so oops. Sorry, fellas. Guess your second families are in for a shock.

Elle:

Of course, you solved a couple decades-old cold cases while you were researching another one. That’s very on-brand for you.

Tina:

What can I say? I don’t like it when men ditch their child support payments to start new lives in Florida. Anyway, I managed to narrow it down to three really good possibilities. These guys all went missing within a week of the cabin burning, and they have supposedly never been heard from since. I can’t find anyone who resembles them online, and their personal information hasn’t been used since they were reported missing.

Elle:

You’re amazing. Anyone in particular catching your eye?

Tina:

Yeah, this one guy, not-his-real-name-Stanley. He was reported missing by his secretary three days