This week, we’re back with a blind read. We don’t do any research beforehand and refuse to peek at spoilers, so we have no idea how this ends! This is a CalMatters investigative piece called “The Man Who Unsolved a Murder” by Anat Rubin. It covers a six-year-old boy named Willie Cook who vanished from a small Northern California logging town in 1976.

What starts as a cold case kidnapping quickly unravels into something messier: a witness whose story keeps shifting, a confession that a leading expert calls psychological torture, a defense investigator who starts pulling one thread and can't stop, and a question that haunts every layer of this story: what happens when the system designed to find the truth is built to skip that part?

"That's Genevieve. And that's Kaitlyn."

Sisters-in-law, best friends, former CNAs, ...