On June 30th, 1999, a woman was driving alone down a rural road near West Alton, Missouri, when something at the edge of a cornfield caught her eye. She pulled over. A man was lying face down in the dirt, fully dressed, in the middle of a hot Missouri summer. He had been there for days. His name was Ricky McCormick, he was 41 years old, and he lived fifteen miles away. He had no car. There was no bus service to that road. Nobody had reported him missing. And nobody could explain how he got there.

Investigators from the Major Case Squad in St. Louis worked every angle they could find. The medical examiner could not confirm a cause of death, though a head injury was suspected. What they did know was that Ricky had last been seen three days earlier at an Amoco gas station in St. Louis, and between that sighting and that cornfield, there ...