Harris True Crime Collection: The Unsolved Murder of Adam Walsh: Special Single Edition (ePub)

True crime writers primarily pursue the question "Why?" Why did somebody commit the crime? How could he get away with it for so long?

In my true crime books, I pursue a different primary question: about the case's outcome, I ask, "Are you sure?"

Every true crime story has loose ends that naggingly just don't fit into the constructed narrative. They make for a challenge: stay with your narrative and ignore or play them down, or follow them and risk your narrative.

There is an essential messiness to true crime that a reader of it must both resist and embrace. But that's why we read it, right? If you want everything well-tied up at the end, read crime fiction. To start, give up on the idea that a story must have a bottom. How can there not be a bottom? Yes, theoretically there is a bottom, but to us on the outside looking in, it's just not accessible. In reality, what we think are story bottoms are really false bottoms; beneath them, if we dare to look, are more bottoms. That wisdom, I should add, did not come to me easily. My stories are always less about the crimes themselves than my endurance to stay on the rollercoaster rides to find the truth. Countless times I'm upended, and I never see it coming.

Yet the job of a guide, narrator and investigator, such as myself, remains to organize that mess. However, I also scrutinize the work of the other guides, narrators, and investigators on the story. When I approach a story, I look for, then follow, significant pathways not taken: people who law enforcement couldn't get or weren't then ready to talk; witnesses who weren't asked everything important; and things the authorities were blind to or simply missed.

Then there are the stories in which the official investigators suppressed facts. On those, I am unrelenting in pursuing public records (always politely, politeness is essential in all information gathering). In obscure files and from additional reporting based on them, I've discovered a few rare things