The New York Times–bestselling true crime author returns to her Oregon hometown to investigate an unsolved murder and its effect on her community.
Corvallis, Oregon, 1967. After attending a party on a fall evening, seventeen-year-old high school senior Dick Kitchel disappeared. Ten days later, his body was spotted by two children as it floated down the Willamette River. He had been beaten and strangled.
While the nation as a whole faced major upheaval—from the Vietnam War to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.—the college town of Corvallis was devastated by Dick Kitchel’s unsolved murder. Police had a suspect but never made an arrest. Decades later, a cold case detective claimed to have solved the case. Yet justice proved elusive once again.
Now Rebecca Morris, a New York Times–bestselling author and Kitchel’s former classmate, returns to her hometown to explore how the murder changed her town and the lives Kitchel’s friends.