For three years now, I’ve gone into work on February 13th under oppressively low, gray skies. The ground has been cold and soaked, and it seeps into my shoes, bones, and mind. There’s a battle in my brain and a storm in my heart, and I’ve never failed to note that if the fourth year back had been like this – if February 13th, 2017 had been half as miserable as I feel right now – a lot of people’s lives would be very different.

But February 13th, 2017 was beautiful and unseasonably warm and bright. The kind of day where the best thing in the world to do if you were 13 would be running off with your best friend after school to be outside. It’s just what Abigail Williams and Liberty German did that day, when we lost them.

…

There has been more written and spoken and recorded and broadcast and rebroadcast about this case than I would ever care to recount. I wouldn’t dream of adding to the din of armchair sleuths and theorists, or even journalists, though that is partly what I am. But I’m not trying to help you understand the mystery or the crime. I want you to understand its effects.

These murders were an earthquake. Podcasters and YouTubers and Redditors are trying to explain what happened at the epicenter. But I want to explain what happened at the surface – the rifts it opened and the institutions it crumbled, the fear of the aftershocks, and just how far away the tremors could be felt.

I never knew Abby and Libby in their lives, but their deaths had a profound personal effect on me. I know I’m not alone in that.

February 13, 2017

It was already late when we got the first phone call, from someone in Delphi saying two girls were missing and lots of people were going out looking. I thanked her for the info and said we’ll call police about it. Often in calls from friends and family about this sort of thing, the child is found moments later; or sometimes they’re a runaway who had good reason to be out of the home in the first place. Police – at least our police – are good at vetting which cases are which.

But before I could get a hold of anyone at the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office, the phone rang again. Same story. This time, I told them we’re working on it. Now we’re flipping back through scanner traffic to see if they said anything about it over radio, and our anchor, who is from Delphi, is checking Facebook to see if her neighbors are saying anything about it.

After a couple minutes, we got confirmation from the sheriff’s department that they are starting a search party, which is something I had never seen done for any missing child report in my very short time in news. We took our reporter off her main story and sent her up to Delphi. She was just a few minutes out the door when I got a third call. This time it was a man, and he was angry.

“We’ve got two missing kids here and you haven’t said a thing about it! This is a big deal!”

I told him our reporter was on her way and he hung up. A year later, on February 13, 2018, I recounted that phone call and sent a summary to the tip line email, because I had just gotten off 24 hours of urging people that no tip was too small, and could no longer afford to rationalize.

February 14, 2017

I woke up to the push alert: “Bodies found in search for missing Delphi girls.” Instantly, I felt the sadness and disappointment. We’d covered tragic deaths before, but last night I’d heard the fear and urgency in the voices of the community. It made it more personal.

The night before there had been some disparaging speculation, which was actually hopefulness thinly veiled in disparagement: “Oh, thirteen year olds? Ah, they probably snuck away to be with a secret boyfriend somewhere.” “If they knew somebody online they could be half way to Chicago by now.”

None of that really fit to me. Namely, because that story had played out a hundred times before, and we never had three neighbors and an Indianapolis affiliate calling us about it within hours. If these girls had anything like that sort of personality, we would have heard of it by now, and there probably wouldn’t have been a search party in the first place.

Frankly, I thought it was a hiking accident. Indiana isn’t too hilly, but it has its share of ravines around the creeks, where they were. And it was February after all – those creeks were rising and the night had been frigid and wet despite the sunny day. Even after hearing there were bodies, I was unprepared for the next push alert, of which I remember only this fragment:

“Foul play.”

February 15, 2017

The next days all run together as if they were one long descent into a deepening horror. The autopsies were going to be held days from now and far away, with a specialist in southern Indiana. When they were eventually completed, investigators declined to release the cause of death. That’s a known investigation tactic, but it was also impossible to shake the feeling that whatever happened was simply unspeakable.

Parents in Delphi stopped sending their children outside, but it also seemed from a distance like hardly anyone stayed in their own homes. They gathered at church for prayer. They brought food and coffee to investigators. They put up posters and canvassed everywhere they went for someone in a blue jacket.

At one point, a seasoned coworker said to me, “must have been a relative of one of them,” as if no other kind of murder had occurred in human history. On a public trail when it could have been a private home? I marveled. A relative who Libby was concerned enough to film from a distance? It seemed to me the only person it couldn’t be was a relative. He was rationalizing because this just doesn’t happen in towns like Delphi.

And that was the first time I said out loud what I had felt in my gut from the moment police said the girls were murdered. It wasn’t a relative and this case was not going to be a quick solve. The man is a serial killer, in psyche if not yet in practice. He is hundreds of miles away by now. We will find him in a decade when he strikes again and slips up. We are in this for the long haul.

February 16, 2017

It was a stroke of brilliance that I wish had never happened. One nonchalant scanner call in a slew of more urgent traffic, asking if there was a trooper available to come to an address on Bicycle Bridge Lane. Somehow, our executive producer heard it, and somehow, she correctly guessed exactly what it meant. State police were serving a search warrant.

We were up there live in half an hour. Once we were up there, Indy caught on and then everyone was up there. The online vitriol was instant. In the community, no one questioned: thank God, this was it, an end to the 48 hour nightmare. Our photographer, whose wife is in Libby’s extended family, came back from the field talking about how obvious it was and how that house has always been creepy. The family inside sent us statements to the effect of “we have no idea who did this, our hearts are breaking for our neighbors too, please call off the torches and pitchforks.”

And as soon as the search wraps, we get the news from state police. Nothing was found here, please give the family privacy, and then the moment of revelation: They had searched half a dozen other houses before this and still had more than half a dozen with warrants coming in.

I felt cold and terrible in that moment. What had we done? What had the people of Delphi done? Fear was ruling us. It had seemed like in grief, the people of Delphi had come so close together. Were they turning on each other too? How could police have more than a dozen search warrants? This was the first aftershock.

We did not cover any of the other searches that week, and we didn’t need to. Three years later, most people have forgotten they happened.

February 17, 2017

I picked up a phone call from CNN. They’d been calling us a lot this week.

“Newsroom.”

“Hi, it’s CNN Newssource. I was calling because we had requested your package on the double homicide in Delphi, and it looks like we were sent the wrong one.”

“Really? We only had one package on it today.”

“Well, this one I’m seeing is about someone donating a fridge. Don’t you have anything on the investigation?”

Since finding the girls, the Delphi police station had been staffed around the clock with far more investigators than it was ever designed to handle. Sheriff’s deputies, state police, the FBI and a full bank of people answering tip lines all crowded into the small town station and hardly ever took a break. The community had so faithfully started bringing food to them, but in the tiny break room there wasn’t enough space to keep it all, or for investigators to keep their own lunches for that matter. So someone donated a fridge.

There hadn’t been any new information in the case itself that day, and the day before, the people of Delphi had so rudely seen the ugly side of their own fear. We all desperately needed a story that was going to put us back on track for the Cause, and then, glory be, we heard about the investigators’ break room. If you wanted the real news on how the investigation was going, this was it.

“There is no other package,” I repeated to Newssource. “If you want something else, maybe Indy’s doing it.”

February 25, 2017

It’s Saturday, at last. On Friday, someone in Lafayette had won the lottery – $435 million. The attendant at the gas station where it was sold said this: “I know that there’s a lot of things that are really bad going on, but like, for having a Powerball winner here in Lafayette, Indiana, you know, instead of anywhere else in the world, it’s amazing.”

Like karmic balance. Lightning striking. One person wins the lottery, and the first thing any of us think of is the murders.

That may have been my first newscast that didn’t lead with a story out of Delphi. It would still be another month or two before I had a newscast that didn’t cover the homicides at all, and well more than a year before I personally had a day I didn’t think about the girls.

A year of thinking daily about the deaths of two people you never even knew.

I needed a break, so I left my dog at my parents’ house in Illinois and continued on to Saint Louis, where I’d attended college. But I didn’t intend to meet up with anyone – I just wanted to see the old sights, the main street walk in Saint Charles, the free museums in Forest Park, the Arch.

There was a strange phenomenon as I crossed state lines: I was paranoid. Not about the possibility of murderers, but about my fellow anyones. I had an Indiana license plate on my car, and it felt like I was branded. I knew it was both ridiculous and impossible, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that everywhere I drove, people around me whispered solemnly “Indiana. She’s from where those girls were killed.”

The trip was listless. I did a lot of thinking, not about the case but not not about it either. Something in my life felt very depressing, very wrong, and I must have thought that in going back to Saint Louis I could also go back to the time when I lived in Saint Louis, when my job was before me and not all around me. (In the name of all honesty, it was not just about the case; my station was also going through a change of ownership at the time and they were putting a great many new demands on us amidst this most difficult coverage I may ever encounter.)

I was wandering around the base of the Arch, trying to figure out why I did not feel anything at all today, when I started to head back to my car. As I passed under a bridge toward the parking lot, a train came rattling by overhead. It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard. I stopped. It lasted minutes. It shook my skin and filled my ears and reassigned my brain waves and I felt the sound.

That’s when I realized I had been depressed. And if I’d been depressed, how could their families cope? How could anyone understand? A great and unspeakable evil had entered thousands of lives – and the source was one person. One person, who’s still talking, seeing, feeling, sleeping, out there, somewhere.

How can it be? How can it be? How can it come from human hands? This is the devil.

Near sunset I crossed back over the Mississippi. One of the last stories we had done before I left was that the FBI was paying to put billboards up all across the country with the blurry picture Libby had taken. The whole nation would see him. Just as I hit the Illinois side, I noticed a billboard. The word WANTED was written in red letters across the top, and the rest of the information was printed out in the familiar yellow and black color scheme from the FBI flyers I’d seen.

I held my breath – but it wasn’t so. The billboard was from some other case, and I remembered the new ones weren’t going to be out for a few weeks. I thought about my license plate. If we are lucky, maybe soon, people really will know what it means.

Three Years Later

That month was just the beginning. There are a hundred other stories I could tell you, about suspects come and gone, other crimes solved, the song I wrote, finding out years later that Libby’s favorite band was the very one I’d leaned into in my depression. About the uncountable ways that hundreds of people, strangers to Abby and Libby, have experienced horror and grief from this case.

Will it be a decade? Do we have years of unanswered pain ahead of us still? I remain hopeful that I’m wrong. Unfortunately, my instincts have a very good track record with that kind of thing. But I can tell you with absolute certainty that I will not forget this case, or forgive it, even if it takes four times that long. And as long as I have a pen and a platform, I will do my best to bring the girls back every February until they have justice.