“I know I might not act like I love you but I really do!” Jessica wrote to her mom one Mother’s Day. “Thanks for being there for me when nobody else was.”

Lisa said Bryan was a controlling and aggressive boyfriend, but his mother, Theresa, said it was the opposite: Bryan was there for Jessica when her family wasn’t. In winter 2013, Jessica moved out of Lisa’s house and lived with Theresa and Bryan for a few months. At first, Theresa told Bryan that Jessica couldn’t stay. Then, she said, she heard Lisa yelling at her on speakerphone. “There’s no way you’re coming back to my house if you’re with that n****r,” she said they said. (Lisa said she had “probably” said that but that she “didn’t call him that word as being racist.”) One morning, Theresa saw Jessica and Bryan sleeping together on the front porch, shivering in the cold. So she took Jessica in, and grew to love her like a daughter.

In May 2013, Jessica was living with her mother again. She was seeing someone new, but was still talking to Bryan. One day, while the two were alone in her mother’s house, a gunshot went off. Jessica said Bryan tried to shoot her because she wouldn’t get back together with him. Bryan said Jessica tried to shoot him in order to get him out of the house. The only charges related to the unresolved shooting were filed by Lisa, who pressed charges for trespassing (Bryan pleaded not guilty) and for petty theft because Bryan took the gun with him (Bryan pleaded guilty). After that, Theresa sent Bryan to live with his older brother in Iowa.

By the time her newest boyfriend went to jail last fall for robbery, Jessica had been in the process of getting her life together for a few months. She spent a few weeks at a Christian shelter that helps women “become productive citizens” after she accidentally hit her grandmother, her mother said. She got a job at Goody’s department store, where her co-workers doted on her, taking her on trips to Halloween haunted houses and saving her on-sale clothes from the juniors section that only Jessica could fit into because she was so tiny. Her dad gave her back her car, which he had taken away until she stopped hanging out with friends he disapproved of.

Both Lisa and Ben said Jessica made comments that people thought she was “snitching” to the police in the weeks before she died. Afterward, gang members offered their condolences, her parents said. Lisa said some of them knocked on her door in the middle of the night in the weeks after Jessica died to ask whether the “snitching” rumors were true. They seemed to know as little as Lisa did.

“I think Jessica got in over her head with some people and found out some things she shouldn’t have known, because she was smart off her own mouth,” Ben said. Both her parents said they wish they had tried harder to find out who thought she was snitching, or what she was snitching about. But they didn’t. Because Jessica was just being Jessica, and it wasn’t unusual for Jessica to be in some sort of fight or another, drama being one of few activities to pass the time in Courtland.

“I wish that people would know that Jessica, regardless of whatever mistakes she made, was a good person,” Theresa said. “She did things that every other teenager does. But she’s not here to defend herself.”

While “snitching” can get you killed in Courtland, the town thrives on backhanded gossip. At one time or another, most people have been involved in situations they’d rather not recall: drug busts, assault charges, or even plain old relationship woes. Just because someone committed a crime, attacked their sister, or cheated on their husband doesn’t mean they killed Jessica. But internet speculation about the murder has pressured panicked locals into deflecting suspicion by outing each other’s dirty secrets.

And at the right moment — on a tree-shaded country road with the rush of 13-year-old cicadas pounding in your ears, reading a particularly astute-seeming Facebook comment — any theory, however ludicrous, can sound plausible.