The Shooter at Midnight: Murder, Corruption, and a Farming Town Divided

By Sean Patrick Cooper

“Gripping . . . A potent account of the crime and its aftermath, placing its story of heartbreaking violence and injustice in a larger portrait of a rural American town.”—The Wall Street Journal

The harrowing true story of a cold-blooded murder and the campaign to bring justice to a suffering Midwestern town

On a November night in 1990, Cathy Robertson is murdered in her home outside Chillicothe, Missouri. After law enforcement conduct a haphazard investigation, the sheriff’s office puts the case in the hands of a Kansas City private eye with his own agenda. In a close-knit town still reeling from the aftereffects of the farming crisis, friends and neighbors abruptly fracture into opposing camps. Mark Woodworth, a Robertson family neighbor, eventually receives four life sentences for a crime that a growing group of local supporters believe he didn’t commit.

In a surprising, dramatic narrative that spans decades, Mark’s family turns to Robert Ramsey, an attorney willing to take on a corrupt political machine suppressing the truth. But the community’s way of life is irrevocably damaged by the parallel tragedies of the farming crisis and Cathy’s unsolved murder, in a gripping story about the fault-lines of a fracturing America that continue to cut across the farm belt today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Release date: Apr 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9780525507116

Book preview

Cover for The Shooter at Midnight: Murder, Corruption, and a Farming Town Divided, Author, Sean Patrick Cooper

Praise for

THE SHOOTER AT MIDNIGHT

In unspooling the story of a murder in the American heartland, Sean Patrick Cooper finds much more than he bargained for. This is a book about a terrible crime, but it’s also about economic crises in the farming community, small-town injustice, and the warping effects of grief within a family. A probing, compelling, surprising read.

—Rachel Monroe, author of Savage Appetites

"Riveting from the outset, The Shooter at Midnight is an expertly woven story of a crime that tore a small town asunder and its devastating fallout in an already fractured community. With an extraordinary eye for detail, Cooper navigates the many legal complexities of the case with ease and empathy, never losing sight of the very human tragedy that lies at its core."

—Susan Jonusas, author of Hell’s Half-Acre

"Though it begins with an account of a murder, The Shooter at Midnight is much more than true crime. With a detective’s eye for detail and a journalist’s passion for truth, Cooper unravels a miscarriage of justice, showing how an actual conspiracy spread from humble farmhouses to fancy courtrooms in 1980s Missouri. This is stunning and essential storytelling."

—Jason Fagone, author of the bestselling The Woman Who Smashed Codes

"Like all first-rate true crime stories, The Shooter at Midnight not only takes the reader into the fascinating human story of the crime itself, with its wonderfully stubborn cast of heroes and villains refusing to conform to type, but it also opens up the wider context in which the crime occurs—in this case the ruin and strife spread across rural America by the farming crisis of the 1980s. The result is a gripping, deeply informed book in which political folly, explosive violence, and an agonizing injustice play out with the intensity—and the surprising redemption—of ancient tragedy."

—James Lasdun, author of Give Me Everything You Have

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE SHOOTER AT MIDNIGHT

Sean Patrick Cooper is a journalist who has contributed narrative features and essays to The New Republic, n+1, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Baffler, Tablet, UnDark, The Atavist, Victory Journal, The Awl, and others. He received an MA in journalism at New York University, where he was a Department Fellow in the Literary Reportage Program, and a BA in English literature from Rutgers University. This is his first book.

Book Title, The Shooter at Midnight: Murder, Corruption, and a Farming Town Divided, Author, Sean Patrick Cooper, Imprint, Penguin Books

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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Copyright © 2024 by Sean Patrick Cooper

Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

Brief portions of this work originally appeared as Blood Cries Out in The Atavist Magazine, no. 85, November 2018.

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Names: Cooper, Sean Patrick, author.

Title: The shooter at midnight : murder, corruption, and a farming town divided / Sean Patrick Cooper.

Description: [New York] : Penguin Books, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023034877 (print) | LCCN 2023034878 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143135449 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525507116 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Murder—Investigation—Missouri—Case studies. | Political corruption—Missouri—Case studies. | Police corruption—Missouri—Case studies.

Classification: LCC HV8079.H6 C66 2024 (print) | LCC HV8079.H6 (ebook) | DDC 363.25/952309778—dc23/eng/20230802

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034877

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034878

Cover design: Colin Webber

Cover images: (farm) Corey Hendrickson / Gallery Stock; (fingerprints) Douglas Sacha / Getty Images

Designed by Sabrina Bowers, adapted for ebook by Estelle Malmed

pid_prh_6.3_148340210_c0_r0

To Laurie

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

—D. H. Lawrence

Who would not be . . . a Missouri farmer, and dwell in a land of feasts and fatness, where from fabulously fertile fields there come no failures. Does a drouth threaten once in distant decades? It never brings disaster. Does one crop show a shortage? Then another proves more prolific and profitable.

—The Chillicothe Constitution, 1916

CONTENTS

PART ONE

Chapter 1 THE FIFTH ATTORNEY

Chapter 2 NOVEMBER 13, 1990

Chapter 3 A PRIMARY SUSPECT

Chapter 4 THE BROKEN PARTNERSHIP

Chapter 5 THE PRIVATE EYE

Chapter 6 UNDERCOVER IN CHILLICOTHE

Chapter 7 THE FARMERS’ PROTEST

PART TWO

Chapter 8 FIRST-CLASS FLIGHT TO LONDON

Chapter 9 DING-DONG THE WITCH HUNT’S DEAD

Chapter 10 THE TRIAL

PART THREE

Chapter 11 GONE FISHING

Chapter 12 THE LEWIS LETTERS

Chapter 13 A COUNTRY AND WESTERN SONG

Chapter 14 TREES IN EVERY DIRECTION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Appendix 1 CALVERT’S FROLIC

Appendix 2 FAST EDDIE

Appendix 3 JURY SELECTION

Appendix 4 JUNK SCIENCE

A NOTE ON SOURCES

INDEX

_148340210_

PART ONE

Chapter 1

THE FIFTH ATTORNEY

There was no good reason for Bob Ramsey, a veteran St. Louis defense attorney, to take on Mark Woodworth as a client. At first glance, Woodworth couldn’t appear more guilty. He’d already been convicted, not once but twice, of the same murder—once in 1995, and then again in 1999 after a retrial, when the judge, throwing the book at him, had sent Woodworth back to Missouri state prison with four life sentences.

The evidence against Mark looked damning. The victim had been Mark’s neighbor Cathy Robertson, a forty-one-year-old mother of five. At the crime scene, investigators had found Mark’s fingerprint on a box of bullets, the same type of bullets police suspected the shooter had used. Moreover, police had confiscated a Ruger pistol from Mark’s father and passed it along to a ballistics examiner. The examiner fired a test bullet from the Ruger, looked at the bullet under a microscope, and then matched it to a remnant of one of the six bullets used in the shooting. Mark, who was sixteen at the time of the murder but was certified as an adult by the state of Missouri at trial, had target-practiced with a nearly identical Ruger pistol weeks before Cathy was killed. Neither did it help his cause that the Robertsons lived across the street from the Woodworths and that Mark slept alone in a bedroom in the basement, next to a door he could sneak out of without anyone knowing he was gone. During a polygraph, Mark responded to the suggestion that he’d been the killer and could now face the death penalty by telling the detective matter-of-factly, We all have to die sometime.

At his first trial, when Mark was brought up to the witness stand to proclaim his innocence, he had not been a convincing advocate for his own cause. He did not passionately reject the prosecutor’s suggestion that he had been the gunman. Quite the opposite, in fact; he wasn’t showing much emotion at all. Pale, short, thin, with a spread of acne on his cheeks and narrow, dark brown eyes that tended to gaze off into the distance, Mark had the type of sullen disposition that, as the Missouri state prosecutors suggested in their closing remarks, was not unlike all the American teenage boys with brains soaked by action movies and bloody video games who kept making the nightly news for brutal acts of senseless violence in the 1990s. In both trials, jurors learned Mark had almost no social existence to speak of. He was hardly interested in girls, didn’t go to parties, and had but one friend. Academics never being his strong suit, he’d dropped out of high school and spent much of his time by himself on his family’s farm.

To put it simply, Mark fit the profile of what had become a prominent if menacing figure in the national imagination—a loner with a gun looking to make a name for himself.

For a small-town jury, there was perhaps nothing more emblematic of the ongoing American crisis of violence than the young American male with a dead stare and something toxic boiling in his blood. In the cities, the bloodshed had become a bleak if almost rudimentary occurrence. But now the violence crept into their rural outpost, knocking on their door.

By the time Mark was back in his prison uniform at the Crossroads Correctional Center after his failed appeal, the Woodworths had already churned through four lawyers. Now that Mark was facing four life sentences, they had little hope of finding a decent attorney willing to keep fighting. It was during this period of despair that Dale Whiteside, a friend and state representative born and raised in Chillicothe, the small northwestern Missouri town where the Woodworths and Robertsons lived, told Mark’s parents about an unusual lawyer named Bob Ramsey. A middle-aged attorney who had bounced around law firms in St. Louis, Ramsey had a habit of taking on down-and-out clients. This wasn’t great for his bottom line, but something about their plight would speak to Ramsey’s sense of injustice; he’d spent years toiling on these special projects, trying to prove to himself and the courts that his client had gotten a raw deal.

Whiteside had come to know Ramsey through a shared hatred of domestic abuse. One of Whiteside’s pet issues in his capacity as a representative was working to free Missouri women who’d been imprisoned after killing their abusive husbands or boyfriends. With frustrating frequency, judges in Missouri rejected the argument that women who’d spent months or years being punched, kicked, slapped, or otherwise physically tormented by their abusive significant others were acting in self-defense when they killed the men who hurt them. Ramsey had taken on a few of these women as clients, one of whom he hoped to free by winning her clemency from the governor. As determined as he was persistent, even when the chances of a successful outcome were slim, he’d set off on a three-day walk along a 130-mile route from St. Louis to the capitol building in Jefferson City to drum up publicity for his client. Though his cross-state pilgrimage was a bust, the effort convinced Whiteside of Ramsey’s extraordinary commitment to his clients. It was then that Whiteside called Ramsey to ask if he would represent the son of a family from his hometown of Chillicothe, a young man who Whiteside believed had been set up as the killer.

Whiteside, however, struggled to instill the same belief about Woodworth’s innocence in Ramsey, who was more than a little dubious. The Woodworths were good people in need of someone who could help them, Whiteside told Ramsey, all but begging him to just give the case a look. At least meet with Mark in prison before you say no, Whiteside pleaded. This wasn’t a good time for Ramsey to take on more long-shot cases. He and his wife, a trauma nurse, were raising two teenage children in their modest suburban home outside St. Louis, and expensive college tuitions were on the horizon. But Ramsey agreed to give Mark a chance.

---

•   •   •

As he sat across from Mark under the sterile fluorescents of the Crossroads Correctional visiting room, with guards watching closely, it had taken Ramsey all of about ten minutes to intuit that Mark was not a killer. The possibility then that Mark was an innocent young man spending his life in prison ignited a deep sense of injustice in Ramsey.

How could you know that? I asked Ramsey. We were in his office in a small brick building along a strip of fast-food restaurants and office parks that sprawled east from St. Louis over the border into Illinois.

You haven’t met him yet? Ramsey asked. I hadn’t. It was August 2013, and after landing in St. Louis, I’d picked up my rental from Hertz and stopped by Ramsey’s place before making the four-hour drive west. I’d heard about the case from a source on an unrelated assignment earlier in the year and couldn’t stop thinking about it. Despite the rap on Mark as an outcast turned stone-cold gunman, he didn’t have any history of violence, and as the local who tipped me off to the case explained, those who’d known Mark had considered him a quiet, even gentle, kid—at least until the shooting took place. He was the son and grandson of farmers on both his mother’s and father’s sides, and as the eldest of seven children he stood to lead his siblings in eventually taking over the family farm. In news coverage of the case, Woodworth supporters said that all the boy ever wanted to do was be a farmer like his father. So what exactly happened to Mark, then, to make him turn away from the path that had been laid out for him, eschewing the traditions and livelihood that were his inheritance? And what was it that had Ramsey so convinced that Mark was innocent? How could he maintain such a high level of confidence when two juries unanimously voted the other way?

Well, when you do meet him, I think you’ll know what I mean, Ramsey told me.

What I wanted to know from Ramsey, though, was how he’d come to take on this case at all. The idea that Mark didn’t seem violent, I said, didn’t necessarily matter in light of the two juries who felt otherwise. What was it that convinced him this was a client who was worth the trouble?

Ramsey took a second to think it over. At sixty-five, he was tall and well nourished, with a round belly and broad shoulders. His neatly trimmed goatee was the same gray as his dense head of hair. He wore silver wire-rimmed glasses. He hadn’t been in this particular office all that long; it was just another workspace he’d taken up since leaving his previous firm after butting heads with the owner over how he ran the practice. Grabbing this desk in the office of an old friend, Ramsey had brought along his diplomas and a landscape print of a golf course, which now hung on the walls slightly askew. All the flat surfaces were covered with piles of court documents and legal pads flipped to pages filled with dense cursive scribbles. Bankers boxes around the edge of the room were stuffed with papers so thickly annotated with sticky notes they resembled planters of exotic yellow flowers. Ramsey had been grinding away on the Woodworth case for well over a decade, and it had become a full-blown obsession.

Well, the funny thing about that is, it wasn’t any single thing, he said. Every part of this case smelled like a skunk from the beginning. He recalled that, after he met Mark, the family put him in touch with a group of a dozen or so locals in Chillicothe who’d formed the Concerned Citizens for Justice for Mark Woodworth. While the Robertsons and many in Chillicothe took Mark’s life sentences as proof of a functional justice system, a small but zealous contingent felt otherwise. They’d held fundraisers over the years, accumulating enough money to offer a $153,000 reward for information that would lead to the arrest and conviction of the persons responsible for the death of Catherine Robertson, as one of their bake-sale posters put it. It was strange that the neighbors in such a small community, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, would so adamantly disagree about who had killed one of their own.

When Ramsey went to the courthouse and asked the clerk to pull the grand jury transcript file, the clerk had given him a folder with almost nothing in it. There were just a few pages containing the opening remarks that the judge, Ken Lewis, had made at Mark’s hearing—a long, stinging monologue chastising the county prosecutor, who, for reasons unspecified, had recused himself from the case. Judge Lewis told the grand jury how grateful he was that the Missouri attorney general, the state’s highest-ranking law enforcement official, had gone to the trouble to travel up north from the capital to this small farming outpost to see about Mark’s day in court. What he was doing in Chillicothe, and why this little speech was preserved in the court files, remained a mystery.

Standing with me outside his office building in the bright, warm August sun, Ramsey smoked a cigarette and lamented that, ever since a pair of back surgeries, he couldn’t keep up his daily training in aikido, the Japanese martial art. He’d traveled all over the country for aikido retreats and studied the philosophy underlying the practice with an intensity he otherwise reserved for trial preparation. Over the years, Ramsey has implemented some of the aikido principles into his legal practice. Calmness in action, he said. "You try to do this without escalating the conflict, without inflicting unnecessary pain on your attacker. It’s based on the old samurai code of a spirit of love and protection of all living things.

It’s all there, downstairs, he said, stubbing out his cigarette. The case squad binders, all of it. You’re free to look at whatever I have. We went into the lower level of the office, where a conference table was flanked by shelves of bankers boxes jammed with papers from the Woodworth case.

It wasn’t possible to guess how many individual pages were in the files. It was many thousands, and a daunting portion of it wasn’t labeled. Ramsey was Mark’s fifth attorney, and he had inherited documents from everyone who had worked on the case before him; then he spent a decade adding his own massive haul of collected materials. Somewhere, I thought I might find the point of origin, of where this case really began—and then perhaps I’d get a sense of what the police had found, and as Ramsey suggested, what they had missed. It’ll take a while, Ramsey said, stacking a pile of folders in front of me before he headed upstairs to take a phone call. But I bet you’re gonna find what you’re looking for.

Chapter 2

NOVEMBER 13, 1990

For a few days, I flipped through the legal files in the basement level of Ramsey’s office to pull out what seemed essential enough to haul over to the nearest Staples to make copies. I wasn’t sure yet what I’d do with it all; the sheer number of pages wouldn’t fit in my luggage on my flight back to Philadelphia, but I could worry about that later. I thanked Ramsey and headed west to spend the rest of my two-week trip in Livingston County. Getting people to talk to a reporter from out of town was slow going. Some simply couldn’t be bothered and politely told me so. When others realized I wasn’t there to stir the pot but to figure out what had happened in Chillicothe, they opened up.

It had started as an uneventful Tuesday evening for the Robertson family. After supper on November 13, 1990, Lyndel Robertson, a farmer, and his eleven-year-old son, Scott, lounged in front of the television, watching the John Candy comedy Uncle Buck, while Lyndel’s wife, Cathy, was busy working on a 4-H craft project at the dining room table. During the day, the sunlight flowed into their living room through the wide picture window behind the red couch, the beams of light falling on the pots of tall plants and dense vines clustered around the furniture. But the window was now dark, and the room’s lamps cast a subdued glow over Cathy’s decorative figurines: two painted porcelain cats sat on the top of one lacquered table; underneath the table, two white doves were perched on a crocheted white diamond doily.

Rhonda, the Robertsons’ fifteen-year-old daughter, arrived home around 9:30 p.m., after supper at her boyfriend’s house. When the film ended, Rhonda and Scott, along with their sisters Renee, thirteen, and Roxanne, eight, went to bed. Cathy and Lyndel stayed up to watch the news.

The leading story that night was the sentencing of Faye Copeland, the wife of a Livingston County farmer, Ray Copeland; the two had received national media coverage after they were charged for the murder of five farmhands found in shallow graves on the Copeland property. Ray had cruised homeless shelters and food pantry lines in Missouri cities, luring at least a dozen itinerant men back to Chillicothe to unknowingly work his check-cashing scam at cattle sales. Opening post office boxes and bank accounts at Ray’s direction, the transients had gone on to write bad checks at cattle sales before they suddenly disappeared without a trace. Faye Copeland had been found guilty of five counts of first-degree murder for aiding and abetting her husband, who’d killed the farmhands once they were no longer useful. The state prosecutor, a rising star in the attorney general’s office named Kenny Hulshof, had told the jury during his opening statement that an account of the gruesome murder case was like a book you are going to want to curl up with and read, cover to cover. Faye Copeland had collapsed into hysterical sobbing at the defense table after the jury recommended she be executed. When the news ended, the Robertsons went to their bedroom. Lyndel hung his jeans on the sink in the bathroom, and he and Cathy made love before falling asleep. They didn’t hear someone stealing through the house just before midnight.

The gunman left the floor safe in Lyndel’s office, where he kept bundles of cash, and Goldie, the family dog, undisturbed. They approached the door of Cathy and Lyndel’s bedroom and pushed it open. They raised a .22-caliber weapon and fired six shots at point-blank range. Cathy was struck twice, in the skull and in the chest. Lyndel was hit by the other four bullets. One ripped through his cheek and shattered his teeth. Another lodged near his liver.

No one else in the house heard the gun or the shooter fleeing. Scott was roused from sleep by the sound of his father groaning. Scott walked across the hall to his parents’ room and flicked on the light. The glare revealed Lyndel, naked and struggling to hold himself up against the wall beside his bed. His arms and torso left a long streak of blood on the white wall. Fragments of his teeth were scattered across the bedsheet. With his mangled mouth, Lyndel managed to tell Scott to wake up his mother. The stunned boy did as he was told, walking to where Cathy lay in her nightshirt, a pool of blood already in a crown around her head. Scott repeatedly asked his mother to get up, louder and louder each time, until he was yelling. She didn’t move. Scott’s cries woke Roxanne, who appeared in the hallway outside the open bedroom door. Go get Rhonda! Scott yelled through tears, and Roxanne ran to her sister’s room in the basement. Scott sat there with his parents and thought he heard the sound of a car engine starting up in the front driveway.

Something happened to Mom and Dad! Roxanne screamed outside Rhonda’s room, banging on the door. The girls rushed to their parents. Scott had already helped his father into a pair of underwear. The youngest sisters watched as Rhonda and Scott maneuvered Lyndel down to the floor, resting his head on a pillow so he wouldn’t choke on the blood streaming from his mouth. Rhonda then corralled her siblings into the living room, where their bare feet left faint, bloody tracks in the brown carpet. On the couch, the Robertson children whimpered in terror. Rhonda picked up the white phone and called her boyfriend’s house and 911. When he arrived at the scene, Brian Alexander, her boyfriend, called the Woodworths, who lived across the street.

The Woodworth family was asleep when ringing cut through their dark, still house. The kids slept in the upstairs bedrooms, save for Mark, the eldest at sixteen years old, who had his own space in the basement. Claude’s wife, Jackie, groggily lifted the phone’s handset. She heard Brian Alexander say there was an emergency. I’ll be right over, Jackie said, now alert. She told her husband where she was going. Claude later recalled thinking that maybe one of the Robertson kids had appendicitis.

To avoid the autumn chill and get to her neighbors’ as quickly as possible, Jackie slid behind the wheel of her family’s red Chevrolet truck. As she hurried out of her driveway, she spotted the lights of emergency vehicles flashing on County Highway 190. After arriving at the Robertsons’ and learning what had happened, she turned around and drove back home, sending the truck’s headlights flashing across her house’s living room window. By the time she parked, Claude was in the doorway.

Something terrible happened, Jackie said, tears filling her eyes. You’ve got to go over there.

When Claude arrived at the Robertsons’ house around 12:30 a.m., paramedics and police were rushing around the scene. He stepped through the front doorway, across a threshold he’d passed hundreds of times before, and was told about the shooting. The children were waiting for investigators to take evidence swabs of their parents’ blood, which had been drying on the children’s skin. Lyndel, miraculously, would survive. He would be airlifted to a medical center in Kansas City, about a hundred miles away, for surgery to remove bullet fragments from his sinuses and jawbone. He wouldn’t return home for several days, which meant that he’d miss his wife’s funeral.

---

•   •   •

In the morning, Chillicothe’s kitchen phones rang incessantly as farmwives, fearing they might become targets, warned one another of the menace. Men recalled to me how groups of farmers had huddled in sheds and around pickup trucks outside coffee shops, speculating wildly about the shooter’s deranged motivations. The violence was brutal but not an aberration. Coming on the heels of the Copeland convictions, depravity still lingered in the November air. The town’s daily discussions had already been embroidered with the sensational details of the five laborers who’d been shot dead by Ray Copeland before he buried them around his homestead, talk that often turned to the suspicion that more bodies were scattered in the soil that had yet to be discovered. As those in Chillicothe told me, harsh judgments had flowed easily against the Copelands, who were seen as isolated outsiders, not row-crop farmers or townspeople tuned to the civic rhythm. Ray, in particular, was a six-foot-four eccentric, a gruff old-timer who wore the same beaten pair of overalls every day and made his living by uncertain means way out in the country. The frothy gossip about the Copeland outcasts had allowed those in town to hold the savageness on the Copeland property at a sanitary distance. But the Woodworth-Robertson farm was a marquee Livingston County operation, I was told by anyone who’d been around back then, as prominent as any other. The ugly brutality against such a well-established farming family brought violence to the heart of Chillicothe, rushing through the town’s unlocked front doors and into its bedrooms.

Across town at the sheriff’s office, some thirty police officers, sheriff’s deputies, and highway patrol personnel gathered after receiving the overnight call that the Major Case Squad had been activated. A confederacy of northern Missouri law enforcement agencies that join up to investigate a major crime, the officers would take their assignments from Livingston County’s chief deputy sheriff, Gary Calvert, the man appointed by the case squad’s board of directors as the supervisor of the investigation. Deputy Calvert was forty-one years old, with a modest build and a clean-shaven face; as many made a point to add, he had a tendency to talk in a quiet mumble. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to ask Calvert to say whatever he just said but a little bit louder. His wire-framed glasses, neatly parted hair, and benign comportment were not out of place for the tidy, middle-aged civil servant that he was, and if not for the gun on his hip, he might have been mistaken for a high school math teacher. At the helm of the Major Case Squad investigation, Calvert would have to absorb pressure from two directions—from the townspeople, terrorized by the idea of a murderer on the loose, and from the squad of law enforcement agencies that, like the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office, were perennially understaffed. Giving up an officer to the case squad while the office attended to the expansive rural territories that constituted their jurisdiction was tenable for a few weeks at most. Some officers could work the case for only a day or two before they had to get back to their posts.

In accordance with the strict protocol in which all members had been trained, Calvert wasted no time sending officers out in pairs to pursue leads one by one, passing them index cards from the stack that sat with Calvert at the command table. With their assignments, the dispatched units collected only the evidence and information that pertained to the particular lead, which might involve talking to a specific subject or bagging the bloody bedsheets from the crime scene. Under no circumstances were the units to pursue additional witnesses or evidence until they were assigned a new lead card. The system was strict and limited an investigator’s creativity in the field, but it also automated the officers into cogs of a machine focused solely on the accumulation of as much evidence as possible, which, at the scale of a fully outfitted Major Case Squad of more than three dozen members, meant that they could collectively crank through a few hundred leads as fast as possible, while the higher-function analysis was left to the command center, where the information filtered and flowed through the brain of Deputy Calvert.

Just off the main drag in town, at the home of Brian Alexander, Rhonda’s boyfriend, the four younger Robertson children had been joined by Cathy’s sisters and Lyndel’s siblings. Some family members drove eight hours across three state lines, traveling to Livingston County after they’d gotten the call in the early hours of the morning that Cathy had been murdered. The aunts and uncles arrived in a steady stream at the Alexander house. They did what they could to comfort the two youngest, Scott and Roxanne, as they cycled through alternating states of numb, silent shock and bouts of anguished crying. Renee and Rhonda were overwhelmed by sadness too, but Rhonda, who in many respects took after her mother, tried to maintain a composed presence to calm her siblings as they met, one by one, for interviews with the investigators. One of the case squad’s few female officers, Renee Brinkley, sat down with Roxanne, who told her that the dog, Goldie, barked at strangers but that she hadn’t heard him bark the night before.

Lying in his bed in room 17 of the Research Medical Center ICU, Lyndel struggled to answer questions from the Major Case Squad investigators who had driven from Chillicothe to Kansas City. With a tube in his chest and fresh stitches from the bullet wounds in his stomach, neck, and mouth, Lyndel was lucky to be alive. The doctors left alone the bullet that had lodged in his liver, deeming it more trouble than it was worth to remove. They scraped out fragments of lead from his jaw and sinuses, and sewed up the gash made along his tongue by the bullet that had ripped a hole in his cheek on its way out. In a great deal of pain, with a swollen blob of a tongue and his sinuses throbbing, Lyndel managed to voice his words in slow, halting speech.

Writing down the conversation, Officer Jim Lightner asked Lyndel: Do you know who shot you and your wife?

Yes, I think I know. Brandon Thomure. I’m almost 100% sure. Brandon is a psycho and is supposed to be the ex-boyfriend of Rochelle, Lyndel told him. Rochelle, twenty, was the eldest of Cathy and Lyndel’s five children.

Lyndel added that, on Tuesday, Brandon had called Cathy at home and they’d gotten into an argument, until finally Cathy hung up on him.

Alan Robertson, Lyndel’s brother, had driven to Kansas City the following day. In the hospital hallway, he gave his statement to the case squad investigators, who passed along their report to Calvert at the command center:

Alan advised that there was no love lost between Cathy and Rochelle. Alan advised that Rochelle has been running wild since the 8th grade. Cathy has been very vocal about the relationship between Brandon and Rochelle. Cathy has made the statement that she has told Rochelle that she should leave and not come back. Cathy would not care if Rochelle had to work the streets as a prostitute to get money, she just wishes she would leave Lyndel and Cathy alone.

I pulled open the blackout curtain of my Comfort Inn window and looked out onto US Route 36, the four-lane east-to-west highway where eighteen-wheelers barreled by in heavy whooshes through the southern tip of Chillicothe. I slid the desk over to the window to give myself a proper view and rang up Ramsey. Lyndel’s telling the police he’s almost a hundred percent sure he knows the guy who shot him is this boyfriend, I said. All week, people in town sympathetic to the Woodworths’ case had given me an earful about Brandon. It wasn’t clear what was true or not about his reputation for violence, though as I made my way through the public record, several witnesses in the investigation reports recalled episodes of Brandon’s violent behavior.

But I don’t see Mark’s name anywhere in here. At least not in the case squad reports, I said.

Ramsey chuckled. You won’t find one word on Mark in there, he said. Did you get to Rochelle’s movie?

When we’d talked at his place, Ramsey had mentioned Rochelle’s curious interview with a detective, captured in a file of typed police interrogations, where she apparently shared a speculative interpretation of what had happened the night of the murder. After dinner tonight, I’ll sit down with those. A dinner and a movie.

It’s a doozy, Ramsey said.

So far, the police reports and local chatter on Rochelle had offered a perplexing portrait of the oldest Robertson child. When I eventually spoke with Cathy’s siblings on the phone, they only hinted at the recurring source of stress that Rochelle’s social life had become in the years before the shooting. In their statements to police immediately after Cathy’s murder, however, there were echoes of Alan Robertson’s lament, from Cathy’s sisters, in particular, who were even more forthcoming about the tension in the house. Rochelle’s friends, too, had told detectives over and over again about how Rochelle’s dating life was creating problems at home, especially regarding Brandon, a dynamic that I kept hearing about in town from her old friends and acquaintances.

Rochelle first began to butt heads with her mother in high school. All around Chillicothe, Cathy would hear about how Rochelle was a remarkable beauty, slender in the hips, with long limbs and her mother’s delicate almond face. In Rochelle’s junior year, she was named queen at the Livingston County Fair, though the honorific wasn’t news to the boys in town, who pursued Rochelle with abandon. Soon her dating life brought her into the orbit of an older crowd, including one newly married man who kept trying to take Rochelle out to dinner. Rochelle was picky about the boys