PS - The Journey to Solve Cold Cases (Bonus Issue #33)
A Special Book Giveaway and Q+A with Laurah Norton!
PSST! Did you see my announcement last Friday??? My podcast, Truer Crime, is coming back with three new episodes (make sure to listen to the trailer here). It’s a podcast I started in 2021, shortly after I was defrauded of my entire life savings. After becoming a crime victim myself, I saw true crime stories in a new way and wanted to create a show to tell these stories with the research, nuance, and care they deserve. The first episode, Mindy Dodd, is out now, and you can listen to it here.
Here’s the description:
If you consume a lot of true crime, you might have heard Mindy’s story before. Or at least one like it – the classic story of a housewife who, pushed too far, snaps and murders her husband. The scary music swells and the story ends neatly. The housewife locked is away. But what if that’s not the whole picture? Today’s episode is about the muddy middle that is so often left out.
If you’ve already listened to Truer Crime, it would mean so much if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. Reviews + ratings are hugely important to the success of a show, and writing a few words is a great way to support the amplification of these stories.
Hi friends!
I’m coming to you today with a very special edition of P.S.! While these Monday editions are usually an exclusive bonus for my paid subscribers, I’ve decided to remove the paywall today to give everyone a taste of the types of content I share in P.S. each week. As a paid subscriber, you’ll get weekly access to these bonus Monday newsletters, and have a tangible impact on the sustainability of Sincerely, Celisia as a whole. Thank you, as always, to everyone who reads, shares, and/or financially supports my work – I literally couldn’t do this without you.
So, for today’s issue, I have the immense honor of re-introducing you to the incredible Laurah Norton! Laurah was featured in the So Obsessed section of the Friday newsletter a few months ago (scroll down to the middle of this issue to check that out), and she’s joining us again today for an exclusive Q+A!
Laurah is the creator and host of The Fall Line and One Strange Thing, two podcasts that I highly recommend checking out. The Fall Line recently returned to its long-form seasonal format, starting with Unsolved South, a six-episode series covering three true crime cases from Georgia and South Carolina. One Strange Thing, on the other hand, explores paranormal stories, using archival news to examine little-known mysteries.
This fall, Laurah released her new book, LAY THEM TO REST. For three years, Laurah shadowed forensic scientists, helping them investigate the case of an unidentified woman whose remains were discovered at a rural Illinois State Park in January of 1993. In the book, Laurah pairs this investigation with a historical look at forensic science, chronicling its advancements through the years. According to Laurah, her goals with the book were three-fold: “make forensic science accessible and increase literacy regarding how cases are and aren’t solved; introduce Doe cases to a larger audience, as they get the least attention; and follow the real story of a case being solved, start to finish, and showcase that it’s not wrapped up neatly, like on TV.” I’m also doing a giveaway of Laurah’s book for one lucky reader. You can enter here. I’ll be drawing a winner this Friday (December 22nd), so don’t wait to enter!
But before we hop into the Q+A, I want to give a little more background on unidentified person cases. Often, these cases are referred to as “Jane Doe” or “John Doe” cases (read more about why this naming practice exists here).
According to the Bureau of Justice Assistance, more than 600,000 people go missing each year. Additionally, it’s estimated that 4,400 unidentified bodies are recovered each year, with approximately 1,000 of those bodies remaining unidentified a year later. But as genetic and forensic sciences have progressed, many long-unsolved cases are yielding new leads, helping to bring closure to loved ones.
Forensic science, like all technology, has evolved especially rapidly in recent years. Officials are now able to use tools like rapid DNA sequencing in tandem with genetic genealogy to identify remains and even solve cold cases. Perhaps the most famous example of this new technology in action was the 2018 arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., who was identified as the Golden State Killer after decades of the case going cold. But this new technology isn’t without its criticism, especially when it comes to debates surrounding genetic privacy.
In the U.S., approximately half of murder cases go unsolved. And when it comes to the 600,000 people who go missing each year, the amount of media attention a case gets is greatly impacted by the missing person’s demographics. According to an analysis by the Columbia Journalism Review, white people are featured in 70% of the news stories about missing people, despite only making up 47% of the total missing person cases. The Columbia Journalism Review built a tool to highlight this disparity called “How much press are you worth?” By submitting your age, gender, state, and ethnicity, the tool calculates the number of news stories you’d likely receive if you went missing based on current reporting in America.
There’s a lot more I could say about this topic, but instead, I’m going to turn it over to Laurah! I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and learned a lot from her insights. Check it out below!
CELISIA: Tell me a little bit about yourself and what led you to become the writer and researcher you are today.
LAURAH: I’ve always been a writer, as long as I can remember! It’s what I wrote on the What Will You Be When You Grow Up worksheets back in elementary school. I interned at publishing companies, majored in English, and went on to graduate school to finish a terminal degree in creative writing. I have been publishing professionally since the mid-2000s. I was really focused on short form for a long time—both fiction and creative nonfiction—and turned down the chance to write a few books during that period. If I can offer some advice to your readers. . . do not turn down queries from literary agencies or editors if they reach out and ask if you have a manuscript, LOL. I’ve made poor life choices.
Until 2022, I worked as a principal senior lecturer in the Department of English at Georgia State University, where I was given a lot of freedom to design my own courses (like narrative podcasting). Gradually, I became more interested in using my archival and primary research skills and background in creative writing to develop work for the audio medium. I’ve told the story of how The Fall Line began many times, but that led me to work in the podcasting field and, eventually, to collaborate with scientists and law enforcement.
Around 2018, I became really interested in covering Doe cases (unidentified decedents, or UIDs) and working collaboratively with scientists and law enforcement to lend my research to underserved cold cases—to see if, by combining our work, we might be helpful in new ways.
CELISIA: I’d love to hear more about the process of creating your new book, LAY THEM TO REST. How is this process different from the podcasts you’ve worked on in the past?
LAURAH: In many ways, it takes me back to my roots since my background—really, most of my career—has been spent in more traditional writing! What I brought from the podcasting world, though, were all the connections I had made with scientists who were so patient with me and willing to teach me about forensics so I could feature Doe cases on The Fall Line; that is what inspired me to write LAY THEM TO REST in the first place. I wanted to make Doe cases more accessible to the general public, make the science accessible, and humanize the victims who are often more difficult to report on—because friends and family aren’t there to interview. Of course, they are out there. They’ve just been removed by circumstance from their loved one. This book shows how, through the reconnection of investigation, missing persons and unidentified persons are so often one and the same.
CELISIA: As I delved into researching for my podcast Truer Crime, one of the things that surprised me most was how forensic science wasn’t necessarily as ‘fool-proof’ as I’d once believed. In season one of the show, I covered the story of Josiah Sutton, a young man convicted of a rape he didn’t commit based on faulty DNA evidence. Through other stories, I observed how sometimes forensics is anything but black and white; like in the case of two forensic scientists who interpret the same piece of evidence very differently. As an expert on the history of forensics, how have your views on the field evolved, if at all?
LAURAH: I think that re-examining scientific “truths” is essential to the development of forensics as a field; in fact, it’s part of the scientific process. Science is not static. It is always in flux. In my area of specialty—working on Doe cases—that really means paying attention to improvements, conversations, and even debates in the fields. My work really brings me to the science focused on identifying people rather than convicting them, though there are certainly places where there are crossovers. There is so much nuance regarding the databases we have available
Many cases can’t be solved via DNA, and require us to revisit advances in other fields like forensic anthropology (FA) which has made many advancements in skeletal analysis since the ‘80s and ‘90s, when many of the cases I looked into occurred.
My friends who are working in FA are really interested in having ongoing discussions of how cases are discussed in the context of where they occurred: are the experts looking at who lives in any given area? Are they thinking about how people might have self-identified in life? For instance: race, as a concept, may break down very clearly on a form, but how will that translate to, say, a Dominican-American missing person, whose family is searching for them? Will they recognize a report that simply lists “Black male”? What about “White/Hispanic male”?
There are so many complexities. Understanding who people are in life helps us identify them in death.
I wouldn’t call myself an expert by any means, but I am certainly an avid student in the field, and grateful to learn from many experts who continue to examine their own areas with a critical lens.
CELISIA: As a phrase receiving a ton of attention lately, what does “ethical true crime” mean to you?
LAURAH: You know, I am extremely glad people are thinking critically about what they are making and consuming, what the effect of it is, and who it serves. I do think it’s tempting to say there is one way to do this, and if I follow these steps, I am one of the good ones. But it’s simply not that easy. This work is nuanced and it’s traumatizing for victims’ families and survivors. Even when it is exactly what everyone involved wants, it can still be really emotionally exhausting for a family to participate in.
Ethics aren’t a template. A lot of the decisions I make about my work have made me less financially successful and less well-known than I might otherwise be, and I am good with that. That doesn’t mean my way is the only way; it’s just the path I’ve figured out. I want to do the most good and the least harm. But I don’t pretend to have all the answers. If I did, I think it would be a pretty good sign I was on the wrong track.
CELISIA: You’ve spent a lot of your career bringing attention to cold cases and cases that otherwise get very little or no media coverage. What is something you wish everyone knew about these cases?
LAURAH: Creators, especially in podcasting, often shy away from covering cases where there is no available research—no books to read, no articles they can aggregate, no documentaries they can watch. I absolutely understand that. But I think it’s important to consider: to truly be a researcher and writer, consider the importance of actually producing original work—your own primary research.
You can be the person to create that material where there was none before. You can go out in the field and do the interviews, dig into the old boxes of land records and dusty yearbooks, you can end up at the county clerk’s office with your list of questions or do your own interviews, and you can begin to study a town, a region, a city. You can look for patterns. These stories don’t just appear from thin air. Someone needs to do the work, and if you truly want to see coverage for cases that have little or no media footprint, you can be the one to make that happen.
CELISIA: I am so excited to read your book and hope that my readers will join me in picking up their copy! If you wouldn’t mind giving us a little preview… I’d love to know, what’s an interesting fact or tidbit from the book that usually shocks people to learn?
LAURAH: I’m simplifying this, but, really — we have no precise idea of how many unidentified decedents there are in the US. There are estimates. There are some accepted statistics we use. But truly, no one knows. It could be 40,000—it could be a much higher number. NamUs figures are not accurate due to non-compulsory reporting, and things get even more complicated when we’re looking at cases that are not forensic but still need accounting like remains from museum collections.
CELISIA: What is the best way(s) for folks to find + support your work?
LAURAH: My book is available everywhere in the US and the UK, and on Audible, where it won an Audie 2023 award for one of the best true-crime releases of the year (that was cool because I narrated it!) That is the best way to support me right now, for sure. The Fall Line just wrapped a series on 22 unidentified persons in collaboration with Metro Nashville, and in February, we have a season coming focused on missing mothers. My second podcast, One Strange Thing, is still going strong, too! If you like something lighter (paranormal mysteries and archival news), it’s for you. You can find me on IG at @laythemtorest and my podcasts on all the socials.