Read Online The Skeleton Crew by Deborah Halber - Free Book Online

launching ColdCases, More had created a site he called E-clipse Network’s Unsolved Case Files—“in search of the lost, the hidden, and the forgotten.”
    Around the same time, in 1998, Todd, inspired by Tent Girl, compiled details on unidentified remains and missing people on a site he called The Lost and the Found. Independent of both More and Matthews, a Michigan woman, Jennifer Marra—describing herself as a former journalist and using the screen names “Jenni” and “Stormy”—launched yet another site, Stormcritters.com, to document American and Canadian disappearances and unidentified victims prior to 1989.
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    For Troy More, Caledonia Jane Doe—whose reconstruction shows an attractive, perhaps sassy and tomboyish girl with a pert nose and cleft chin—became a personal challenge. An extremely frustrating one, judging from his posts.
    The official report stated:
    Victim was found in a field near Route 20 by a passing motorist, on November 9th, 1979. Murder weapon a .38 caliber handgun which was recovered at the scene. No information available suggests a sexual assault took place. Clothing worn was corduroy pants, plaid shirt, blue knee socks, and red windbraker [sic] jacket. Victim was 5'3" tall and weighed 120 pounds. She had brown, wavy hair that had been frosted several months prior, a rather deep tan, and tanlines indicating that she had worn a bikini frequently.
    One of the most mournful clues in Cali’s case was a key chain dangling from a belt loop on the girl’s tan corduroy pants. One half was a tiny key; the other a silver heart with a key-shaped cutout inscribed, “He who holds the key can open my heart.” Web sleuths typically pored over details like this. Hercule Poirot would approve. Agatha Christie’s famed character did not scour crime scenes with a magnifying glass (although some web sleuths would if they could). Instead, the brain’s “little gray cells,” Poirot claimed, are all one needs to solve any crime. Sit in an armchair and think, he advised the admiring Hastings. The puzzle pieces will fall into place.
    Unfortunately, that wasn’t happening in Cali’s case. As I read back over months of posts, I saw that More surmised that Cali had known her attacker. It was unlikely, to his mind, that she could have been brought to this remote place near the Canadian border unless she was traveling with her assailant, especially given that there was no evidence she was sexually assaulted or restrained.
    The murder was not premeditated, or if it was, it wasn’t intended to happen where it did, he reasoned. The Finger Lakes region of New York contained many remote haunts that would seem more logical for a planned homicide than out in an open field along a moderately busy road. Shot in the back before the fatal gunshot pierced her right temple, Cali may have been fleeing from her attacker. The weapon, a .38 revolver, was left next to her in the cornfield, where a passing motorist found her shortly after daylight.
    The victim was most likely not a runaway, More believed. She was simply too well-groomed. Her clothing, hygiene, jewelry, and physical condition all suggested that she had been well cared for. Her tan meant she might have lived in the Southeast, the Gulf Coast, or California. A summer tan would have faded by November.
    More checked 1979 business directories for tanning salons, then a relatively new phenomenon. Even if one had been operating in upstate New York and the girl had happened to visit it, he suspected she would have opted for a full-body exposure rather than to create bikini tan lines.
    A thorough search for the manufacturer of Cali’s clothing turned up no such company in the United States at that time, and although More’s research into missing-person files in Canada, Europe, and Australia also led nowhere, he considered the possibility that she was Canadian. November ninth was part of the