Part 1

My name is Detective Mark Reynolds. In 20 years of policing in West Virginia, you learn to trust your gut. And my gut was screaming the moment I walked into that house on May 8th.

The call came in as a missing juvenile. Riley, 15 years old. A good kid. Didn’t run away, didn’t cause trouble. Her mom was frantic, the kind of panic that vibrates the air in the room. But it wasn’t the mom I was watching.

It was him. Andy. The mom’s boyfriend.

He was standing there, leaning against the doorframe, too calm. Way too calm.

“She’s not back yet?” he asked, casual as if he was asking about the mail. “Does she normally take her phone?”

We started sweeping the house. Riley’s room looked like a typical teenager’s explosion of clothes and books. Messy, sure. But it felt… staged.

Most of her things were still there. Her backpack, her glasses. If a kid is running away, they take the essentials. Riley had left everything behind.

Then, we looked closer at the bed.

To the naked eye, it was just unmade. But we stripped the sheets. There, on the pillow and the comforter, were stains. Dark, rust-colored spots.

I looked at my partner. We didn’t need to say a word. We knew. This wasn’t a runaway case anymore. This was a crime scene.

I turned back to Andy. He was trying to steer the narrative, planting seeds of doubt.

“There’s a rumor going around she was afraid to come home,” he said, shifting his weight. “People telling us she didn’t want to be here.”

“Why would she be afraid, Andy?” I asked, stepping into his personal space.

He shrugged, avoiding eye contact. “I don’t know. You know how teenagers are.”

He claimed he was at work all day. He claimed he loved her like his own. But his eyes were empty. He was hiding a dark secret, and I was going to tear his world apart to find it.

We just needed one thread to pull to unravel his lies. And we were about to find it.

Part 2

The drive back to the station was heavy. You know that kind of silence? The kind that presses against your eardrums. It wasn’t just the silence of a car ride; it was the silence of a missing girl, a bedroom that felt like a tomb, and a man sitting in the back of a squad car who was way too comfortable with the situation.

We hadn’t arrested Andy yet. Not officially. We didn’t have the probable cause to slap the cuffs on him for anything other than maybe obstruction if we pushed it, but right now, he was a “witness.” He was “helping” us. That’s the dance we do. We bring them into our world—the fluorescent lights, the smell of stale coffee and floor wax, the windowless rooms—and we see if they crack.

I sat across from my partner, Detective Miller, in the observation room before we went into the box. Miller looked at me, rubbing the stubble on his chin.

“He’s slick, Mark,” Miller said, his voice low. “Did you see him back at the house? He wasn’t grieving. He was managing.”

“I know,” I replied, watching the monitor. inside the interrogation room, Andy was sitting in the metal chair. He wasn’t fidgeting. He wasn’t crying. He was picking at his fingernails, looking bored. “Let’s see how well he manages when we start tearing apart his day.”

The First Alibi: The Working Man

I walked into the room, holding a notepad that was mostly empty. It’s a trick. make them think you know more than you do. I pulled out the chair opposite him, the metal legs scraping loudly against the linoleum floor. I let the sound hang there for a second.

“Alright, Andy,” I started, keeping my voice neutral. “Let’s go over this again. For the record. Walk me through your day yesterday. Every step. Don’t leave anything out.”

Andy leaned back, crossing his arms. He had this look on his face, like he was doing us a favor. “Like I told the other officer, I was at work. I’m a drywall hanger. I was at the job site all day.”

“All day?” I asked.

“Yeah. Got there around 7 AM. Left around 3:30 or 4:00. Came straight home.”

“And you didn’t leave the site? Not for lunch? Not for a cigarette break?”

He shook his head. “Nah. We were swamped. Stayed on site.”

I wrote down ‘0700 – 1600: Work’ on my pad. I circled it three times. I looked up at him. “Okay. That’s easy enough to verify. Who were you working with?”

“Johnny,” he said. “You can call him.”

I nodded. “We will.”

I stepped out of the room. Miller was already on the phone. In 2019, checking an alibi isn’t like the old days where you have to drive out and find a payphone. It takes seconds. Miller held up a finger, listening, then his eyes widened. He hung up and looked at me.

“He’s lying,” Miller said flatly. “I just spoke to the foreman. Andy clocked in, sure. But then he vanished. He left the site at roughly 9 AM and didn’t come back until almost 2 PM. That’s a five-hour gap, Mark. Five hours where nobody knows where he was.”

My blood went cold. Five hours. You can drive to the next state in five hours. You can hide a lot of things in five hours.

I walked back into the room. The air felt different now. Charged. Andy looked up, expecting me to say, ‘Okay, you’re clear.’

Instead, I leaned on the table. “Andy, I’m going to give you a chance to reset. Sometimes, people get nervous with cops. They forget things. They misremember times. So, I’m going to ask you again. Did you stay at the job site all day?”

He didn’t blink. “Yeah. I told you.”

“That’s funny,” I said, my voice dropping an octave. “Because your boss says you weren’t there. He says you left at 9 AM and didn’t come back for hours. Where were you, Andy?”

The Pivot: The “Lesser Crime” Strategy

You could see the gears turning in his head. It’s a common tactic with criminals. If you get caught in a big lie, admit to a small crime. It makes you look honest, like you were just trying to hide something embarrassing, not something evil.

His posture changed. He slumped a little. “Okay, look. I didn’t want to say anything because… well, it’s embarrassing. And illegal.”

“Try me,” I said.

“I have a problem,” he muttered. “With d*rugs. Coke. I left work to go score.”

“You left work for five hours to buy d*rugs?” I asked, skeptical. “Where did you go?”

“I went to my cousin’s place. Then I went to a park to… you know, use.”

“Which park?”

“Just… a park. I don’t remember the name. I was high, man.”

“So, let me get this straight,” I said, pacing the small room. “You risked your job, left the site for half the day, just to go get high in a random park? Why didn’t you just do it at the site? Or wait until you got home?”

“I needed it,” he said, shrugging.

It was a convenient story. It explained the missing time. It explained why he lied initially. But it didn’t feel right. My gut was twisting.

“We’re going to need to talk to this cousin,” I said. “And we’re going to need to talk to your buddy Johnny again. Because if you were using, Johnny would know.”

We brought Johnny in. He was a rough-around-the-edges guy, honest about his own vices. When we asked him about that day, he laughed.

“Go get more?” Johnny said, shaking his head. “Man, we had plenty on us. We had enough to last the whole week. There was no reason for Andy to leave to get more. We were set.”

The alibi crumbled again. First, it was work. Then, it was a drug run. Now, even the drug run didn’t make sense. Andy wasn’t running to something; he was running away from something. Or rather, he was taking something away.

The Boyfriend and The Deleted Truth

While we were hammering away at Andy’s crumbling stories, another team was looking into Riley’s digital life. In modern policing, the phone is the first witness. But Riley’s phone was missing. It wasn’t in her room. It wasn’t in her bag.

So, we looked at who she talked to last. The boyfriend. Hayden.

Hayden was young, maybe 16. He came in with his mom, and the kid looked like he was about to vibrate out of his skin. He was terrified. Not the guilt-ridden terror of a killer, but the sheer panic of a kid who knows he’s in way over his head.

“When did you last speak to her?” I asked him gently. We were in a softer interview room, not the Box.

“We FaceTimed,” Hayden stammered. ” The night before. She was… she was okay at first.”

“At first?” I pressed.

He looked at his mom, then back at me. “She was worried about the DC trip coming up. But then… she got weird. Quiet.”

“Hayden, I need to see your messages with her,” I said. “Whatever is on there, you’re not in trouble. We just need to find Riley.”

He turned pale. “I… I deleted them.”

My heart sank. “You what?”

“I deleted them!” he blurted out, tears welling up. “My mom… she checks my phone. I didn’t want her to see we were up late talking. I didn’t want to get grounded.”

It was such a teenage reason. So innocent and stupid at the same time. But in a missing person case, deleting data is a disaster.

“Okay,” I said, keeping my voice calm despite the frustration boiling inside me. “Hayden, listen to me. Technology is stubborn. Nothing is ever really gone. We can recover them. But you need to tell me right now—what did those messages say?”

He was shaking. “She said… she said Andy was in her room.”

The air left the room.

“She said he was in her room?” I repeated. “What time was this?”

“Late. After her mom went to sleep. She texted me and said, ‘Andy is in my room.’ And then she said…” He choked back a sob. “She said, ‘I’m scared.’”

“Did she say why?”

“No. She just said he wouldn’t leave. And that she was scared to talk because she thought he could hear her.”

We rushed Hayden’s phone to our cyber unit. It took them an hour—the longest hour of my life—but they pulled the data from the cloud backup.

There they were. In blue and white bubbles. The last words of a terrified girl.

“He’s in my room.”

“I’m scared.”

“Don’t text back, he might see.”

And then, silence.

This wasn’t just a “creepy stepfather” situation anymore. This was a documented timeline of abduction. Riley was in her safe space, her sanctuary, and the predator had walked right in.

Back in The Box: The Pressure Cooker

I took the printout of the text messages. I folded the paper so the text wasn’t visible yet. I walked back into the interrogation room where Andy was still sitting, looking a little more tired, but still arrogant.

“So, Andy,” I said, sitting down. “We talked to Johnny. He says you guys were flushed with product. Says there was no reason for you to leave to buy more.”

Andy’s jaw tightened. “Johnny doesn’t know everything.”

“No, but he knows enough. And we know you weren’t at the park. We pulled the GPS data from your truck, Andy. You didn’t go to a park. You went driving. A lot of driving. Into the mountains.”

He stayed silent. The “I don’t recall” defense.

“But that’s not what I want to talk about right now,” I said. I slid the folded paper across the table. “I want to talk about your relationship with Riley.”

“I told you,” he said, defensive. “I loved her. She was like a daughter.”

“Is that so?” I unfolded the paper. “Because daughters usually don’t text their boyfriends saying they’re terrified of their dads.”

I watched his eyes. When you confront a normal person with something like this, they get confused. They get upset. They say, ‘What? No, that’s a mistake!’

Andy didn’t look confused. He looked… calculating. He was scanning the paper, not reading the emotions, but looking for a loophole.

“She was a teenager,” he said, dismissing it. “Drama queen. Probably mad I told her to clean her room or something.”

“She said she was scared, Andy. ‘I’m scared.’ That’s not cleaning a room. That’s fear. Why was she afraid of you?”

“I don’t know!” he snapped, the first crack in his armor. “Maybe she was high. Maybe she was making it up for attention. I wasn’t in her room.”

“The timestamp says you were,” I countered. “Chantel—her mother—says she was asleep. You were the only one awake. You were the only one there.”

“I didn’t touch her,” he hissed. “You got nothing.”

“We have a missing girl. We have a five-hour gap in your alibi. We have texts saying she was scared of you minutes before she went silent forever. That’s not ‘nothing,’ Andy. That’s a noose.”

He leaned forward, staring me down. “Am I under arrest?”

“Not yet.”

“Then I’m done talking.”

He knew the system. He knew we needed more than circumstantial evidence. He clamming up was the smart move for him, but it was infuriating for us. We had to let him sit there, stewing in his own lies, while we waited for the one thing that could lock him down: The Lab.

The Silent Witness: The Biology of Betrayal

While I was battling Andy in the box, the Crime Scene Techs were dismantling Riley’s room. They had taken the pillows, the sheets, the mattress. They were looking for what the naked eye misses.

We sent the samples to the state lab with a rush order. “Priority One. Missing Child.” That usually gets you to the front of the line.

Late that evening, the call came in.

I was at my desk, rubbing my temples, trying to map out Andy’s route on a whiteboard. The phone rang. It was the lead forensic biologist.

“Detective Reynolds?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“We got the preliminary results on the pillowcase and the comforter.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s a mix,” the biologist said. “We found saliva and blood. The blood… it’s not just Riley’s.”

My grip on the phone tightened. “Whose is it?”

“It’s a match for Andrew McCauley.”

I closed my eyes, letting the breath hiss out of my lungs. “Are you sure?”

“100%. We also found something else. The saliva on the pillow… the pattern suggests forced contact. Like a face was pressed into it. Hard.”

I hung up the phone. The picture was complete. It wasn’t just a suspicion anymore. It was a narrative of horror written in DNA.

Andy had gone into her room. She was scared. He had attacked her. The blood—maybe a nosebleed from the struggle, maybe a scratch—had mixed with the fluids of a girl fighting for her life. He had smothered her. He had silenced her screams with the very pillow she slept on every night.

And then, he had wrapped her up. He had waited. He had gone to “work” to establish an alibi, only to slip away, return to the house while the mother was out, and carry Riley’s lifeless body out to his truck.

The five hours. That wasn’t a drug run. That was a disposal run.

I walked over to Miller. He looked up, seeing the look on my face.

“We got him?” Miller asked.

“We got the blood,” I said. “And we got the saliva. He suffocated her, Miller.”

Miller’s face hardened. “That son of a b*tch.”

“But we still don’t have Riley,” I said, looking at the map on the whiteboard. “We can charge him with murder now, sure. But a body… a body brings closure. And a body tells the story the suspect won’t.”

I traced the route Andy took. He went towards the mountains. Towards the rugged, dense woods of the West Virginia panhandle. There are a thousand places to hide a secret out there. Ravines, old mines, dense thickets where the sun barely touches the ground.

“Get the K9 units ready,” I told Miller. “And call the search and rescue teams. We know where he went. Now we just have to find where he stopped.”

The Search Begins

The sun was beginning to set, casting long, jagged shadows across the station floor. We had the warrant now. We had the charges drafted. Andy wasn’t going home. He was going to a cell.

But my mind wasn’t on the paperwork. It was on a 15-year-old girl, alone in the dark.

I gathered the team in the briefing room. The mood was grim. Everyone knew what the DNA meant. This wasn’t a rescue mission anymore. This was a recovery.

“Listen up,” I told them. “We know he headed west on Route 9. We have camera hits here, here, and here.” I tapped the map. “He was off the grid for about two hours in this specific sector. It’s rough terrain. Steep drops. Heavy brush. If he dumped her, he didn’t carry her far. He’s lazy. He’s arrogant. He probably pulled off to the side of a fire road and pushed her over the edge.”

I looked at the faces of the officers. Some were parents. Some were rookies. All of them looked ready to tear the mountains apart with their bare hands.

“We find her,” I said. “We bring her home. And we make sure that piece of trash never sees daylight again.”

As we loaded up the trucks, I checked my phone one last time. A text from Chantel, Riley’s mom.

“Did you find her? Is she cold? Please tell me she’s okay.”

I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t type the words. How do you tell a mother that the man she let into her home, the man she shared a bed with, had extinguished her daughter’s life while she was just a room away?

I put the phone in my pocket. The night was coming, and the mountains were waiting. We had to find Riley.

But as we were prepping the search, one of the Crime Scene techs, a sharp kid named Sarah, came running up to my truck. She was holding an evidence bag.

“Detective!” she yelled. “Wait! Before you go out there.”

I rolled down the window. “What is it, Sarah?”

“We processed Andy’s truck,” she said, catching her breath. “The bed of the pickup. We found something weird.”

“We already found the drywall mud,” I said.

“No, not that,” she shook her head. “Screws. Industrial screws. Weird ones. Not the kind you use for drywall. They were loose in the back, rolling around.”

I looked at the bag. They were distinct. strange heads. oxidized metal.

“Why does that matter?” I asked.

“Because,” she said, “If he dumped her… if he threw her body somewhere… these might have fallen out too. Or maybe they belong to the location where he left her. It’s a long shot, but if you see these out there… you’re close.”

I took the bag. A screw. A tiny, insignificant piece of metal. But in homicide work, the devil is in the details.

“Good work,” I said. “Let’s roll.”

The convoy of police SUVs moved out, lights flashing against the twilight. We were heading into the darkness to find the light that had been stolen. The interrogation was over. The hunt was on.

And Andy McCauley, sitting in his cell, probably thought he was safe. He probably thought the mountains would keep his secret.

He was wrong.

Part 3

Into the Abyss

The drive up to the Tuscarora Trail wasn’t just a drive; it was a descent into a different world. Berkeley Springs is a small town, tight-knit, the kind of place where neighbors know each other’s cars. But once you cross that invisible line into the mountains, civilization falls away. The roads narrow into gravel ribbons that wind like scars across the face of the earth. The trees grow thicker, blotting out the stars, and the silence isn’t peaceful—it’s predatory.

I was in the lead vehicle, my knuckles white on the steering wheel. The GPS data from Andy’s truck was our only map, a digital breadcrumb trail left by a man who thought he was smarter than the satellites orbiting above him. He had driven this route in the middle of a workday, claiming to be high on c*ke, claiming to be lost. But the data didn’t show a man wandering aimlessly. It showed a man with a destination.

He had stopped. Specifically, he had stopped near a steep embankment off a fire road for eleven minutes.

Eleven minutes. That’s not enough time to hike. It’s not enough time to hunt. But it is exactly enough time to pull a truck over, open the tailgate, and push a heavy burden over the edge of a ravine.

“We’re getting close to the coordinates,” Miller said from the passenger seat. He was holding the topographic map, his finger tracing the contour lines. “It’s a steep drop-off, Mark. If he dumped her there, she could have rolled down fifty, maybe a hundred yards. It’s going to be brutal terrain.”

We parked the cruisers in a line, our headlights cutting through the dust and gloom. The K9 unit was already out, the handler, Officer Davis, strapping a tracking harness onto a bloodhound named Buster. Dogs don’t lie. They don’t have alibis. They just smell the truth.

“We have a scent article?” Davis asked.

I handed him a sealed bag containing Riley’s hairbrush. Davis let Buster get a good noseful. The dog’s demeanor changed instantly. His tail stopped wagging. His head lowered. He let out a low, mournful bay that echoed off the trees. He had the scent of the girl. Now he just had to find where the scent ended.

The Search

We moved in a phalanx, flashlights sweeping the ground. The underbrush was thick—thorny vines, decaying logs, and layers of dead leaves that crunched loudly under our boots. It was physical work, battling gravity and nature, but nobody complained. We all had the same image in our heads: a fifteen-year-old girl, alone in this cold, dark wilderness.

We focused on the area where the GPS said Andy had idled. It was a pull-off, barely wide enough for a truck.

“Spread out!” I ordered. “Look for anything. Tire tracks, disturbed earth, trash. Anything that doesn’t belong.”

Minutes turned into an hour. The frustration was mounting. The woods are vast, and a body is small. You start to doubt yourself. Did the GPS drift? Was he just turning around here?

And then, Sarah, the Crime Scene Tech, shouted.

“Detective! Over here!”

I scrambled down the slope, sliding on the loose shale. Sarah was crouching near the edge of the drop-off, her flashlight beam focused on a patch of dirt.

“Look,” she said, pointing with a gloved finger.

I leaned in. Half-buried in the mud was a screw.

It wasn’t a standard wood screw you’d find in a deck. It was an industrial screw, green-coated, with a unique star-shaped head. It was identical to the ones Sarah had found rolling loose in the bed of Andy McCauley’s truck just hours ago.

My heart hammered against my ribs. This was it. This was the physical link.

“He was here,” I whispered. “He opened the tailgate right here. These fell out when he dragged her out.”

“The dog is alerting!” Davis yelled from further down the ravine.

The sound of the dog was different now. It wasn’t the baying of the hunt; it was the sharp, frantic bark of discovery.

The Discovery

We descended. The slope was nearly vertical. We had to hold onto saplings to keep from tumbling down. About forty yards down the embankment, the terrain leveled out slightly into a natural depression, a place where fallen leaves and debris gathered.

Buster was circling a mound of dark earth and brush, pawing at the ground. Davis pulled him back.

“Easy, boy. Easy.”

I reached the bottom and clicked my flashlight to its highest setting. The beam cut through the shadows.

At first, your brain tries to reject what it sees. It tries to tell you it’s a pile of old clothes, or a mannequin, or a trick of the light. But then the details resolve. A shoe. The pattern of a shirt. The stillness.

Riley Crossman was lying there.

She had been discarded. That’s the only word for it. Thrown away like refuse. She was still wearing the clothes she had on in the last photo her mother took of her. Her body was positioned awkwardly, caught against a fallen log that had stopped her descent.

The decomposition was advanced. It had been eight days. The mountain had not been kind to her. But it was her. I knew it.

I keyed my radio. My voice felt thick, like I was speaking through wool.

“Dispatch, this is Reynolds. We have located the victim. Notify the ME. Secure the perimeter. We are… we are 10-4 on the recovery.”

A silence fell over the team. Miller took off his hat and pressed it to his chest. Sarah turned away, taking a deep breath to steady herself. We stand over death often in this job, but a child? A child killed by someone she trusted? It rips a piece of your soul out every time.

But then, the sadness turned to cold, hard professional rage. I looked closer, not touching, just observing.

On her shoulder, on the fabric of her shirt, was a smear. It was dried, white, and chalky.

Drywall mud.

Andy was a drywall hanger. He had been at work, presumably covered in the dust of his trade, before he killed her. Or, more likely, the residue was in the bed of his truck—the same truck where we found the screws—and it had transferred to her body when he loaded her in.

“Bag everything,” I told Sarah, my voice steel. “Every leaf around her. Every insect. And get samples of that white substance on her shirt. That is our smoking gun.”

We had the screws at the top of the hill. We had the body at the bottom. We had the drywall mud connecting her to his vehicle. The narrative was no longer a theory. It was a forensic fact.

The Arrest

We didn’t leave her. We stayed on that mountain until the Medical Examiner arrived, until the retrieval team carefully brought her up the slope in a basket. We walked her out of the woods, a solemn procession under the moonlight. We owed her that dignity.

By the time we got back to the station, it was morning. The sun was coming up, painting the sky in cruel, beautiful shades of pink and orange. The world was waking up, but Riley never would again.

Andy McCauley was still in the holding cell. We had held him on an obstruction charge, a placeholder while we searched. Now, the charges were going to be upgraded.

I walked to the cell block. I didn’t wash the dirt of the mountain off my boots. I wanted him to see it. I wanted him to smell the woods on me.

Andy was asleep on the cot. He looked peaceful. That angered me more than anything. How do you sleep after doing what he did?

I rapped my baton against the bars. The sound rang out like a gunshot.

“Wake up, Andy.”

He sat up, rubbing his eyes. He looked at me, and for a second, he saw the look in my eyes and he knew. The arrogance vanished. The color drained from his face.

“Did you find something?” he asked, his voice trembling for the first time.

“We found her, Andy,” I said, unlocking the cell door. “And we found the screws you dropped. And we found the drywall mud you left on her clothes.”

I stepped inside, pulled him to his feet, and spun him around.

“Andrew McCauley, you are under arrest for the first-degree m*rder of Riley Crossman.”

I cinched the cuffs tight. Tighter than necessary? Maybe.

“You have the right to remain silent,” I recited, walking him down the hallway. “And I highly suggest you use it. Because everything you’ve said so far has just dug your grave a little deeper.”

He didn’t say a word. He didn’t cry. He didn’t ask about Riley. He just stared at the floor, a man realizing that his web of lies had turned into a cage.

The Forensic Lock

The days following the arrest were a blur of paperwork and lab results. We needed to make sure the case was airtight. A defense attorney would try to rip us apart. They would say the screws were common. They would say the DNA was transfer because they lived in the same house.

But the drywall mud… that was the nail in the coffin.

We sent the samples from Riley’s shirt to a specialized geology lab. They compared it to the buckets of joint compound found in Andy’s truck.

It wasn’t just generic mud. Drywall compound has chemical signatures—polymers, limestone, mica, clay. The ratios vary by batch and brand.

The report came back three weeks later.

“The sample taken from the victim’s clothing is chemically indistinguishable from the control sample taken from the suspect’s vehicle bed.”

She had been in his truck. There was no innocent explanation for that. She didn’t work with him. She didn’t ride in the bed of the truck. The only way that mud got on her back was if she was lying dead in the cargo bed while he drove her to the mountains.

We also analyzed the screws. They were specialized decking screws, a specific brand. We traced the purchase. Andy’s boss confirmed he had bought a box of them for a job site two days prior. The screws found near the body matched the batch exactly.

The “Cinderella fit” of evidence. Everything aligned perfectly.

But the hardest part wasn’t the science. It was the family.

I sat down with Chantel, Riley’s mom, and her biological father. I had to explain the details. I had to tell a mother that the man she slept beside, the man who ate at her table, was a monster.

“Why?” Chantel sobbed, clutching a framed photo of Riley. “Why did he do it?”

That was the one question I couldn’t answer. We had the how, the where, and the when. But the why? That remained locked in the dark, twisted mind of Andy McCauley. Was it a sexual advance rejected? Was it a rage killing? We suspected the former—the text “He’s in my room” suggested a predatory approach. But without a confession, the motive was a black hole.

“We don’t need the why to put him away, Chantel,” I told her gently. “We have the evidence. He’s never coming back.”

But as we prepared for trial, I knew the fight wasn’t over. Andy was pleading Not Guilty. He was going to drag this family through hell one more time.

Part 4

The Courtroom Theater

Morgan County Courthouse is an old building, filled with the ghosts of past judgments, but I had never felt tension like the day State of West Virginia v. Andrew McCauley began. The community was outraged. “Justice for Riley” signs were everywhere. But inside the courtroom, emotions had to be checked at the door. We dealt in facts.

The defense strategy was predictable but infuriating. Since Riley’s body had been in the elements for eight days, the Medical Examiner couldn’t determine an exact anatomical cause of d*ath. There were no bullet holes, no knife wounds. The decomposition masked signs of strangulation or suffocation.

Andy’s lawyer, a sharp suit from the city, paced in front of the jury.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, his voice smooth. “The state has a theory. They have a story. But do they have a cause of dath? No. They cannot tell you how Riley died. They cannot prove my client killed her. For all we know, this was a tragic overdose, an accident, and a panicked reaction. But mrder? They haven’t proved it.”

It was a Hail Mary pass. He was trying to use the tragedy of the decomposition—caused by Andy hiding the body—as a shield for Andy.

I sat at the prosecution table, grinding my teeth. I looked at the jury. Twelve ordinary people. A teacher, a mechanic, a nurse. They looked skeptical. They needed us to connect the dots.

The Prosecution’s Hammer

We didn’t have a video of the crime. But we had a mosaic that formed a picture of guilt so clear it was undeniable.

First, we put Hayden on the stand. The boyfriend. He was older now, but he looked just as terrified as he did the day we interviewed him. He read the texts aloud.

“He’s in my room.”

“I’m scared.”

You could hear a pin drop. The jury looked at Andy. He was scribbling on a notepad, looking bored. That lack of emotion was his biggest enemy. A grieving stepfather cries. An innocent man gets angry. A sociopath gets bored.

Then came the science. We brought in the FBI expert on the drywall mud. He set up a chart.

“The chemical composition of the smear on Riley’s shirt is unique,” the expert explained, pointing to the spectral peaks on the chart. “It matches the wet compound found in the defendant’s truck bed. It does not match any materials found in Riley’s room or the house. The transfer occurred in the truck.”

The jurors nodded. They were taking notes furiously.

Then, the screws. We showed the photos. The screw in the mud of the ravine. The screw in the truck. The receipt from Andy’s work. It was a trail of breadcrumbs made of steel.

Finally, I took the stand. I walked them through the timeline.

“The defendant claims he was buying drugs,” I testified, looking directly at the jury. “But his phone was off. His GPS showed a direct route to the disposal site. He stopped for eleven minutes. That is the exact time required to unload a body. He didn’t buy drugs. He bought time to cover a m*rder.”

The prosecutor, a fierce woman named DA Kallen, closed the case with a powerful image.

“Andy McCauley wants you to believe in coincidences,” she said. “He wants you to believe it’s a coincidence that Riley was scared of him minutes before she vanished. A coincidence that his DNA is mixed with her blood on her pillow. A coincidence that he vanished for five hours. A coincidence that her body was found where his truck stopped. Ladies and gentlemen, there are no such things as this many coincidences. There is only the truth.”

The Verdict

The jury deliberated for four hours. In a m*rder trial, that’s lightning fast. Usually, they argue for days. But the evidence was overwhelming.

When the bailiff announced they had a verdict, the air in the room was sucked out. I stood next to Chantel. She was shaking so hard the bench was vibrating.

“Will the defendant please rise,” the judge commanded.

Andy stood up. He buttoned his blazer. He still looked like he thought he was going to walk away.

“We, the jury, find the defendant, Andrew J. McCauley Jr., as to Count One, M*rder in the First Degree… Guilty.”

A sob broke out from the gallery. It was a primal sound, a release of months of held breath. Chantel collapsed into her mother’s arms.

“As to Count Two, Concealment of a Deceased Human Body… Guilty.”

I looked at Andy. For the first time, the mask slipped. His jaw went slack. His eyes darted around the room, looking for an exit that didn’t exist. The reality was crashing down on him. The drywall, the screws, the texts—they had buried him.

The Sentencing and the Aftermath

The sentencing hearing was where the final blow was struck. The judge, a man who had seen decades of crime in West Virginia, looked down at Andy with undisguised disgust.

“Mr. McCauley,” the judge said, his voice booming. “You betrayed the sacred trust of a home. You took a child who should have been safe in her bed, and you extinguished her life. You have shown no remorse. You have shed no tears. You are a danger to society.”

The gavel came down.

“I sentence you to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the charge of M*rder. And for the concealment, I sentence you to a consecutive term. You will never walk free again.”

Two life sentences. He would die in a concrete box.

As the bailiffs shackled him and led him away, Andy looked back one last time. He looked at Chantel. He didn’t say sorry. He just looked… empty. A vessel where a soul should be.

The Epilogue: The empty Room

A year has passed since the trial. The case is closed. The files are boxed up in the archives. But for those of us who lived it, it never really ends.

I visited Chantel yesterday. She’s moved out of that house. She couldn’t stay there, not with that bedroom down the hall. She’s trying to rebuild, but how do you rebuild when the foundation was stolen?

We sat on her new porch, drinking iced tea.

“I still reach for my phone to text her,” Chantel said, looking at the distant mountains. “Every time I see something funny, or a cute dog, I think, ‘Riley would love that.’ And then I remember.”

“She’s with you, Chantel,” I said, though I knew the words were inadequate. “We got him. He can’t hurt anyone else.”

“I know,” she whispered. “But I just wish I had listened. I wish I had known.”

That’s the haunting part of this job. The what ifs. What if she had screamed louder? What if the mom had come home early? What if we had found her sooner?

But we can’t live in the what ifs. We have to live in the what is.

And what is true is this: Riley Crossman was a bright, beautiful girl who was taken by a coward. But she wasn’t just a victim. She was the witness who convicted him. Her text messages, her DNA, the very mud on her clothes—she fought him from beyond the grave. She pointed the finger at him when he thought he had silenced her.

I drove home that evening, the sun setting behind the Appalachian ridges. I pulled into my driveway and walked inside. My own daughter was sitting on the couch, watching TV.

I walked over and hugged her. I hugged her tighter than usual.

“Dad? You okay?” she asked, confused.

“Yeah,” I said, my voice thick. “I’m okay. Just… checking on you.”

The world is full of monsters. Sometimes they hide in the woods. Sometimes they hide in the room next door. My job is to hunt them. But Riley’s story is a reminder to all of us: Listen to your children. Watch the people you let into your life. Because the most dangerous predator is the one who has a key to your front door.

End of Story.