A young mother disappears just days before Christmas. More than a year later, another woman is murdered across state lines. The cases seem separate – different cities, different circumstances – but eventually they converge around the same teenage suspect.

What follows is more complicated than a confession and a conviction. It’s a case shaped by questions of mental competency, juvenile justice, changing constitutional protections, and what happens when one act of violence forces investigators to reconsider others that never made sense.