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Waiting at the IHOP for take-out coffee, Denise thought back to being with Carrie in the woods a couple days ago, the noise they’d heard.

They’d seen nothing. At first Denise had figured it might be a news competitor spying on them. More likely an animal or falling branch, they reasoned after they’d left the forest.

Now, waiting in the IHOP, Denise’s phone vibrated.

A message had come through her public contact address.

Just read your story. So sad, but so informative , Gloria T. wrote.

The message was one of many compliments she’d received from readers since the story went up on the paper’s site last night. The print edition was delivered across the county earlier this morning.

Grabbing her coffee, she crossed the street to the strip mall and the Chronicle office.

Her younger fellow reporters were already there. Marco Barnes raised his mug.

“Epic piece of journalism,” he said as Denise got a copy from the newsroom stack.

“Yes,” Kelcey Field said. “First-rate work.”

“Thank you, colleagues. And thank you for taking up the extra story load.”

Denise went to her corner desk to study her work. Flagged as an exclusive, her article ran under the headline:

MURDER IN WILD PINES FOREST

Unraveling the Heartbreaking Mystery

Dominating the front page, her story ran a few thousand words, spilling inside, filling two ad-free pages—a “double truck” in news terms. Denise had just started reading when Lynn, her editor, arrived at her desk, pushing her glasses to the top of her head.

“Giving you time for this paid off,” Lynn said. “Good work.”

“Thanks.”

“We’re getting calls from national outlets. The wires are reporting on it. We’re looking at syndicating it.”

“That’s great.”

“You did us proud, Denise. Some networks want to interview you. The exclusive with Carrie was new information, and the little old Chron beat the big guns who were poking around—the Times , the Post , CNN, everybody.” Lynn knocked her knuckles on her desk. “Good stuff.”

Denise returned to the story and her coffee. She looked at Carrie’s photo with the cutline Haunted Sole Survivor . Getting her to talk had been a coup. Denise had tried to get her to remember as much as she could. Going over the files with her had helped. So did walking through the crime scene, until Carrie became overwhelmed.

It seemed that she was on the brink of recalling more—but Denise thought she was holding back.

I wonder what she might have remembered.

Still, Denise had plenty of material. After two days of writing at home, she’d pulled it together, hammering out the most exhaustive story yet on one of the darkest chapters in Clear River’s history. It didn’t answer all the questions, but still, she was pleased with the result.

She’d given the timeline: Carrie’s confrontation with Abby and Erin; then the costume party; then the woods.

Sipping coffee, Denise thought of Carrie struggling to recall why the three of them ended up together in the woods. In the story, Denise detailed how the detectives had suspected Carrie, believing she had a vendetta against Abby and Erin. The investigation revealed that the girls died of gunshots fired from a Glock, a common police weapon. Being the sheriff’s daughter, Carrie had access to such a firearm from her father’s collection. And her father had even instructed her on how to use a gun.

Given the situation, it was clear to Denise why they’d thought Carrie committed the murders.

But no weapon and no casings were ever recovered at the scene. All of Vern Hamilton’s weapons were accounted for; ballistic tests on his Glocks were negative. Testing Carrie for gunshot residue was ineffective because she’d been in the river.

Denise moved on to her story’s next key aspect, the one she felt Eve Trainor had declined to reveal. Denise had found it buried deep in the case files. It was a theory suggesting the murder scene was staged to look like the work of a serial killer, with missing items taken as trophies. These included shoelaces, articles of clothing, identification and jewelry. They were never recovered. The theory held that Carrie would know how to disguise the scene. Denise found this aspect intriguing. No weapon or casings found. Items taken from the victims, in a possible staging .

She read on, to the detectives’ interviews with Carrie’s high school classmates, coming to one with Opal Wells. They’d asked Opal if Carrie was capable of violence, or seeking vengeance, after the confrontation in the cafeteria.

“No, not at all,” Opal had said at the time in her statement. “I was there sitting with Carrie the day Erin, Abby and their group were bullying Lanna. Carrie saw what was happening and told them to stop. Carrie’s a good person, so smart. She helped me with my homework and we worked on projects together. I always felt sorry for her because she was so quiet after her mother died.”

When Denise interviewed Opal for the story in her home, she supported everything she’d said in her police statement years earlier. However, Opal struck Denise as being a tiny bit unsophisticated and naive—she recalled how Opal had rummaged in vain through closets for a school project she’d done with Carrie.

Denise continued reading how the circumstantial evidence at that point was insufficient to charge Carrie. Her spotty memory was a challenge. Carrie moved to California; the case grew cold. Years later, Donnie Ray Hyde emerged as a new suspect, ultimately confessing to the murders before his execution.

In his confession, Hyde admitted to being “out of my mind on drugs and alcohol, wanting to know what killing three together would be like.” He confessed to wearing a mask, killing the girls and chasing Carrie, trying to kill her before she fell from the cliff. Hyde said he’d collected shell casings, took items from the dead girls, then got rid of them and the gun. He was relieved reading news reports that Carrie’s injuries had blocked her memory, and as time passed, he grew ever more confident he would never be linked to the case.

It was remarkable, Denise thought, how after he was visited on death row by Vern Hamilton, a man who had his own death sentence, the case was closed. Obtaining his confession was attributed to Hyde’s exhaust of appeals in the Dupree case—and wanting to cleanse his soul.

Denise read on, to her eyewitness account of his execution in Huntsville and her interview with his mother, Mary-Ellen, in Kilgore. The story also went into the lives of Hyde, Jenna Dupree, Erin, Abby and Carrie. The layout of the article was well-done with an array of photos—high school yearbook pictures, photos of Erin and Abby taken on the day they were murdered, before they went to Wild Pines Forest. There were pictures of Jenna Dupree as well as Vern and the detectives. The story also featured photos of Hyde, a file image of the gurney in the execution chamber at Huntsville, and one of Hyde’s mother in his childhood bedroom.

At the story’s end, Denise took readers back into the woods with Carrie battling to remember, to unravel the mystery of how she and the others ended up there.

“Abby and Erin wanted to talk to me. They said that they needed to talk here. But I was afraid.”

Afraid of what, and why, will likely never be known, Denise had written, because on that ill-fated day, the three young women crossed paths with a killer, in a forest that may never give up all of its secrets.