Wrongful convictions can result from any number of cascading errors, blatant oversights, and outright slipups—some conscious and deliberate, some structural and circumstantial. Over 32 years, the investigation and prosecutions of the Schweitzers seem to have incorporated every possible one of them. There was intense media attention putting pressure on police to make an arrest—the “dead white girl” phenomenon. There was cultural bias against Native Hawaiians like the Schweitzers—the legacy, well known to Hawaiians, of lynchings of native men for alleged attacks on white women. There was investigative tunnel vision—going after the Schweitzer brothers even after the facts failed to support that case. There was blind faith in jailhouse informants—a slew of them, all hoping for special favors from prosecutors in return for their testimony. There was junk science—about teeth marks, and tire treads. There even may have been prosecutorial misconduct—a state lawyer misleading a judge about the outcome of one of the brothers’ polygraph tests.

Now that Ian has been exonerated, he needs to reacclimate to life in the world. He had to get a driver’s license and learn how to use a smartphone. He needs to get comfortable around people again. These towns were small enough already. For decades the Schweitzers were the area’s greatest villains; now they run into people and those people are nice. At the market and at restaurants, they congratulate Ian and ask if they can give him a hug. It’s weird. He can’t help but think: Where were those people for the past 30 years? But he knows there are others out there too—people who benefited from accusing him of a crime they knew he hadn’t committed. Chief among them is John Gonsalves.

As our conversation meandered over a sunny afternoon, Ian allowed himself to wonder about Gonsalves. What must it be like for him now, to know that the lie didn’t hold? If the brothers ever did confront him, what would he say?

So in March, Hutchison contacted Marta Mena-Gordon, who was 9 years old when her big sister was murdered. He told her he was digging back into the case, then followed up with updates. Mena-Gordon welcomed the reports.

“When he would call, his voice, he just has this very sincere voice,” Mena-Gordon said. “It was like, OK, he brought us some hope. It devastated my father and mother not knowing anything.”

In early October, Hutchison flew to Portland to meet with Mena-Gordon. He was able to tell her that the case had been solved and closed, and although her sister’s killer was dead, they knew who he was.

“It was quite a moment, definitely,” Mena-Gordon said. “So many emotions. Lots of happy tears.”

Even so, Tim, the only person who survived the fire, became a suspect. “We did not want to believe this was intentionally set,” CSPD detective Rick Gysin told the Colorado Springs Gazette in 2008, five years after the blaze. “You don’t want to think of humanity like that.”

However, investigators eventually came to the conclusion that the fire was a triple homicide. CBI tests on the carpeting, on Tim’s sneakers and jeans, and on pajamas belonging to both Sophia and Sierra had come back positive for xylenes—colorless, flammable liquids that could be used as accelerants in fires—which gave investigators reason to believe the fire was intentionally set.

On top of that, Tim’s recollection of the fire changed with each retelling. At one point, he said he’d walked to the garage and returned to a living room filled with fire; in another, it was heavy smoke. In one, he ran to a bedroom window to get air; in another, he was lining up his children to get out of the house. “What Tim Nicholls said didn’t make a lot of sense,” Derek Graham, part of the police homicide investigation team, told the Gazette in 2008. “That was a big red flag from the beginning.”

I felt caught in a peculiar quandary. If I repeated details that G had already written down, was I relying on a primary source or appropriating what my peers in creative-writing workshops would call her “lived experience”? The tautology maddened me. I had lived the experience, too, yet I felt like either a mimic, reciting my family’s recollections, or a fabulist, mistaking my imagination for fact. My ignorance isolated me from G and our mom. I had a sense that I was hammering on a bolted door, begging them to admit me to an awful place. And why would I want to get in? Well, because they were there.

Ruth Pelke was pinned like a specimen to her dining-room floor. She would soon be dead. The young girls were circling, stalking, moving through the house, overturning photos of Mrs Pelke’s grandkids and touching and tossing aside books and ornaments, family things. They took the key to her Plymouth, and a total of $10. These were children, like the hundreds of others who had passed through her house. That was why she had let them in.

Dispatches from a fracturing America spread across the front page of the Chronicle on Nov. 11, 1969. Richard Nixon’s administration railed against anti-war protesters; police in Memphis sprayed tear gas into a crowd of young Black people opposing segregation. But the lead story that day was Alcatraz. “A war party” of 14 “young Indian invaders” had claimed the island, calling themselves the Indians of All Tribes and naming Oakes their “president-elect.”

Celebrities including Jane Fonda and Anthony Quinn soon declared their support, sailing to Alcatraz one day on a boat purchased for the protesters by the band Creedence Clearwater Revival. The occupation was becoming a ’60s event, tugging at politics and pop culture. But another set of visitors went largely unnoticed by the media. In the last weeks of 1969, delegations from tribes across the country journeyed to the island, curious to see what this new nation looked like. Oakes asked these elders for guidance, and they in turn asked for advice on land fights in their own territories.

They thought it best to leave town for a bit, and they asked Haley where she wanted to go. Her favorite thing she had ever seen in her short life was the Gateway Arch, which they’d visited on a family vacation, so they decided to take a short trip to St. Louis. During the drive up, Haley told them for the first time—told anyone for the first time—about her “imaginary friend,” Alecia.

From the moment Alecia first appeared in the story, Haley insisted on that slightly unorthodox spelling, although she did not yet perfectly know how to read. She also insisted on other specific details. Alecia was four years old. She had long, dark hair tied in pigtails. She wore a red shirt with purple sleeves, bell-bottom pants, and white sneakers. She had a flashlight. She guided Haley to the river.

“I never had imaginary friends before this experience,” Haley told me, “and I never had any after. And I never saw this particular imaginary friend again.” She did not think at any time that Alecia was a real child. “I was fully aware that this was a non-corporeal being that was with me. And she was a little girl, and we had conversations, we told stories, we played patty-cake, and she was just a very comforting presence. But I knew I was alone.” The hallucinations started later, after she’d already made it to the river. Alecia was not a vision of this sort. “I one hundred percent did not think there was another child with me. I knew, physically, I was alone.” But she also says that Alecia guided her to the river, which she didn’t know was there.

There is a phenomenon called third man syndrome, or third man factor: when some sort of unseen or incorporeal conscious presence seems to accompany people—often a person alone—going through a long, difficult, and frightening experience they do not know they will survive. It is not well understood. It may be some sort of emergency coping mechanism. It was most famously experienced by Sir Ernest Shackleton during one of his expeditions to the Antarctic; the mountaineer Reinhold Messner has also reported experiencing the phenomenon, as have the explorers Peter Hillary and Ann Bancroft. “During that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia,” Shackleton wrote in his 1919 memoir, South, “it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.”

Levina Moody, whom the police refer to by her first name, Gloria, is on the list as one of the first known Indigenous women to be murdered along BC’s infamous network of highways. Levina’s family believes people are withholding the truth about her case. As with other cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls that I have covered, the investigation into Moody’s murder was shoddy, despite strong evidence of there being a known suspect. Understanding why her case is still cold requires untangling the strands of a messy skein of an investigation.

Despite the fact that it’s been more than fifty years, the Moody family is still holding out hope for being able to name Levina’s killer or killers within their lifetimes. As Elders in their family pass on, Vanessa says it’s a constant reminder that many are dying without having the closure they deserve. With each generation that passes, there is a reminder of the intergenerational trauma caused by the murder and the lack of care that has seemed to surround it.

Showmanship came easily to von Bredow. A natural raconteur, he could mesmerize strangers with his verve, comic voices and seemingly endless collection of esoteric facts. “He was one of the most authentic people I’ve ever met,” says Martin Schleske, a luthier who became one of von Bredow’s friends. “He didn’t care about any conventions. They were just not important for him.”

He gave me a look of almost cartoonish wariness; he knew that I knew who he was. What he could not have known was that my reaction was not just to seeing a famous murderer walking around campus, but to encountering a character from a novel in the realm of supposed reality. It was as though the fabric separating fact from fiction had been torn.