SAN JOSE, Calif. — One day in 2007, I found myself in the basement of the Contra Costa County Superior Courthouse in Martinez, staring at a partial bloody footprint on the lid of a plastic bin. The footprint looked markedly similar to the tread on the bottom of the teenage boy’s slip-on shoe I held in my hand.
I had fallen down a true-crime rabbit hole. Somehow I had hoped that seeing the shoe and footprint in person would help me make sense of a gruesome murder I’d covered as a reporter. A teenager who had gone to my high school had been convicted of bludgeoning his 52-year-old female neighbor to death.
Even after the boy’s conviction, I scoured public records, hit up key players for insights and traded theories on mid-2000s message boards. And, yes, my curiosity led me into a courthouse basement to search through boxes of crime scene evidence.
