A Vaguely Familiar Stranger Did It

They say nine out of ten murder victims know their killer.

Cops like those odds. It means they start with the husband, the wife, the coworker, or an ex, and work from there.

They assume a history, recent, intimate, obvious. But what if the relationship isn’t fresh? What if it’s dated, buried under decades of dust?

I’ve thought about this a lot.

A child is bullied on a playground, a fleeting romance at university goes sour, and a forgotten insult in a bar isn’t resolved. Life keeps moving, and people forget—until someone doesn’t. And when that forgotten connection resurfaces in blood, it confuses the math.

Police struggle when the link isn’t a tangled web of text messages, shared bank accounts, or workplace grudges. If the victim last saw their killer forty years ago, if the interaction lasted mere minutes, how can anyone connect the dots?

Would that ten percent gap shrink with this knowledge?

I believe it would.

Because I am that missing piece. The anomaly. The statistical outlier.

I once knew them all. Not intimately. Not the way detectives expect. A face glimpsed in a high school hallway. A voice that mocked me at a party. A cashier who shortchanged me in 1983. They forgot me, but I remembered them.

I remember everything.

Nine out of ten? No.

Ten out of ten victims knew their killer.

The difference comes down to when. I’ll tell you how. It’s in SEETHINGS, downloadable and free for a limited time.

-K