Sue Grafton, who wrote the brilliant alphabet series of mysteries featuring P.I. Kinsey Millhone, has a perfect description of a homicide which sounds vaguely like the original lead detective in the Stacey Burns murder case.

Detective Steve Rowland said that he is the voice of the victim since they can no longer speak for themselves.

In the I Is For Innocent novel, the irrepressible Kinsey Millhone says,  “The dead are mute, but the living still have voice with which to protest their innocence. Often their objections are noisy and pious, impossible to refute since the one person who could condemn them has been silenced forever.”

Stacey Burns has been silenced forever and with that silence any chance of corroborating or impugning the many “facts” surrounding conversations, phone calls, or events to which she was the only witness has been lost.

My thanks to Sue Grafton and her heroine, Kinsey Millhone, for putting this in perspective.

Duke