Every so often I go back and check on her — to find out whether anything new has come up. She’s a bright smile in one photograph, a playful sneer in another. Her friends miss her, they tell me. They just want to know what happened. They just want to bring her home.

They know she’s dead, they tell me. They just want to bring her home.

There’s no new information, of course. Whatever happened to her is still a mystery. Somewhere, someone buried her, and now her friends and family don’t get so much as a proper funeral. I think about her a lot. I think about most of them a lot.

I think about their loved ones, trying to choke out a usable quote over the phone in the wrenching hours after the news. Sometimes they don’t sob; sometimes they tell me about the deceased in a sort of breathless monotone just on the wavering brim of collapse, and that’s worse.

I think about the court appearances — somber people staring quietly at the accused, who inevitably keep their eyes on their shoes as those left behind read victim impact statements to the court. Sometimes they break into tears, too. Sometimes it’s not until the judge reads the sentence that someone comes apart, whether its the man staring at a life behind bars, or a family suddenly on the yawning edge of uncertainty in the case of an acquittal, robbed at the last minute of closure.

I think about all these things long after I’ve made the 45-minute drive back to my little townhouse bedroom. Most of the time, I cloud the commute as much as possible with comedy podcasts or music as loud as I can tolerate, and I do my best to keep my eyes forward, singing or shouting along with the music.

I don’t listen to the true crime podcasts. My friends keep suggesting them, and I keep telling them I’ll listen one day, and it’s probably the most blank-faced lie I’ve ever told in my life.

I joined a local, small-town paper in June 2018, just after being laid off from a college print shop two months prior. As the new guy on the squad, comparatively speaking, I took handle of what my editor called the “crime and courts” beat. If there was a major incident that involved the police, I found myself tasked with getting the details and cobbling together a story.

They tell you it’s a good starting gig because the writing is mostly formulaic: you sketch out who is accused of what, when, and where the investigation stands. You develop a rigid series of acceptably impartial descriptors and your writing program begins inserting “allegedly” and “supposedly” via auto-correct. For someone trying to learn the ins and outs of news reporting, crime and courts can provide structural practice.

For the most part, local reporting ends up with an array of robberies, civil suits, and assault cases, particularly if they involve any community celebrities. It’s not until you get to the murders, missing persons cases, and officer involved shootings that you really discover what you’ve signed up for.

About one and a half months into my tenure at this small town paper, I landed a missing persons story. My editor emerged from her office, shoved a camera in my hand, and told me to “book it” over to a small, one-story brick house in a middle class neighborhood. Our intern at the time arrived ahead of me, but my editor wanted two people on the job, thanks to a tip about some law enforcement poking around the property with what looked like a search team.

I arrived to find several people standing on the corner watching the proceedings, as well as the intern in question. I handed her the camera and tried to strike up conversation with the folks watching the search. They clarified the situation: someone supposedly murdered the woman in that house and buried her in the backyard, and the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation showed up to test that rumor.

None of them would go on record, of course — they didn’t want their names in the paper. (I found out over the course of my two-year stint that a lot of people didn’t want their names in the paper.) But off the record, the watchers informed me that the woman’s roommate stood accused by dint of his use of the victim’s debit card after she disappeared.

Our intern put together the initial story, and I followed up with the district attorney when, sure enough, he filed charges against an “unknown subject” for murder that Friday. They treated it as a murder case — this woman, they were certain, was dead.

I began following the case through each step of the process: calling family members and friends to provide memories and stories about the victim, and routinely checking in with the district attorney to ask if anything new turned up. It never did. As far as I know, that woman remains missing. Her former roommate stood accused of other charges in an attempt to get something out of him, but nothing came of it. The case is still open.

The last story I did on the subject covered a vigil held for the woman one year after her disappearance. I convinced my editor to let me reach out and ask the organizers some questions about the vigil, and to get details on their interactions with investigators on the case. One of the organizers cried while we spoke, and told me the investigation stopped cold months earlier; she said I was the first person to ask about the missing woman in weeks.

That turned something in my stomach — the idea that this woman I never met would just slide into obscurity, despite all the hurt surrounding her disappearance. I set up a reminder for myself to check every year on May 15, the day she disappeared, and see if any new information emerged. In the two years since I left that local paper, nothing has materialized.

But I think about her a lot, and I hope in some small way that helps, despite the fact that sometimes it keeps me up at night.

Another thing they don’t prepare you for when taking on the crime and courts beat is the inevitable officer involved shooting story. Those land in the same area code as the murders and missing persons cases, but typically with body cam footage to go along with the story. The writing remains rigidly structured, even as you piece together the story by way of cam footage and then step-by-step your audience through it.

The difference is, you have to watch the end of it. You don’t get to watch up until the footage will be cut for public consumption; you have to watch someone die, so that you can accurately report on the entire event. Another necessary evil, per my editor. (I kept thinking I would get used to it; my editor seemed to have acclimated, as did most of my office colleagues. I felt like the only one whose stomach flipped into my throat when I watched.)

The first time I watched body cam footage to completion was the first time I saw someone die, so to speak, in front of me. It was a middle-aged man who attempted to pull a gun on a cop serving a warrant in a bar and restaurant. The cop proved the quicker shot, and admittedly, did his best to talk the man down before things escalated (my thoughts on trying to serve a warrant in a crowded restaurant notwithstanding.)

I can still see the footage: the cop shoots the man in the chest, just below the sternum, and he collapses before he can pull the small, black pistol free of his jeans. A flurry of activity surrounds him as more cops pour in to secure the scene, but the main police officer — the shooter — stands over him, keeping an eye on the suspect as a medical professional prepares to work.

In the midst of the chaos, the dying man lets out a long, painful sigh, and stops moving.

The story becomes easy enough to put together, and provides enough follow up to cover my daily quota for nearly a week. I don’t talk about it with anyone else besides the police officers, who flatly refuse my editor’s request to talk to the young woman the suspect/victim sat with at the restaurant. I follow up, I take notes, I keep an eye out for the eventual police explanation for why they stormed into the restaurant to get the suspect/victim as opposed to waiting for him to come outside, and I go home each day, and I shiver thinking about that long, painful sigh.

I will remember that sound for the rest of my life. No matter how loud I turned the music up in my car or how many sleep sounds I put on through my smart speaker, I heard it again and again in my head — one fading, struggling, shredded breath through the lips of a man dying on the floor of a restaurant.

It took me two months to sleep soundly again, and in some small way I found myself disgusted that I could get back to that point.

Journalism is a necessity. It’s not a necessary evil, because at its core the practice itself is the telling of stories — all the tiny narratives that comprise The Human Experience(tm) up and down the scales. It’s necessary to tell those stories for a range of reasons — it’s worth celebrating those joys and mourning those tragedies, and it’s doubly worth keeping an eye on powerful people pulling levers behind massive portions of our lives.

Even the sad stories, even the infuriating stories, even the stories of people being as horrible as they can manage to one another — those all need telling, too.

But sometimes I catch myself looking up missing persons cases that weren’t solved while I was working, or thinking about the way people sound when they’re trying not to cry on the phone. Sometimes the thoughts get away from me, and I’m right there that moment again, fighting the tightness in my chest and the lump in my throat and the anxiety burning in my gut.

Sometimes I think maybe it’s necessary to talk about talking about loss, because as tangential as the speaker may be, hurt bleeds into people. Listen to enough people cry for too many hours and you start tearing up yourself.

I have to wonder how many other journalists out there have a hard time clocking out, so to speak. I think about them a lot, too — colleagues whose eyes get a little too flat when they talk about certain stories, or who quickly change the subject when someone asks about a case they covered.

I don’t regret working as a crime and courts reporter, but I’ll never do it again. These days I write about business development and foundational support, and I don’t have to watch any body cam footage. The only time I report on someone dying is when an important figure walks on. I feel more fulfilled and happy with my work.

But every so often I go back and I check to see if anyone’s made any progress on the missing woman, and see nothing, and it takes me a little while to recover.

I hope they find her one day.