On the fourth day, the story went in the direction everyone feared most.

A woman about ten houses up from Jesse’s, who rented out rooms, had gone looking for some overdue rent from one of her boarders, a man named Devlin Smythe. She hadn’t seen him around for a couple of days, not since the news broke about that poor girl down the street. She had wondered if maybe he’d volunteered for the search, and that had made her hold off for a day on demanding the money she was owed. How would that look? she thought. A guy’s trying to help find some little girl and you throw him out on the street.

But she hadn’t seen Smythe around, not even at night, and she began to wonder whether he’d skipped out on her for good.

She went upstairs and banged on the door of his room, but there was no answer. So she used her passkey to go inside.

It was as she’d feared. There were no shoes or boots by the door, no clothes in his closet. He’d packed up and gone, but not without leaving her a mess. There were dirty dishes in the sink, cereal bowls filled with ashes from his smoking. The place reeked of cigarette smoke. It was going to take a few days to clean up before she could rent to anyone else.

How bad, she must have wondered, had he left the fridge?

Sears wrote:

She had been jammed in with a container of sour cream that had turned green, some wilted celery, and an open can of chicken noodle soup. It was a final resting place of such monstrous indignity that even hardened officers found themselves turning away.

Jesse Shuttleworth had been suffocated.

Subsequent stories yielded further details. The landlady was interviewed at length and put together with a police sketch artist. The man known to police as Devlin Smythe had a shaggy head of dirty blond hair, a moustache, strong chin. He was described as stocky and stood an inch or two under six feet.

They reproduced the sketch in the paper. I tried to imagine him without the hair and the moustache. How he might look with a shaved head.

He was a chain-smoker. “You never saw him without a cigarette,” the landlady said.

He did odd jobs. He was, according to one man, a talented electrician. He had rewired a house for someone in the neighborhood. “He was good at it, and quick, too. He liked to get paid under the table.”

He possessed the skills, I thought, to bypass an electric meter.

Another man came forward to tell police Devlin Smythe had done some landscaping work for him. It was from this man that police learned Smythe had a tattoo.

It was on his right shoulder. Small, police said. Of a melted watch, in the style of Salvador Dali.