Lindsay clicked out of Wikipedia and found a longer article about the still-unsolved murder, aimed at true crime junkies. The article detailed a crowdsourced online theory that Melanie Locke was behind the killing. Some of the amateur sleuths opined that she could have easily left their young daughter asleep at the ranch, followed her husband back to town, committed the murder, and then returned to Flint Hills in time to be interviewed by police. The problem with that theory was that police had called her within twenty minutes of discovering Richard’s body, using a cell phone number they obtained from the next-door neighbor. Cell phone tower data placed Melanie in Flint Hills at the time she answered that call. Based on those records and the daughter’s statement that her mother never left the house that night, police had publicly cleared Melanie of suspicion in an effort to encourage potential witnesses to come forward with any relevant information they might have. The most likely explanation, they announced, was that Richard had interrupted an attempt to burglarize the family home while they were away for the weekend.

Despite law enforcement’s insistence that Richard’s wife was not a suspect, speculation persisted. The more nuanced gloss of the Melanie-did-it theory posited that she intentionally left his briefcase behind, knowing that he had an important federal appellate brief due the following week and would need to return to the house to retrieve it. A woman with her resources, intellect, and ambitions, critics maintained, would have no problem finding a skillful contract killer to do her dirty work while she had an ironclad alibi.

As for motive, the armchair, online detectives had no shortage of ideas there, either. Melanie had married Richard at a young age. The couple met at Harvard—she was an undergrad, he was in law school. At the time, Melanie had no intention of working for her father’s company, let alone becoming the corporate heir apparent. The couple’s initial plans were to live and work in Washington, DC, Richard as an elite appellate litigator at one of the capital’s largest law firms, and Melanie as a congressional aide with ambitions to become a behind-the-scenes power broker, perhaps as a lobbyist or campaign manager.