Colter Shaw arrived in Hanson Valley, Ohio, at ten in the morning, after fourteen hours on the road. He’d made the journey in his gray, thirty-foot-long Winnebago, whose odometer registered just over 139,000 miles upon his arrival.

Shaw had owned four other RVs, similar to this one, over the past ten years. Two he traded in, according to his own admittedly arbitrary rule of thumb: when the odometer reached a quarter-million miles—ten times around the circumference of the earth at the equator. One camper was totaled in a crash in Colorado, in which he was injured, though not badly. The fourth was destroyed in Oklahoma City when a man threw a Molotov cocktail at it. The improvised explosive device didn’t breach the windshield, but the flaming gasoline flowed into the body and burned the vehicle to the rims in twenty minutes.

Shaw, who was inside the RV at the time, escaped with most of his belongings. Six feet tall, and with a muscular build, he had been a champion wrestler at the University of Michigan and learned grappling—also known as street wrestling—from his father. When he located the bomb-flinger in his mobile home, it took only five minutes to convince the man to turn himself in, which he did, though only after a brief stop in the emergency room to treat the man’s dislocated shoulder.

In Hanson Valley, Shaw parked outside of the Sterlings’ bungalow, located in a tattered section of town. They obviously weren’t a family that could easily spare the twenty-six hundred dollars they were offering to anyone who could prove Jude was innocent of the murder. Arnie worked for the power authority doing line maintenance work; Jewel was a checker at Foster’s, a local grocery store that had been in business for sixty-two years, a mom-and-daughter operation.

Shaw always met offerors—his term for those posting a reward—in person. This gave each party a chance to size the other up. He’d need their cooperation and that meant they’d have to be comfortable with him. He, too, always made sure the offerors were people he wanted to do business with. Once, he’d declined a forty-thousand-dollar reward for a runaway teen. He’d walked into the father’s living room, noted the Nazi flag dominating one wall, and turned around and left, thinking to the teenager: Keep running, son, and good luck.

Arnie Sterling was a wiry man in his forties, with thinning flyaway reddish hair. His wife was heavy and her face was pinched, as if fraught with constant worry. They warmly welcomed Shaw into their cluttered kitchen and Jewel poured coffee. He declined baked goods.

“He got into a fight last night. This prisoner was baiting him. They finally broke it up but the guards don’t really care.”

Jewel added: “And there was a knifing yesterday, he told us.” She was tearing up.