In a case two years later, Tricia Jean Jeppsin, aged 14, from New Haven, was hiking with her family along a trail in the Cold Hollow Mountains when she had an argument with her parents and ran off. During the next few weeks, the region was searched extensively by more than 500 volunteers—using dogs, ATVs, and on horseback. Police also used airplanes and helicopters, but not a trace of Jeppsin was found. Her parents were questioned, polygraphed, and ruled out as suspects in their daughter’s disappearance.

Then there was the case of Canadian Louise Renaud, aged 21, who was attending McGill University in Montreal. In 1987, Renaud had been visiting her sister at Harvard, and was driving home from Cambridge to Montreal. Renaud’s car was found—with no one in it—on the side of a back road near Lake Carmi, in the northwest corner of Vermont. The keys were in the ignition; her purse and belongings were still in the car. Investigators determined there were no mechanical problems with the car. There was no sign of a struggle, and no trace of Renaud was ever found.

Wyatt continued reading about other cases, many of them also referenced in the next books he studied, Unexplained Happenings of New England and Myths and Monsters of the Kingdom.

After more than an hour, he rubbed his tired eyes before going to his tablet to gather background on more recent cases of missing persons in the region. He clicked onto the Vermont State Police site, with the interactive map for unsolved missing-person cases. It showed locations and histories for more than 40 cases, some dating back to the 1940s.

On the VSP’s interactive map for unsolved homicides, the number of cases doubled; a few of them went back to the 1950s. It included the heartbreaking case of a newborn baby boy found abandoned on a road in Northfield in 1982. An autopsy determined the baby had been murdered.

No doubt about it. The region had had its share of puzzling, disturbing, and mysterious cases over the years, Wyatt thought, but so had every other part of the country. Then he came to an old crime feature about the Hydra Killer in USA TODAY.

Wyatt was familiar with the Hydra case. The remains of more than a dozen children, women, and men had been discovered on Long Island, New York, in the metro areas of Philadelphia and Boston, and in New Jersey’s Meadowlands. In most cases, victims had been dismembered, and the killer had left a short message beginning with You can’t. Only detectives close to the Hydra investigation knew the exact full message found in each case.