All this was interesting, but I wasn’t sure it was helpful. Ellsworth Cartwright certainly could have little to do with the present situation since he’d died more than sixty years ago. I moved on to the section that covered her writing career and the brief flirtation with Hollywood. I didn’t find anything particularly exciting or helpful, but the article did name the hopeful starlet who was supposed to portray Veronica Thane in the film.

Her name was Marietta Dubois, and I had never heard of her. Curious, I put her name in the search engine and found a few pages of results. Her career in Hollywood was short-lived, according to one resource. She had minor roles in minor films, and her one chance at a starring role was the proposed Veronica Thane film. Shortly after that fizzled, Marietta married a businessman from her hometown in Iowa and went back there to be a housewife and mother. There were three images of her, and she did fit my mental image of Veronica. Dark hair and eyes, lovely face, enigmatic smile—too bad she hadn’t been able to bring Veronica to life.

Funding for the production never materialized, and news of Warner Brothers’s plans to bring Nancy Drew to the screen killed the idea completely.

That trail really didn’t lead anywhere useful, I realized, but it was interesting. A good example, though, of how easy it was to get distracted and go haring off in one direction when you really needed to be going in another. Back to Electra Barnes Cartwright.

After her disappointment in California, Mrs. Cartwright returned to Connecticut and kept on writing. She gave birth to her only child, Marcella Ann Cartwright, two months after the death of her husband from a heart attack. She never remarried.

In addition to the Veronica Thane books, she wrote thirty-one other titles for children and young adults. Her sales were consistently good, but Veronica was her best-seller. Sales began to drop off in the mid-1960s, and the series ended in 1970 with the thirty-sixth book in the series, Peril for Veronica Thane.

Other than information about her books, there was no further mention of details about Mrs. Cartwright’s life. She faded into near-obscurity, except among children’s mystery series enthusiasts. Even they didn’t realize, however, she was still living, much less that she had left Connecticut twenty years ago to share a home with her daughter and grandson.

Now I knew the basic outline of Electra Barnes Cartwright’s life. Had I learned anything that shed light on the murder of Carrie Taylor? I couldn’t see even a hint of a connection from these basics to the woman who had been killed.