After I woke up from a quarter-century of almost total silence as a writer, I discovered the joy of investigative reporting and started making up for lost time. Several of my articles and a whole slew of my Fearless Consumer columns for The Hook are online; unfortunately, my 1997
C-Ville Weekly articles on the Pat Collins disappearance aren’t.

“Life and Death: A Child’s-Eye View of Jim Crow Charlottesville” is a microhistory of Eugene Williams’s life in the mid-1930s, when he and his little brother attended a segregated elementary school. Williams grew up to lead the Charlottesville NAACP in the early days of desegregation.

I marked the 25th anniversary of Pat’s disappearance in “Long Gone: How UVa Lost Pat Collins.”

“Cold Case: Alicia Showalter Reynolds and the Fall and Rise of Darrell Rice” is about the unsolved 1996 murder of a Johns Hopkins graduate student by the so-called Route 29 stalker, who terrorized women in Central Virginia for several years in the mid-1990s.

“Murder in the Park” recaps my extensive coverage of the unsolved 1996 murders of Julie Williams and Lollie Winans near the Appalachian Trail.

Finally, my Washington Post essay, “The Price of Seclusion,” recounts how I confronted the doctor and hospital who confined me to a locked room for twelve weeks—and how, by doing so, I regained my voice as a writer.