But once in a while, there is somebody who is telling the truth. I am familiar with the way people communicate and I can usually separate the attention-seekers from those I think are being honest. The ones who are telling the truth I do contact, and I talk with them and work with them. They can’t believe someone professional is willing to give them the time of day instead of telling them to “seek psychiatric help.”

I tried counseling three different times, and then I gave up. That first therapist wanted to put me on antipsychotic drugs of some sort. The second one wanted to hear the cool story and then put me on medication. And the third one told me that she was going to have to take calls during my appointment. “During my appointment?” I objected in disbelief, since I was paying for the damn thing.

The psychotherapist looked at me blankly, apparently failing to see the problem. “Well, some of these people could be suicidal.”

“And some of these people sitting in your office could be homicidal,” I muttered to myself, wishing I could have carried a weapon. Then I just shook my head, walked out, and laughed all the way home. At least the absurdity of it all was good medicine.

A few days later, I called a hotline myself, the one my health care provider offers for online advice, mostly to complain that the whole mental health system sucked along with the criminal justice system; I was in a bit of a foul mood. I told the nurse who answered, “I am so frustrated with the system because I see I can’t get anywhere with it!”

She actually listened to an abbreviated version of my story and didn’t tell me I was nuts. She said, “You’re fighting to do the right thing, what any good citizen should do. Don’t even bother with any mental health therapist. They will only give you drugs. I think your biggest problem is that you are overfocused on one case. You keep picking at that same gnarled knot and if you don’t see any progress with it you have no other easier knot to work with or distract your mind. Why don’t you develop more cases?”

People talk about the “Aha!” or lightbulb moment in their lives when a truth becomes self-apparent, that point when they go, “Of course! That’s what I should do!” And I probably owe the rest of my career in part to the advice of that hotline nurse. Wherever you are, I thank you.

DURING THE YEARS I waited for the police to act, I became a regular reader of my local newspaper, The Washington Post, and I learned that Anne Kelley’s death was not unusual at all.

My original view that this was an anomaly or some freaky circumstance proved to be the height of naïveté. There were dead women turning up all over the Washington, D.C., and Maryland metro area.

In Washington, D.C., alone there were 123 unsolved murders of black females between 1986 and 1996; add in women of other races and female victims killed over the borders of the city in the neighboring states and God knows how many women have been murdered in the area over recent years. If we add in sexual homicides of men and children, the number grows even larger.

Who killed Nia Owens, Dana Chisholm, and Ann Bourghesani? Who murdered Chandra Levy, Joyce Chang, and Christine Mirzayan? Could criminal profiling link any of these cases? Were these murders the work of a serial killer?

How many killers were really out there, living in our neighborhoods, blending in among us, and committing heinous crimes with little fear of being apprehended?

Why had all of these cases remained unsolved?

Dead women were turning up everywhere. It’s like when you’re pregnant and suddenly you notice how many other women are pregnant.

What freaked me out was that not only were there so many dead women, there were no arrests made on a good many of these cases, particularly on the homicides that were clearly serial murders. A woman doesn’t usually end up strangled and naked in the bushes because she had a bad boyfriend. And even if one woman had a boyfriend who raped and murdered her, it’s hard to believe each one of these dead women had a separate rapist for a boyfriend. I didn’t think so. All indicators pointed to serial killers.

I realized that the Anne Kelley case wasn’t an island unto itself. But it was the only knot I was picking on, trying to loosen up a lead, make a bit of progress, and it was driving me nuts. Why don’t you get some more knots? I asked myself.

That advice was brilliant. Without knowing it, it was precisely what I needed to hear. Many victims of crime find that if they can put their knowledge to use and help someone, maybe the unfortunate event that fate brought them wasn’t all for naught. That’s when I first got the inkling that while I may never solve the Kelley case, there are plenty of unsolved murders out there. Who committed those?

I printed out what pictures I could find of female victims of unsolved homicides in my county, and I rented a booth at an outdoor festival. I laminated all the pictures and hung them up in a big circle around the table. Under each, I wrote, “Unsolved.”

People would walk up and their mouths would fall open.

“These are all unsolved in Prince Georges County?”

“Yes,” I’d say.

“You mean nobody was ever caught?”

They’d recognize a picture of Lisa Young, because their daughter had known her at school or because they were in town when the crime occurred.

“Didn’t the police ever catch Lisa Young’s murderer?”

I’d just shake my head.

Then they would point to another photo.

“They never caught that killer either?”

“Oh, my God,” I heard over and over again. “I thought these murders were solved.”

The pictures I selected represented just fifteen unsolved cases, less than 10 percent of female victims of homicide in my area over the last two decades. I realized that I should have been trying to get ten guys off the street, not just one. And the problem wasn’t that one police department had made an error or that one political decision made by county executives was irresponsible or that one prosecutor was more concerned with his win record than public safety. There was an epidemic throughout our country of sexual homicides and we were obviously not getting these cases solved. Police departments might say, “We have an 80 percent closure rate,” but in reality they had a high rate of case closure when the suspect was connected in some way to the victim; the closure rate for stranger homicides was abysmally low.

I estimated that the actual closure rate for serial homicides was 5 percent or less. If you want to get away with a crime in this country, serial homicide is your best bet.

My efforts at more knots began with Citizens for Case Closure (CCC), an organization I started with the concept of bringing all victims’ organizations together to fight for increased case closure, with citizens having rights within their communities to hold police and prosecutors accountable for unsolved cases. But it didn’t work. I couldn’t drum up enough interest. It was a frustrating beginning in the field of criminal justice.

I realized my message wasn’t getting through after an article about me appeared in the local newspaper, in which I stated my belief that law enforcement hadn’t done its job in the Anne Kelley case.

I wanted the story to be about police and citizen accountability and how cases like that of Anne Kelley were being swept under the rug, the police refusing to allow the public to know what really had happened and the public apparently not caring to know. A newspaper reporter came to my house and interviewed me. But when the story came out, almost nothing was mentioned about the police and prosecutorial problems in the Kelley case and how there needed to be more accountability. The headline read “Local Homemaker Starts Victims’ Rights Organization,” and it was a sappy human interest story about a nice lady who wanted to help families who had loved ones with unsolved cases and wasn’t I dedicated and caring?