For forty years, a brother struggled with the mysterious circumstances of his sister’s death. With the help of an old school friend, a determined family and a relentless drive for justice, he finally found the truth.

In the fall of 1978 teenager Theresa Allore went missing from her school residence near Sherbrooke, Quebec. She wasn’t seen again until the spring thaw revealed her body only a few kilometers away. Dismissing her death as a result of 1970s drug culture, police investigated only briefly and the school moved on. 

Patricia Pearson started dating Theresa’s brother John in the years following Theresa’s death. She got to know a family haunted by the missing daughter they now knew would never return. Though the teens would go their separate ways, the shockwaves of Theresa’s death would return to Patricia’s life repeatedly over the decades to come.

 In 2001, John had just moved to North Carolina, with his wife and young children, when the police came to the door. They had determined that a young girl had been murdered and might be buried in the basement. John wondered: If these cops could look for this girl, why had nobody even tried to find out what happened to Theresa? Unable to rest without closure, he reached out to Patricia, by now an accomplished crime journalist and author, and together they found answers far more alarming than they could have imagined—and a legacy of violence that refuses to end.