The Forest Floor

Six cases. Six open wounds.

The Forest Floor is the anthology volume of the Ozark Crime series - six cold cases from across the Ozarks region, each one unresolved, each one carrying the weight of a family still waiting for answers.

The Springfield Three (Springfield, Missouri, 1992): On the night of their high school graduation, Suzanne Streeter and Stacy McCall went to Suzanne's mother Sherrill Levitt's house to spend the night. By morning, all three were gone. Their cars were there. Their purses were there. The family dog was there. The front porch light was shattered. Thirty-four years later, no one has been charged.

Janie Ward (Marshall, Arkansas, 1989): Sixteen-year-old Janie Ward died at a cabin party in the woods outside Marshall. Official cause of death: a fall from a porch. But her body arrived at the Arkansas State Crime Lab wearing different clothes than she'd been wearing at the morgue. She was wet and covered in sand. Her father Ron Ward spent twenty-seven years fighting the official account. He died in 2016 without an answer.

Rebekah Gould (Izard County, Arkansas, 2004): A college student beaten to death with a piano leg at her boyfriend's mobile home in rural Arkansas. Her killer fled to Oregon and then the Philippines and built a new life. Sixteen years later, a Facebook group dedicated to her case lured him out of hiding. He confessed. He pleaded guilty. He got forty years. This is the one case in this anthology that found justice.

Nona Dirksmeyer (Russellville, Arkansas, 2005): A beauty queen and Arkansas Tech University student, beaten and stabbed in her apartment. One acquittal. One suspect with DNA at the scene. Two trials. Two hung juries. No conviction.

Christine Seal (Branson, Missouri, 1973): She disappeared more than fifty years ago. The witnesses are elderly or gone. The technology that might help solve her case didn't exist when she vanished. Her family has been searching for fifty years.

A Note on the Phantom (Texarkana, 1946): Covered in full in Book 1, the Texarkana Phantom Killer is the original Ozarks cold case - the one that established the template for regional violence that goes unsolved.

The Forest Floor is Book 7 in the Ozark Crime series.