The Revenge of the Teaching Gods

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I remember when I took trigonometry, and I pleaded with my teacher to “Tell me ONE reason I’m going to need this in my real life!”

Mr. Miller told me that trig was the way they figured out the placement of parking spaces in a parking lot– whether they’d be straight or angled, and how many, and how wide, and how they decided which way the cars would enter and exit.

I thought that was really cool, and I actually still think about it whenever I'm in a parking lot.

And even though now parking garages play a huge role in my new book (yes, they really do!), I still do NOT need to know how to design the spaces in one of them.

Today our dear Friends of the Reds Maureen Boyle discusses the powers of the superheroes she calls…the teaching gods.

Science and Murder

by Maureen Boyle

What you don’t know comes back to haunt you as a writer - things like science, math, geology and those other pesky subjects in school that didn’t involve reading stories. Those were subjects you avoided, the ones where you earned Cs (and that was a stretch), because you figured you would never need to know that stuff. I wasn’t going into medicine or architecture or accounting or any of the fields where that information was critical. I just needed to know how to write, research and interview people. Right? The teaching gods quickly got the last laugh. Over and over.

In each of my true-crime books, science played a key role in the stories. Some of it was pretty basic, like how the dogs searching for the dead are trained (it’s both fascinating and cute in a way only those readers of mysteries and true crime can appreciate) or how fingerprints are lifted from different objects or what the medical examiner can tell you about the dead.

But then I faced taking a deep research dive into how bodies can be recovered – even decades later - for my latest book, Child Last Seen: The Search for Patty Desmond. The scientific textbooks were ordered and chapters highlighted. The expert studies downloaded. Terms were Googled. Then the folks who do that work were interviewed. Repeatedly.

Then I needed to translate it all into simple and non-graphic language for readers. I’m not a big fan of gore or obscenity, either in film or in books. People get squeamish if a scene is too explicit.

I came across the story of Patty Desmond while wrapping up my second book, The Ghost: The Murder of Police Chief Greg Adams and the Hunt for His Killer. That book detailed the 1980 murder of a police chief in the small town of Saxonburg, Pennsylvania and the decades long search for the man who fatally shot him. It was a twisted tale spanning multiple states before its strange ending in Massachusetts.

While talking with one of the retired Pennsylvania State Police investigators for The Ghost, he mentioned the case of Patty Desmond that he worked on. The teenager slipped out of her home in December of 1965 following an argument with her mother to meet an older, married man. She never returned home.

Despite an on-again, off-again investigation, it took decades before authorities learned what happened to her. Child Last Seen is a story of a naïve girl from a small town, an era where missing teens were considered runaways and how one heroic person helped solve a case. It is a story about the grey areas of life and love and the secrets kept.

Here's a brief excerpt of Child Last Seen. And then I have a question for you.


It was unseasonably warm for December when 15-year-old Patty Desmond slipped out through the basement of her family’s rented home on McCalmont Road in rural Renfrew, Pennsylvania, a community a little over 30 miles from Pittsburgh. The teen carefully picked out her outfit: a yellow short-sleeved blouse, a white sweater, black stretch pants with stirrups popular in 1965, and black flats. She had no coat—earlier that day temperatures logged at 45 degrees—and had no purse.

She might have been wearing two pieces of jewelry: a bracelet and necklace. No one knew she was gone until well after she snuck out, driving off with Conrad Eugene Miller and a few of his friends.

The hour before Patty disappeared into the darkness of the winter night on December 5, 1965, was one spent arguing. Her widowed mother, Anna, wanted her to stop hanging around with the 19-year-old Miller, a married man with a teenaged wife and one child. Even if he weren’t married and a father, Conrad was still too old for Patty, who was still in high school. Anna had a bad feeling about him. He had brushes with the law that were well-known to those in the area. He was just plain trouble and not someone a teenaged girl should be around.

“Stay away from him,” Patty’s mother told her. Stay far away.



And then the book goes on, and I hope I have tempted you to read more! So, here’s my question, Reds and readers. Did anything mysterious ever happen in your neighborhood that remains a question?

HANK: Oh. Definitely. We were never formally told by law enforcement who it was that burned down the gorgeous old barn behind our house. But–we knew. His family moved away soon after. More I cannot say.

How about you, Reds and readers?

Award-winning journalist Maureen Boyle is the author of three true-crime books. Child Last Seen: The Search for Patty Desmond (Black Lyon) is out in June 2023. Shallow Graves: The Hunt for the New Bedford Highway Serial Killer was published in 2017 and The Ghost: The Murder of Police Chief Greg Adams and the Hunt for His Killer (Black Lyon) was published in June 2021.She was named New England Journalist of the Year three times and has been honored for her work covering crime, drug issues and human-interest stories both regionally and nationally. She is now the journalism program director at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts.

(For more of CHILD LAST SEEN and my other books, go to Barnes & Noble and follow me on Twitter, on maureenboylewriter, and Facebook )