Julie J. Riddle

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In the summer of 2021, as national headlines trumpeted the story of missing woman Gabby Petito, a teenage girl quietly disappeared in small-town northern Michigan.

Days after searchers found Petito’s remains in a national park in Wyoming, Michigan police dug up the strangled, burned body of 17-year-old Brynn Bills in the back yard of a rural Up North home.

Weeks later, police found the body of Abby Hill, the last person known to see Bills alive, shot execution-style and left crumpled in the woods.

Two and a half years later, a jury sent a man to prison for life for both murders and the community breathed a sigh of relief. Things like that don’t happen in places like this, they told each other after the murders. With the perpetrator locked up, justice was served and they could go back to feeling safe in their beautiful, peaceful town.

But the drugs that ensnared both victims still wash under that pleasant town and swirl around the feet of other girls, other women. The domestic abuse, child endangerment, loneliness, poverty, cycles of criminality, lack of resources, despair, and other factors that contributed to the two violent and shocking deaths still exist in the small city, and in towns just like it everywhere.

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I decided to write a book centered on the murders when police officers and attorneys and social service workers kept telling me, their faces grim and sad, that the story spread far beyond the sad tale of two deaths.

The same story, minus the final, tragic ending, is being played out over and over, all the time, they told me. Even in pleasant, safe towns, people all around us are on the same path as that which ended two lives in the summer of 2021.

“You see what’s going to happen,” one source told me. “You just can’t stop it.”

Perhaps not.

But we can at least look at it.

And maybe, by examining the ugly why, we can make change and save lives.

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My book will use the northern Michigan murders as a case study to explore the factors that contribute to violent crime in places we consider safe.

It will include details about the crimes that jurors never got to hear ― details I’ve gathered since I sat on a weedy hill watching police dig up Brynn’s body.

It will zoom out to show the bubbling undercurrent that flows through all safe places, endangering our kids, disrupting lives, and closer than we think.

And it will ask if we’re OK with things as they are, or if we want to do something about them.

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After reading hundreds of pages of police documents and court documents, conducting dozens of interviews, and building a timeline spanning two decades recording events connected to the murders, I still have much to learn and many questions to ask.

Some days I think I should listen to the people telling me to mind my own business and chuck the whole project.

But people around me are in danger. And I can’t be another bystander who watches and does nothing.

Not when I’ve seen what can happen when we look away.

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I need your help writing this book.

To attract a publisher, I have to prove people are interested in what I write. The best way for me to do that is to build a mailing list of people willing to be notified when I post something new on my blog.

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