Filed Without Resolution

Filed Without Resolution is a true-crime collection about the moments that almost made sense, and then didn’t.

Drawn from publicly available cold-case files, these stories are told not by detectives chasing answers, but by the ordinary people who encountered the evidence first: a highway patrol officer logging mismatched shoes by the freeway, a family arriving minutes too late to an abandoned picnic, a mail carrier who noticed when someone stopped answering the door, a postal worker recognizing handwriting that should not have returned.

Each account is written in first-person, conversational prose, dramatized for emotional truth while remaining grounded in documented cases. Names and locations have been changed, but the details, the objects, the procedures, the silences, remain faithful to the records.

What unites these cases is not violence, but interruption. A life paused mid-motion. A routine that continued after a person disappeared. Evidence logged, bagged, filed, without resolution.

These are stories about what gets left behind: a bracelet buried in soil, a door swinging through the night, a text message that never finished its sentence. They explore the quiet terror of almost helping, of noticing too late, of being the witness history barely remembers.

Filed Without Resolution asks a haunting question:
What happens when the system does everything right, and the truth still never arrives?