Now, dear reader, let me tell you a tale, not of romance or personal misadventures, but of a young woman and a desert silence that stretched over forty years until the long arm of truth reached clear through the grave.
In the spring of 1981—back when hairstyles were higher than hopes and polyester ruled the day—Miss Vicki Radig, a girl of just twenty tender years, vanished into the Nevada night after an evening out with a fella named Walter Bradley DeMint. Mr. DeMint, whose name conjures more peppermint than penitence, claimed they had quarreled and that she’d lit out into the wilderness like some high-strung character in a dime novel. But this wasn’t fiction, and two days later, Miss Radig’s body was lying in the dust near Boulder Highway, her light extinguished by both blunt and sharp force–as if cruelty itself had taken up multiple instruments.
At the time, the Henderson constabulary gave Mr. DeMint what we might call the side-eye, noting that his tale had more holes than a politician’s promise. Alas, the evidence was too thin to hold water—or a charge—and Mr. DeMint continued living his days, eventually shuffling off this mortal coil in 2007, untroubled by the hangman or the court.
But science, that dogged bloodhound of Providence, was not yet done.
DNA—God’s most precise scribe—finally whispered the truth witnesses and circumstances could not. Ever digging like ants in a sugar barrel, Henderson detectives matched old samples and declared what suspicion had long suspected–DeMint was not just a person of interest but the author of that deadly deed.
So now, though the man is dead and beyond the reach of human justice, the case is closed. Miss Radig’s kinfolk have the small, bitter comfort of knowing and perhaps the quiet dignity of mourning with certainty.
They say time heals all wounds, but time merely handles the shovel.
The Old Blog in the Desert 
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