I love old crime scene photos. I have dozens of them. In a fast-changing world they can be rare high-quality documentary evidence of the timebound, of things and places and people who no longer exist. They can also document the timeless. The older the crime scene the likelier the photos will be black and white, giving the scenes a classic, artistic, mysterious, film noir look. The cameras and film used are always high quality which increase the chance of inadvertent art. 

At the bottom of that hill is the body of 16 year-old Patricia Kalitzke, raped and murdered in 1956 in Montana. The prairie, the wide open spaces, Big Sky country. It is timelessly, peacefully rural, with a defect. It may still look that way. 

It is the contrasts in murder scene photographs, the normality and horrific abnormality, the common and the uncommon, death and life that have always grabbed me. I’ve never seen one like this, not in Miami. The contrast here is the most striking, bigness and smallness, natural beauty and the most unnatural acts of man, up and down, the quick and the dead together in one panorama. I cannot think of a police reason for this crime scene photographer to have taken a pastoral. I can believe that he too was struck for a moment by these contrasts.

The body of Patricia’s 18 year-old boyfriend was found by his car a day before. The kids had gone out to a “lover’s lane.” Kids don't do that anymore but they did then. The cases were solved in 2020 by DNA. The rapist-double murderer died in 2007.