It’s the summer of 1902, and the city of Buffalo, New York, is weathering what would become one of its most alarming and sensational – and ultimately unsolved – local mysteries. Five-year-old Marian Murphy is missing.

She’d vanished one night while playing outdoors in her quiet residential neighborhood, and for over a week police have been scouring every imaginable recess in that part of the city. When finally she is located – her lifeless body discovered and dredged out of a nearby cemetery pond – authorities become hell-bent on apprehending her killer, soon zeroing in on a Chinese laborer who lives and works just around the corner from the girl’s home.

That man’s arrest seems to bring the case to a close, until new evidence emerges suggesting he may be entirely innocent of the crime. This is the true story of the turn-of-the-century missing persons case that brought an entire city to a near-standstill, and of the rocky quest for justice that ensued.

It is a close account of Marian Murphy’s sudden and baffling disappearance, as well as the frantic investigation that followed. It is also the story of an early Chinese immigrant making his way in the New World, cast suddenly into the spotlight and accused of one of the most heinous crimes in the city’s history.

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