The other day I happened to check the logs and saw that someone had viewed the post on Dennis Terry Sites several times and that there were referrals from Google.

It didn’t take much mental effort to figure out that someone had probably looked up his name on the search engine and had landed on my Chapter 5 of the Murder in a Small Town series.

I was a bit disappointed because I wrote that series in the hope of reclaiming Carrie Layser’s reputation, not as simply a victim of a terrible crime, but of a fully rounded person. It seemed whoever had done the search was only interested in Dennis Sites.

But an hour or so later I checked again and presumably that same person had run through the rest of the series, from Chapter 5 all the way to the Epilogue and the final Afterword. That was a little bit encouraging, at least he or she was interested in more of the story, but still whoever it was hadn’t bothered with the first few chapters, which was where I had detailed the life story of Carrie Layser.

That evening I checked again and discovered that the individual had backtracked and had viewed all of the posts starting with the very first and including, of course, the one on Carrie. There’s no guarantee that they actually read them all obviously, still it was good to see someone make the effort.

But it does raise the question of who the person was. As they didn’t leave a comment, I have no idea who it was.

Someone from Richland who recalls the murder seems most likely. Or perhaps someone who was mentioned in the series who is still living?

In the months since I wrote that series I’ve seen the posts accessed in various ways from time to time. Sometimes just one or two posts, sometimes most or all of the posts in the series on one day. WordPress doesn’t give me timestamps in the logs, so I can’t tell the sequence in which people access the posts, alas. But occasionally it seems like someone comes across the series and then shares it with others (in other words, only one referral from a search engine but multiple people accessing the posts).

I confess that I’m very curious. I wrote the series knowing full well that some of the players were still very much alive, and I tried very hard to be fair to everyone involved. I couldn’t be objective, of course, no one can ever truly be objective, but I did try to be fair.

I’m curious to know how the people who were involved in the case, who might come across the series, might feel about the way I handled it after all these years.