"This is the story of Rick Jackson, a famed LA homicide detective and eventual cold case investigator, and the case that he's never managed to let go. In June 1990, a white male UCLA student was found stabbed to death in a tunnel near the infamous Spahn Ranch, where Charles Manson and his followers had lived. That night, Jackson and his partner, Frank Garcia, were called on the scene and soon focused their investigation on the young man's two male roommates, one Black and one white. Nothing about the case made sense, though- not the relationship between these young men, not the potential influence of Wicca (then a trend among youth, and closely tied to the moral panic around Satanism), not the justice system that tried the two roommates very differently, and not Los Angeles itself, which was and remains a fraught tinderbox of racial bias and violence. In straightforward, matter-of-fact prose, Jackson takes us through the events as he and his partner experienced them, with no foreknowledge of information that would emerge later in the case. Readers will feel as though they are a fly on the wall, piecing together the truth about what happened to Ron Baker as the detectives did themselves, day by day and clue by clue"-- Provided by publisher.