How CaseWalk researches a case

Before a single word of narration is written, a case is a stack of documents. Court filings, transcripts, contemporary newspaper columns, inquest records, published histories written by people who spent years with the material. A CaseWalk begins the way any careful account of the past begins — with reading, slowly, and with the assumption that the record is more complicated than the headline that survived it.

Starting from the public record

Every case we build is drawn from documented, publicly available sources. We favour the primary record wherever it exists: what a witness actually said under oath, what a judge actually ruled, what a reporter standing outside the courthouse actually filed that evening. Secondary histories help us understand context and connect the threads, but they are read against the documents rather than in place of them. Where accounts disagree — and in older cases they often do — we note the disagreement rather than quietly choosing the more dramatic version.

The sources we lean on most tend to fall into a few groups:

• Court and legal records: charges, testimony, verdicts, appeals.
• Contemporary reporting: the newspapers and periodicals that covered the events as they unfolded.
• Published histories and reference works that have already been scrutinised by editors and readers.
• Public civic records — addresses, maps, and the physical geography of the places involved.

Plotting a route across the real places

A case is not only a sequence of events; it is a sequence of places. The street where it began. The building where a decision was made. The route someone walked, or was said to have walked. The court where it ended. Once the facts are in order, we map those locations and ask a plain question: can a person actually stand here today, on public ground, and look at this?

If the answer is no — if a site is private, gone, or simply unsafe to gather near — it does not become a stop. What remains is stitched into a route that flows on foot, in an order that makes sense both geographically and as a story. A good walk should feel like the ground itself is carrying the account forward, one chapter to the next, rather than doubling back or asking you to imagine a place you cannot see.

Writing the case in chapters

We tell each case in chapters, because that is how the events actually moved: where it began, what happened, how it was investigated, how it was tried, and what was left afterward. Each chapter is written to be heard at a specific place, so the narration you hear at a given stop belongs to that ground and no other. The writing aims for the register of a well-made documentary — measured, factual, unhurried — and it is timed to the pace of walking rather than the pace of a page.

Restraint does most of the work here. We do not dwell on suffering for effect, and we do not decorate gaps in the record with invention. When something is unknown, the narration says so. The people in these cases were people first, and the writing is meant to leave a listener with understanding rather than a shiver.

The human fact-check

Nothing ships on research alone. Before a case is made available, a person reviews it against the sources: checking that names, dates, sequences, and locations match the record, that claims are supported, and that the tone stays where it belongs. This is the step that turns a well-researched draft into something we are willing to stand behind. We reserve the strongest language about accuracy for content that has been through this human sign-off — it is not a formality, and it is not automated.

What we leave out

Discipline in a project like this is mostly about what you decline to include. Rumour that never made it into any record. Lurid detail that adds nothing but shock. Speculation dressed as fact. A theory is only presented as a theory, and clearly marked as one. If we cannot source it, we do not say it. That is a slower way to build, and it means some stories we would like to tell are not ready to be told. We think that is the correct trade.

Why the process matters

A true-crime walk asks something of the places it passes through and the people it remembers. Doing the reading, choosing real sites, writing with care, and checking the work by hand is how we try to honour that. When you open a case and begin the walk, what you are hearing is the documented past, arranged so you can stand in it. That is the whole idea, and the research is where it lives.