A radio host dies on the air. The music plays for four more hours.
Sunday night into Monday, 18 to 19 October 1987. Dean Whitlock, 44, has hosted the overnight show on KLRK, a thousand-watt AM station on the edge of Larkin, Nebraska, for eleven years. He signs on at midnight, alone in a cinder block building with a bad lock on the back door, and hands over to the morning host at six.
At 06:10 the morning host finds him on the floor of Studio B. The music is still playing off the automation rack. His last live words, according to a trucker on I-80, were at ten to four: time, temperature, "going for coffee, here's some Patsy Cline". The transmitter log, which the operator on duty must fill in every hour, has been kept up to five o'clock.
Six people had a reason. The wife who filed for divorce. The owner who was about to sell the station. The engineer he had got fired ten days earlier. The salesman who took his bets and was owed nearly six thousand dollars. The farmer whose dead son he had talked about on the air, and who called in that night to say he would be sorry. And the morning host who found him. The Sheriff's detective worked it for fourteen months and wrote that the answer was in the file. Then he put it on the shelf.
Read all 24 documents and name the person who killed Dean Whitlock. One accusation. Right or wrong, the solution file opens and shows every document that convicts. There are no hints and nothing is marked; the file is complete and the answer is in it.
Press play and choose Create a room. Up to eight of you read the file on your own phones, see what the others have opened, vote in secret and let the host reveal. This case is free for everyone, so nobody in the room pays anything.