Pasadena author Weston DeWalt was researching jogging trails near his home when he heard about a boy who disappeared while hiking along an Arroyo Seco trail. Eight-year-old Tommy Bowman had run ahead of his family on a spring day in 1957 and vanished forever. “I was intrigued by the story that a child could vanish seemingly without a trace, and being a father myself, I couldn’t imagine enduring that,” DeWalt tells LA Weekly’s Christine Pelisek. “I made a decision that if I could find some of his relatives alive, I would write a book about what it meant to a family to wonder for 50 years.”

The Weekly story details how DeWalt teamed up with an LAPD cold-case detective in 2005 and eventually helped unravel the secrets of a Southern California serial killer. This past week, the investigation led authorities to dig up a stretch along the 23 Freeway in Moorpark searching for another long-lost boy.

More at NPR, LA Times, LAPDTV.