Time Starts Now

On my third day in 1992, I saw Laura Dietrichson.

It was one thing to read about murders in true crime books. The victim had a life—accounts and photos were merely evidence of that life. But that's all it was. The person was still dead as you read about them.

Yet here I was looking at a future murder victim, as real, as alive, and as wholly unaware of the date she would die as I was of my own. Her murder in ten months somehow made her seem even more alive.

Professor Cal Sutherland's research o...