The Skagit Crossing

About this book

A cold case from 1985. Skeletal remains found in a Pacific Northwest riverbank forty years later. One investigator who reads case files the way a forensic examiner reads bone, looking for what the record left out. On a March morning, Marisol Halverson-Pemberton opens a manila envelope at the Pacific Northwest Cold Case Initiative office. Inside: fifty-one pages of a case reclassified from active to runaway-or-misadventure in 1990 with no new evidence, no new interviews, and a three-sentence memo from a budget-pressured sheriff. Aslaug Brandt-Pelletier was nineteen years old on the night of August 17, 1985, when she walked out of the Skagit County Fair and was never seen again. Her wallet was in her car. Her keys were in her bag. Her bag was in her car. Her car was locked. A plate of sheet cake she had been carrying sat untouched on the passenger seat. In 2025, a construction crew excavating the South Fork Skagit River found her. The DNA match is 99.6 percent maternal lineage. The origi