Alpha Female: The First Tash Winslow Mystery

The Story Summary

Tash Winslow, a 64-year-old woman on the verge of retiring from her career as a forensic paralegal, has one last social obligation on behalf of her law firm, Blevins, Ritchie, and Sauder. She is to attend a local ABA dinner honoring her firm’s founding member. She goes to the event knowing she starts her retirement the next day. Tash has grand plans to transform her newly acquired two acres of land into several magnificent gardens. She looks forward to the solitude of working her land as a salve to the grief of losing her husband two years earlier. The evening goes well, and Tash becomes reacquainted with a lawyer she met on a case several years earlier. He has retired and volunteers with a not-for-profit legal aid project, the Innocence Mission, which he helped found 20 years ago to represent selected prisoners on death row in North Carolina. He suggests to Tash that they meet in the coming days to discuss her volunteering with the Mission. Tash kindly refuses to join his cause, explaining her plans for a country life.

When she gets home that evening, Tash and her dog Sass take a walk on her property. Sass leads Tash into the woods along the land’s eastern boundary. They discover the body of an elderly Black woman. She has been stabbed and strangled. When Tash discovers that the woman is the great aunt of a man the Innocence Mission is representing, Tash is catapulted into a series of events that uncover how the crime of 25 years earlier connects to the murdered woman on Tash’s property. Tash collaborates with Lance Tyrone Investigations, hired by the Innocence Mission to investigate the original crime for which their client was convicted. Tash’s goal is to discover who murdered the man’s great aunt, and when she learns that the woman had worked for years to clear her great nephew’s name, Tash and the agency begin linking the two crimes, discovering a series of murders in the intervening years that resemble the original killing of a teen-aged girl. As the cases grow in number and complexity, Tash must fight her urge to retreat to her garden of solace. It is Tash’s anger at the killer for contaminating her Eden and her fiery desire to see justice done that keeps Tash on track, despite a dislike of working with others.  A pattern of strong, independent girls and woman—alpha females—emerges, and the woman Tash found fits this profile. So does Tash, and the killer soon sets his sights on her as the driving force trying to end his reign of horror. A final showdown ends with Tash bringing down the killer, who she and her team have proved killed ten girls and women. By the end of the story, Tash has a second family in the people at Lance Tyrone Investigations, and they continue their collaborations through a series of Greek Alphabet mysteries. Stay tuned for The Beta Test: A Tash Winslow Mystery.

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Tash Winslow, Protagonist

Tash Winslow’s Pop

Demographics and Backstory

Tash Payne Winslow is a 64-year-old woman on the eve of her 65th birthday and retirement from her 15-year career as a forensic paralegal. She is 5 ft. 4 in. tall and physically fit, with gray peppering her black hair. Like her English father, Tash has startling blue eyes with pale skin that is sprinkled with freckles. Her mom had been of Russian heritage, naming her daughter after a beloved Great Aunt Natasha. But Tash had never been called by her full name. She was always known as just Tash. She grew up in North Carolina and earned her bachelor's degree in American literature and folklore from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in the early 1980s. Tash took a couple of years after college to work and travel before attending Cornell University, where she received her master’s degree in communications.  After graduate school, Tash worked for 15 years in university alumni relations, progressing from a communications specialist to the assistant director of alumni communications at a large university in Michigan. It was the primary responsibility of her office to build bridges with alumni—mostly those with deep pockets—to encourage giving to the university. Tash’s work involved interviewing alumni, writing alumni highlights, and editing the alumni magazine.

During this time, Tash married Dr. Rowan Winslow, who started his career as an assistant medical examiner in Michigan, became a noted medical examiner in North Carolina when the couple moved there 20 years earlier, and was a tenured professor of pathology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill at the time of his death. The couple had two children, now in their early 30s, Alannah and Aidan, both successful in the early years of their careers. Alannah is newly married. Aidan is gay and has a steady boyfriend.

Tash walked away from her career in alumni communications when she was 45 years old. She had become jaded at the constant politics that defined university administration, and she could no longer stomach the relentless pursuit of money. She became lethargic, depressed, and suicidal. After walking off her job, Rowan persuaded Tash to see a doctor. She received a diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder and spent five years clawing her way out of depression with the help of her family, a psychiatrist and the medicines he prescribed, a therapist, and Tash’s own determination to remain alive for her children.

At age 50, Tash retrained as a paralegal and went to work for the law firm of Blevins, Ritchie, and Sauder, an established criminal defense firm in Raleigh, North Carolina. She worked full-time for ten years doing traditional paralegal work: research, case analysis, reports, and client interviews. In 2020, Rowan had a stroke at age 63 that left him cognitively impaired. While still able to take care of his own personal needs, he lost all short-term memory. Rowan would turn on the stove to start cooking and walk away for a moment, totally forgetting he’d left a burner lit. He would buy groceries, then go into the house forgetting the bags in the car. Eventually he couldn’t drive without getting lost. Tash had to stay home and be his caregiver. She trained to become a forensic paralegal, which enabled her to work at home to care for her husband. It was also beneficial to be at home during the pandemic. Rowan’s dementia led to a rapid decline in his physical health as well as his mental abilities. In 2022, two years before the story begins, Rowan died of kidney failure brought on by cirrhosis of the liver.

Tash was newly widowed when the working world started trickling back into the office. While she wanted to stay working from home—dealing with her grief and the sudden change of being a woman alone—Tash’s firm requested that she return to the office. Rather than go back to more traditional paralegal duties, Tash continued handling forensic paralegal work, which had the benefits of allowing Tash to work on her own at her desk and keep her focus on the nonviolent crimes of fraud, identity theft, phishing, and the like. Before Rowan’s death, she enjoyed working with cases that touched her husband’s world of forensic science. Although neither could discuss individual cases with the other, the couple enjoyed shared learning about the science behind the investigations of violent crimes. Tash believed wholeheartedly in the ideal of American justice, which included the presumption of innocence as a due process right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. After Rowan’s death, Tash had no stomach for the often-gruesome world of murder, rape, manslaughter, or aggravated assault. She still had a strong sense of justice, but she’d lost her fire and passion for “fighting the good fight.”

After a year alone, Tash sold her Chapel Hill home and bought two acres of land in nearby Harnett County, North Carolina, a much less expensive area. She built a small ecological home that looked out over her acreage, which she planned to landscape with an abundance of native North Carolina plants that would attract pollinators, lots of beautiful flowers, delicious vegetables and herbs, and shade gardens where she could sit alone and meditate. It would become her haven, Tash dreamed. The house was finished and the patio furnished six months before the story begins.

Tash lived in the house with the dog she and Rowan adopted six years earlier, Sass, short for Sasquatch, a reddish-brown Anatolian Shepherd and Australian Shepherd mix. Tash was looking forward to retiring from her career and trading out desk work for the manual labor of gardening, one of her passions. Tash also wanted freedom to travel, visiting many of the places she and Rowan dreamed of exploring. She had in mind training again for a marathon. She’d last run a marathon when Alannah was three years old, pushing the toddler in a baby jogger as she ran her long training runs. While having kept up with running all these years, Tash hadn’t run more than a five-mile stretch in over 25 years, but she looked forward to setting up her training schedule, sticking to it, and running a women’s marathon in Savannah, Georgia, a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving. She had eight months to prepare.

All seemed right in Tash’s world when she came home after attending a local American Bar Association gathering. She got home around 10 p.m. and decided to walk out on her property with Sass. In the woods bordering the east side of her land, Tash discovers the body of an elderly Black woman, who appears to have been stabbed in the abdomen and then strangled. Tash is thrust back into the world of violence with this discovery and resists being drawn into its ugliness. But Tash is so angered that her “Eden” has been tainted by this woman’s murder and that her carefully laid plans have been thrown so off balance that she can’t help but be pulled into the investigation. She begins by learning who this woman was and discovers that her murder relates to the killing of a teen-aged girl 25 years earlier. Tash becomes the driving force, along with a cast of characters at Lance Tyrone Investigations and the Innocence Mission, at hunting down and stopping a ruthless killer.

Tash Winslow’s Abilities and Expertise

Tash has always loved words and their use to create art through literature, poetry, folklore, and great drama, whether it be on the stage or screen. The education she pursued led Tash to two careers that used words to communicate information and ideas. Her more recent career as a paralegal honed her abilities to research, evaluate information, interview people, and write reports. More recently, her skill as a forensic paralegal made her proficient in the investigation of electronic storage and communications to discover evidence used to defend her firm’s clients in criminal cases. Bottom line, Tash is a good researcher, writer, and communicator who is very proficient with technology, a skill not often associated with a woman her age.

On a personal level, Tash’s love of nature has made her a very skilled gardener and botanist. She knows plants and has a passion for landscape art, creating gardens rich in color, scents, and texture. She is a great mom to two adult kids. Tash modeled survival and perseverance for her son and daughter, and now she gives them space to be their own people while very much enjoying their company when they get together. Bottom line, Tash has built a world for herself that is contained, even if out in nature and filled with love from the people closest to her.

Tash Winslow’s Personality

Tash is rarely, if ever, seen in a dress. She’s known for wearing Tommy Hilfiger pants and tops with flat shoes. Comfort is key for Tash. Professionally, this style has worked for Tash, but at the beginning of the story Tash is put in a situation where she must play more to her feminine side, which is outside Tash’s comfort zone. It’s ironic since Tash has maintained her physical fitness and physique, and looks great in a dress. Through her twenties and thirties, Tash loved to dress up, wear makeup, and show off her femininity, but with age and her husband’s death, Tash stopped caring what other people thought of her. Her own personal comfort is most important. Also, although Tash plays “the invisible woman” aspect of being in her sixties to her advantage, it does bother her when she’s not given her due or assumptions are made based on her age. Being discounted or not even seen tugs at Tash’s sense of self, invading her hard-earned self-confidence with doubt. When she starts to question her own abilities, Tash must fight being dragged down by the swirling vortex of negative thoughts. She has a great arsenal of weapons against depression after twenty years of living with this illness, but Tash will never forget just how it felt to be down so deep in the total darkness of The Pit. Tash does not define herself by her depression; rather, she can sometimes be heard saying a mantra out loud, “You are smart. You are wise. You are important. And you look great in size 6 shorts!” Few people are privy to the history behind this mantra, and Tash’s habit of saying out loud what she is thinking can be disconcerting to others. Bottom line, Tash has fought hard for the self-love she feels at age 64, but it takes a toll on Tash to assert herself to people who underestimate her.

Contrast

The ways in which Tash’s pop creates unexpected contrasts, tensions, or combinations that can surprise or intrigue the reader include her willingness to defy the stereotypes of a women in her mid-sixties. While she doesn’t like being the “invisible woman,” Tash can use people not noticing her as an advantage in her investigations. Her dislike of social situations, stubbornness at times, and frustration with others are in direct conflict with the necessary actions she must take to reach a satisfactory conclusion. She must work with others to accomplish her goal. Despite a long history of depression, Tash loves laughter. She appreciates good jokes and counts among her favorite comedians Lewis Black, John Oliver, the entire cast of The Daily Show, Tag Notaro, and Sarah Silverman. The one qualification to Tash’s appreciation of humor is that it does not come at the direct expense of another person, such as in a practical joke. Humor in a stand-up situation that makes fun of a public figure is fair game. It’s clear that Tash loves nature and is comfortable in a natural environment, but her conflict with the antagonist puts Tash in an adversarial position out in the wild, where she must both fear nature and respect it to survive. Tash’s single-minded pursuit of a goal makes it hard for her to be flexible at times, but learning to bend will keep Tash from breaking as a character. Finally, it may surprise the reader to learn that when her honesty and integrity are challenged or she comes across a great injustice, Tash can swear with the best of them.

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Tash Winslow’s Flaws

Limitations & Misbeliefs

As seen in her backstory and personality, Tash has struggled with low self-esteem and self-doubt for over twenty years. While she has come a long way from her years of deep depression, Tash is aware that the illness may linger without conscious efforts to combat it. The energy expended at dealing with internal emotional struggles, including the grief of losing her husband, has left Tash tired. She is easily overwhelmed by situations, and often Tash seeks retreat to deal with the anxiety that accompanies feeling out of control. Bottomline: Tash is always at battle with herself when it comes to self-confidence.

Tash is quick to anger when frustrated, especially with other people. It’s been a part of her personality since she was a girl, leading many an elementary teacher to write on her report card, “Does not play well with others.” Preferring to work alone and her impatience with other people have kept Tash from forming relationships with coworkers except on an as-needed basis. When an attorney expects a project to be completed, Tash will do what it takes to successfully meet expectations. But the completion of one project has not led to alliances that make future goals easier to accomplish. Bottom line: Tash is a loner professionally and adopts behaviors—such as anger, impatience, social segregation, and playing on “invisibility”—to keep from forming alliances.

Throughout her adult life, Tash has achieved her goals by setting forth concrete plans—usually through detailed lists of actions needed, charts setting forth expected actions, and calendars holding Tash to a rigid schedule. Too often, this strict adherence to written guidelines has tripped Tash on her journey to fulfilling a goal. Missing one or more items on the list, not performing the specified action on the chart, or falling behind on the calendar have undercut Tash’s self-confidence and drive. Rather than learning to “go with the flow” or “read the current circumstances,” Tash would see it as failure to not follow the path she’d paved for herself before a project’s start. Bottom line: Tash can sabotage herself with rigid adherence to what she initially believes to be the right approach to a problem or goal.

Modern American society, despite advances in gender roles and expectations, continues to see older people—especially women—as “lesser”. They are “past their prime.” They’ve “lost their looks.” They are not “with it” or unable to learn new things, especially as related to the fast world of technological advances. Too often, older women are perceived as needy, vulnerable, unattractive, and less useful than younger women, who are of childbearing and child-rearing age. Of course, the worlds of entertainment, politics, art, academia, and many other areas have put forth examples of women who defy stereotypes, reject limitations, and continue to be contributing members of society. But like most women her age, Tash is reminded of these outdated assumptions daily and must consciously assert herself to be seen and heard. Bottom line: Tash is a woman in her mid-sixties who will be perceived by others as quite different than she really is, based solely on her age.

Tash believes in the world she has created for herself after her husband’s death. Part of grieving the loss of a spouse after so many years of marriage is redefining oneself. Tash is trying to figure out who she is without her husband. Because it hurt so much to lose the love of her life—with whom so many plans, expectations, and outlooks were formed—Tash thinks she has found the way to move forward: alone. She had invested so much energy into believing her life would take one direction in “retirement,” she and her husband traveling the world on exciting adventures, Tash was ill prepared for the sudden change of first caring for her husband and then being without him. The loss hurt so much that Tosh finds solace in mindful living, communing with nature, taking long, solo runs, and curling up with her dog in the evenings to read a book or watch television. She has found contentment—and respite from the pain—in this solitude, but she is self-aware enough to know that something is missing, connection with others. Tash has occasional contact with her adult children. She sees a friend or two every now and again, but no longer having work as an excuse to not spend time with other people, Tash does wonder if she will become too isolated when she retires. Bottom line: Tash is at a transitional point in her life moving from a career to retirement as well as from being part of a couple to being single. How Tash manages these transitions will, in part, inform the choices she makes throughout the story.

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Tash Winslow’s Drive

Motivations

Tash is passionate about justice. She’s also very dedicated to building a new, more solitary, life for herself, one that will keep her busy on her beautiful new land. Anticipating retirement, looking forward to gardening, and starting this new chapter in her life energizes Tash. When she discovers the body of an elderly Black woman on her property, Tash’s world is turned upside down along with all her expectations for the future. She tries to keep moving along the path she had defined for herself before the murder, but her outrage at having her haven desecrated by some unknown killer propels Tash into a series of events that puts her on a new journey to find out who killed this woman and why.

Wants & Needs

In addition to wanting to know why this woman was killed and dumped on her property, Tash needs to understand the woman’s story. She is compelled to flesh out who this seemingly frail, elderly woman was in life, and when the connection is made between this woman and her great nephew on North Carolina’s death row, Tash is all in, wanting to help an attorney friend who volunteers for the Innocence Mission and represents the death row inmate prove the man’s innocence. She also wants to link his great aunt’s murder with the killing of a teen-aged girl for which the inmate was convicted 25 years earlier. Tash doesn’t believe in this level of coincidence. She’s convinced the two crimes are connected, and when her attorney friend offers her the opportunity to collaborate with the Innocence Mission’s investigative team—Lance Tyrone Investigations—Tash recognizes working with them will be the only way she can find peace with this crime. Tash forms a relationship with the police detective investigating the elderly woman’s murder. While at times the relationship seems cordial, the two are often pitted against each other in discovering the murderer. Tash wants to cooperate with the official investigation, but the case takes twists and turns that challenge Tash. She needs to test her ethics and morals to get the satisfaction she’s looking for in solving the case.

When the detective asks Tash point blank why she’s involved herself in this case, Tash answers, “I must hold whoever violated my peace of mind with this horrible murder accountable for his actions. You may see that as your job, and it is, but the killer made it personal when he dumped that woman’s body on my land. I’m determined to understand how and why this murder happened, and I have the skills and resources to do just that. Also, that woman’s life cannot just end as a body lying in my woods. She had a life, passions, interests, skills, and everything else that makes up being a whole person. I want to know her story, and she deserves to have it known and shared. I need to be her storyteller.”

What Tash doesn’t understand at the beginning of the story is what deep-seated need this quest will fulfill for her—relationships with other people who are invested in like or similar goals and the ability to work with these people as a team. Tash learns that she needs a second family that will enrich her life daily, not just when she visits with her kids. The team she helps bring together to find the killer, expose him, and bring him to justice becomes her family, and together these characters, with Tash as the protagonist, go on to solve many more crimes in subsequent stories.

Tash Winslow’s Agency

To accomplish her goals, Tash will open herself to:

• learning new aspects of criminal investigation
• teaming up with others
• continuing to train for her marathon, even though it becomes more difficult as the case becomes more complicated
• discovering that the murdered woman’s tenacity and intelligence was leading her to prove her great nephew’s innocence, which made her a danger to the murderer
• using her skills to link a series of murders over a 25-year time period to the antagonist
• realizing that the legal world she left in Raleigh, North Carolina, is intertwined with this murder investigation, which puts Tash in a vulnerable position, exposing her to the antagonist
• identifying who the antagonist is
• going first mind-to-mind and then head-to-head with the antagonist in a life-threatening showdown
• resolving the murders
• finding connection with her colleagues and a possible love interest at the end of the story to be pursued further in the second Tash Winslow Mystery

Contrasts in Motivations

Tash believes strongly in tying the elderly woman’s murder with a series of murders that began with the killing of a teen-aged girl for which the woman’s great nephew was convicted and put on death row. Tash and her team uncover multiple other murders of young women that match the pattern and style of the first murder and is similar to the elderly woman’s murder. Tash is so committed to linking this series of murders she may be blinded to facts in evidence. She needs to be reminded that solid investigation requires that one follow where the evidence leads, not cherry pick or distort the evidence to fit a preconceived assumption. She has long criticized police investigations for this fault, and it was this shoddy detective work that convicted an innocent man of the initial crime and possibly put other innocent men in prison for related crimes. Tash must be careful to not stray down the path of hypocrisy just to bring the killer to justice.

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Tash Winslow’s Vibe

Demographics, Personality & Preferences

Demographics and personality have been outlined in Tash Winslow’s Pop; however, vibe can further flesh out this character, showing how she will act or react in certain situations. We know that she’s an “older” woman, but we know, too, that she is physically fit and determined not to be a stereotype, all while struggling at times with self-confidence. Tash’s vibe will tell the readers that she is willing to push her physical and mental limitations but that she is going to struggle with resetting her boundaries. Also, we know that Tash has grown and honed her skills as a communicator and investigator throughout both careers. It will come as no surprise to the reader that Tash’s vibe to keep building on her skillset will help her accomplish her goals. When faced with social situations, Tash does hesitate to make connections, but clearly her success as a wife, mother, and professional woman have given her a certain comfort in relating to others. She will have to overcome self-determined expectations of herself, but Tash’s vibe to be able to relate to others will carry her through awkward social encounters.

Distinctive & Consistent Aspects of Tash’s Personality

• Tenacity
• Compassion for others
• Passion for justice
• Hard-earned love of self

Adjectives & Adverbs that Orient how Tash Behaves and Responds to the Story

• Persistent, sometimes annoyingly so
• Empathetic, which encourages others to open up to her
• Trustworthy and honest, which can create conflict when faced with the need to bend rules
• Stubborn, sometimes to the point of inflexibility
• Impatient
• Reclusive, tending to “go it alone” rather than “work with others”
• Determined
• Steadily and patiently, her approach to challenges
• Frustrated and angry, often her reaction to others

Preferences: Tash’s Loves & Hates

Loves

• Words crafted into a great story
• Running and hiking
• Gardening
• Animals, especially her dog, Sass
• Her children, Alannah and Aiden
• Her best friend
• A good mystery, either in book form (especially English mysteries by PD James, Dorothy Sayers, and the like, or as a good drama, such as Endeavour, Morse, The Wire, etc.)
• Solving problems
• Solitude and Meditation
• Healthy vegetarian food
• An occasional delicious dessert
• Simple and comfortable clothes
• Quiet
• Advocacy for mental health and destigmatizing mental illness
• Alliance with LGBTQ+ community
• Forensic science
• Traveling
• Research and writing accurate histories of underrepresented individuals
• Science and its pursuit of knowledge
• An eco-friendly approach to living
• Soulful singers, such as Tracy Chapman, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Roberta Flack, Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Janis Joplin, etc.
• Jazz music of the older, classical variety
• Older rock and roll from Queen, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, Beatles, etc.
• A great art exhibition
• The folklore, mythologies, and art of indigenous or underrepresented cultures

Hates

• Racism, misogyny, and bigotry
• Injustice
• Fish, which is really a phobia developed in childhood
• Snakes and large insects, ironic given her love of nature
• Walking her dog or running in the rain
• Chocolate, which makes her kids wonder if they’re related to her
• Informed stupidity, knowing but ignoring or twisting facts to support one’s own belief system, no matter how illogical
• How religion is used to deny people their individual beliefs and human rights. (Tash is an atheist who understands why some people believe in religion and she respects their right to practice the religion of their choice. However, she has no tolerance when religion is used to deny other people their individual choices and rights.)
• Cold feet, literally
• Being overheated, which is ironic because she lives in the South and is a runner
• Polluters and destroyers of the ecosystem
• Loud noises, especially head-banging music
• Poorly written dramas with one-dimensional characters
• Busy urban areas except in small doses
• Lack of diversity
• Crowded social situations

Who Must Tash Winslow Become to Solve the Mystery

To find and stop the killer, Tash must be a woman with enough self-confidence and determination to succeed, not on her own, but working as part of a team of dedicated investigators, lawyers, police detectives, and forensic scientists. She must curb her tendency to quick anger and her dislike of working with others to build trust among the people involved in the investigation. She will be the glue that holds this crew together. The case will test her limits of endurance and cast doubt on her abilities, but Tash will need to think outside the box to find creative solutions to the problem. While her skill and experience as a successful communicator and paralegal will prove helpful in her hunt for the killer, Tash must build on her current set of tools to incorporate nontraditional methods of investigation, some of which stretch her clearly defined professional and personal ethics and morals. She will have to decide how far she can go to stop a man from continuing to murder women and herself. Finally, Tash must question her own dreams and goals. Is she seeking the answer so she can return to the life she had envisioned before the murder, one of solo labor and quiet solitude on her land? Or will she find new dimensions to her dreams, ones enriched by the relationships and teamwork she has built?

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Cast of Characters (to be fleshed out)

Antagonist: the unknown murderer of the elderly woman Tash finds murdered on her property. The character has also killed ten other girls and women.

Victim: Lorena Jefferies, an 85-year-old Black woman whose great nephew is on death row.  A retired social worker, Lorena spent 25 years trying to prove her great nephew’s innocence.

The Innocence Mission

Cedric Carmichael, a 72-year-old White attorney who sparks Tash’s interest in helping his client.

Albert Simons, a 42-year-old Black man on death row in North Carolina for the murder of a 17-year-old White girl in 1999. He is the Innocence Mission client and great nephew of Lorena Jeffries.

Lance Tyrone Investigations, LLC

Lance Tyrone, owner and chief investigator, a 35-year-old Black man and highly skilled investigator.

Gerrie Reynolds, part-time office manager, a 47-year-old Black woman with a mysterious past.

Lowen Carter, investigator, a 26-year-old White nonbinary individual with strong computer investigation skills as well as contacts among certain criminals in the surrounding community. Lowen uses these relationships for less-than-legal purposes, such as hacking, unsanctioned surveillance, and protection.

Cole Tyrone, Lance’s 70-year-old father, retired as a detective with the Detroit City Police who has a useful contact in the FBI. He is introduced in name only until the very end of the story, when he and Tash meet.

Blevins, Ritchie, and Sauder, Tash’s law firm

Samual Blevins, Jr., son of the firm’s founder, Samuel Blevins, Sr. Tash worked with both attorneys. Junior invites Tash to the ABA dinner honoring Senior at the story’s beginning.

Melanie Peeples, paralegal at the law firm and Tash’s successor as forensic paralegal. Tash had mentored her for about a year but is resistant to carrying the relationship into her retirement.

Characters at the ABA Event

Cedric Carmichael of Innocence Mission (see above)

Marjory Dolton, a 59-year-old White woman who is the wife of U.S. Senator from NC David Dolton, also in attendance at the party but not seen.

Thomas Harding, a 42-year-old White attorney for the NC Department of Justice. He and Tash had met during a deposition where Tash presented evidence she had discovered for the defense and Harding, serving as the case’s prosecutor, had attempted to damage her credibility based on her age, gender, and history of mental illness.

Tash’s Children

Alannah Winslow Murphy, Tash’s 33-year-old daughter recently married Charlie Murphy, an accountant with his father’s investment firm. Alannah lives in Durham, NC, and is pursuing her master’s degree in biological sciences at Duke University.

Aiden Winslow, Tash’s 30-year-old son who lives and works in Seattle, WA. He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer engineering at Seattle University, and he now works for a start-up company that develops user applications that incorporate artificial intelligence. He lives with his boyfriend, Bertie Calhoun.

Harnett County Sherrif’s Department, investigating Lorena Jefferies’ murder & Medical Examiner’s Office

Detective Sarah McNaughton, primary investigator, a 49-year-old White woman who has made her career as a police officer for Raleigh police, moving up the ranks before taking the position of detective with the Harnett County Sherrif’s Department.

Officer Randy Clemmons, first on the scene after Tash calls 911, a 31-year-old White man who was born and raised in Harnett County, North Carolina. He has only ever worked for the Harnett County Sherrif’s Department.

Dr. Joseph LaMarr, Harnett County Medical Examiner, a 45-year-old White pathologist

Dr. Misha Patel, Harnett County Forensic Scientist, a 34-year-old woman whose family immigrated to North Carolina from India when Misha was four-years-old.

Cast of Characters in the Murder of Nicole Bowler

Nicole Bowler, a 17-year-old White girl who was a high-school classmate of Albert Simons, convicted of her 1999 murder.

Garth Bowler, Nicole’s father, now 72 years old, a known racist and bigot who prohibited his daughter from attending the prom with Albert, who is Black.

Nancy Bowler, Nicole’s mother, now 68-years-old and a barely functioning alcoholic, was destroyed by her daughter’s murder 25 years earlier.

Andrew (Andy) Bowler, Nicole’s 15-year-old brother at the time of her murder, is now a Raleigh attorney and married to Susan Harrison Bowler. They have two young children. He becomes a suspect in the murders through Tash’s investigations.

Katie Bowler, Nicole’s 13-year-old sister at the time of her murder, and now a recently divorced schoolteacher in Chatham County, North Carolina, with one young son.

Albert Simons, a then 17-year-old classmate who was friends with Nicole and asked her to the prom. She turned him down because of her father. Albert was convicted in 2001 of assaulting, raping, and strangling Nicole to death in 1999. He has been on death row in NC ever since, and his appeal the NC Supreme Court was denied. The Innocence Mission is pursuing other avenues of appeal.

Tommy Whitaker, a 17-year-old White boy who was a classmate of both Nicole and Albert. After Nicole rejected Albert, she accepted Tommy’s invitation to attend the Senior Prom. Nicole was murdered before the date of the prom. Tommy was questioned, but the police determined Albert was the most likely suspect. Tommy died in the Afghanistan war.

Other Crimes with Victims and Suspects Discovered by Tash and Her Team

Victim                                     Date        Age        Race/Gender               COD/Other Injuries

      Accused

Missy Redford                       2001        15           White female              Strangled/BFT/Rape

      Billy Smothers, suspect (42yo Black male)

Jessie Flowers                       2003        16           White female              Strangled/Bound/Rape

      Marty Jones, convicted (17yo Black male)

Belinda Thomas                    2005        18           White female              Strangled/Bruises/Rape

      Vernon Little, convicted (25yo Black male)

Penelope Price                     2007        20           White female              Strangled/Contusions/?

      Tomas Ramirez, convicted (21yo White/Hispanic male)

Teresa Hammond                 2011        24           White female              Strangled/Bound/Rape

      Jackson Washington, suspect (23yo Black male)

Holly Brewbaker                   2015        18           White female              Strangled/Bruises/Bound/Rape

          Willie Alvarez, accused (17yo White/Hispanic male)

Bonnie Fallow                         2020      17           White female              Strangled/Bound/Knifed/Rape

          Ray Norton, convicted (17yo Black male)

Yasmin Ahmad                        2022      20           White female              Strangled/Bound/Knifed/Rape

          Jamal Ahmad, accused (24yo White male)