On a Monday evening in November 1936, a young woman carried a basket of clean laundry up the steps of a little clapboard house on South Waco Avenue in Wichita, Kansas, and knocked on her grandfather's door. Nobody answered. She knocked again on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, and by then she had decided the old man was behind his curtains, laughing at her. On Thursday her father snapped the latch. George Washington Wiant was on the floor of the next room, fully clothed, on his left side near the wall, and the newspapers had been piling up on the porch for three days.

Seventeen years later, a New York tabloid retold the case under a headline that did all the work for the reader: Perfect Candidate for Murder. An old man, alone, bad-tempered, separated from his wife, eight housekeepers hired and none of them stayed, a flock of relatives waiting to inherit, and money — everybody in the neighborhood knew — hidden somewhere in that house. A police chief with three conclusions and a bloody footprint on the linoleum. A lie detector. A woman with a briefcase and a fur coat. And a hired hand from a farm south of town who went in front of a Wichita jury twice, once with the State asking for his life.

But the coroner said something about the night George Wiant died that changes what that knock on Monday evening meant. The county clerk said something about the estate that takes the paper's motive apart in a single line. And a jury that had put a boot on a footprint and voted ten to two to acquit talked itself back into a deadlock on three words that became the title of this episode. Then we went and found him ourselves: three censuses, a farm in Sumner County, a house he owned outright, a wife the paper never names, and a life that starts with a fatherless one-year-old in Ohio and runs longer than the newspaper ever knew. A beating death, a description of a body, and a district court trial. Listener discretion advised.