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Please do not suffer in silence. The building was quiet.

It was the late summer in San Antonio, Texas, a Saturday evening in August of 2015.

The funeral home had done its work for the day.

mourners had gone home, the staff had already tidied up, the lights were off.

A young woman's casket rested in a hallway, waiting for cremation the next morning.

The alarm was set, the doors were locked.

The staff walked away certain they had fulfilled their sacred duty,

to guard the body of the deceased until the final act of care could be performed.

But by the morning, the impossible had happened.

The casket sat empty, its hinge was bent, its beer, the rolling stand that supported it,

shoved toward an exit.

The room smelled of polish and flowers as though nothing had changed,

but everything had changed, because the body inside of that casket, 25-year-old Julie Mott,

was gone. No alarm had been triggered overnight. No window was broken. No door forced open.

The disappearance of a living person is a tragedy

that we can understand. Maybe it was an abduction, a runaway, a crime. But the disappearance

of the dead, that violated something deeper, a boundary that most of us believe is sacred,

that when we entrust a funeral home with our loved ones,

...