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A note before we get started.

This episode contains intense descriptions of domestic violence.

One day last year I was talking with Marshall Stewart at his home and he handed me a thick folder.

Inside were notes and papers from his investigation in the first months after Shane disappeared and some newspaper clippings and those poems Shane wrote.

When I got home I went through it all and a set of stapled pages immediately got my attention.

They start with a letter written by Jimmy Burnett, one of the St. Angelo Lost Boys,

and according to Sheriff Nick Hanna, one of the four main suspects in Shane and Sally's murders.

The letter is written in neat cursive and addressed to Jimmy's first wife.

It begins,

I've told you many times I love you and I do. Jimmy promises to be a better person for her and for the

baby they're expecting. He says he's going to stop looking for fights, going to the lake, and pissing off her and her friends.

It's a photocopy of the letter, not the original,

and I wondered how Marshall got his hands on such a personal note from one of the main suspects.

I just can't say how I got some of those letters,

you know, after the kids were gone.

I, for some reason, thought Jimmy knew that baby was coming before during it

when the kids disappeared at something during that summer.

...