The Detail No One Would Invent

In 2018, forensic pathologist Dr. Richard Shepherd published his memoir Unnatural Causes, recounting forty years of examining the dead. He observed that the most reliable witnesses are those who report details they don't understand — a strange smell, an unexpected color, something that didn't make sense at the time. Those bewildering, uninterpreted observations are almost always true. No one invents what they cannot explain.…