THE MURDER of Felicia Gayle, a reporter for the St Louis Post-Dispatch, in 1998 was one of those crimes almost perfectly calibrated to shock. In the evening of August 11th that year, Gayle’s husband returned home from work to find the back door of their house in University City, a suburb of St Louis, wide open. Inside, he found his wife dead in the blood-spattered hallway, wearing only a T-shirt, with a kitchen knife sticking out of her neck. It was, the police guessed, a botched burglary. The killer had taken a purse and a laptop, but left behind many other valuables. Bloody fingerprints marked the wall and footprints the floor. Gayle had been stabbed 43 times, seemingly after coming out of the shower and interrupting the thief. “He was probably just as surprised to see her as she was to see him,” said the local police chief at the time.