The Ice-Cold Case

But Jim Selph couldn't remember where the couple had gone for target practice. So Morgan's detectives asked him to undergo hypnosis to try to retrieve the memory. In September 2003, Selph visited the Jenks Hypnosis Center in a Tulsa suburb; afterward, he was able to find the general area but not the exact tree.

Morgan's detectives flew to Tulsa and, with assistance from the Tulsa Sheriff's Department, used a metal detector to find a large oak tree that had metal in it. They cut it down and had it shipped to Kansas City, where they extracted 32 bullets they believed came from a .32-caliber gun. They turned the bullets over to the KCPD's crime lab.

At the beginning of this July, the KCPD contacted Morgan's private investigators to tell them the bullets were not a match. "They weren't even from the right type of gun," Eckert tells the Pitch.

But Morgan isn't letting dead ends like that discourage her. She had planned to stop investigating and start writing her book in February 2003, but she can't let the case go.

Morgan says the case has so consumed her that she even talks to the dead Louise Vilott. "I have long conversations with her, telling her, look, if you want me to solve this, I need some help," she says. She and Wylie have collected donations to offer a $10,000 reward for information that helps them solve the case. And she's working with a screenwriter on a fictionalized treatment of the story in hopes of selling it as a movie or TV show to get money to keep paying investigators.

Morgan says she doesn't care if she ever gets back the money she has put into the case. She just wants some resolution. And if she ever wants to write her book, she needs an ending to her story. "If there's no resolution to this case, there's no book," Morgan says. "We don't even have an agent right now, because nobody wants a murder mystery without an ending."