Cold, Dead, But Never Buried
Hosted by Sebastian Blaine

I’VE LEARNED THAT REGARDLESS of resources like the internet, historical documentation, websites of ancestries and the like, some mysteries are left to the people who lived them. Maybe they know. Maybe they understand.

I can’t help but think, based on what little actual evidence I’ve been able to uncover, that there was more to Isabelle Addington than just simply being a transient passing through Shepherd who was brutally murdered. Did the Opperman family who owned the property at the time have anything to do with it? Perhaps. But in searching the newspaper archives, the story seems to fade away. Unsolved. Questions never answered. Yet maybe that’s the way of it at 322 Predicament Avenue. Maybe the us of today aren’t supposed to understand the them of yesterday. The people who came and went through 322 Predicament Avenue. The folks in town who, after the sensation of discovering a crime scene, remained remarkably silent.

Perhaps they were protecting someone. Perhaps each other. Or maybe it was just that Shepherd, Iowa, isn’t unlike any other small town in America—or the rest of the world, for that matter. We love our thrilling stories, that is, until the truth is revealed and our darker sides are exposed. The sides we’d rather were kept secret, hidden away forever.

In my career of solving historical cold cases, I’ve come to the conclusion that the story of murder—the heinous taking of a life—is like dominoes falling. One person may be left holding the knife, but many played a part in the process of getting there. Maybe societal pressures. Maybe parental misguidance. Perhaps mental illness or greed. And when I find what I can about Isabelle Addington, I’m led to wonder if she was just a person in the wrong place at the wrong time, or if she was part of something larger. Something that got away from her, and in the end, the consequences were far more than she’d expected to pay.

Whatever the ending to the story of 322 Predicament Avenue, I’ll say this: Evil never goes away. Once it stains a place, the mark remains for generations. Its horror is repeated. It rises from the grave to haunt.

So, what do we do with that?

Are you afraid to grieve the loss of a loved one?

Are you afraid to lose a loved one?

Are you afraid to go on living without a loved one?

Or perhaps, in all of this, you’re more like me. You realize you’re missing time with your loved one because you’re afraid you will fail them.

This is evil at its core.

Fear.

Fear is a lack of hope and a belief in the murder of our dreams, our lives, and even our salvation.

But if I’ve learned anything during my stay at 322 Predicament Avenue, it’s that to live—to truly live—is to hope that there’s a deeper purpose for our lives. That a person’s life, no matter how short or how long, how peaceful or how turbulent, how adventurous or how tragic, is not wasted. Not when you have hope. It might be a tiny pinprick of light in a world of darkness, but it’s there all the same. It was planted there by God, and the more you pursue hope, the brighter it becomes, and the more we discover that fear is not of Him. Hope is. We need only to surrender to it.

Most of us resist this surrendering to hope, and yet we surrender to fear every day, easily and without much of a fight.

Today, listener, I challenge you. Surrender to hope instead.