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publicity hound. Some web sleuths accused Todd of selfish motives, pointing to his appearances on Good Morning America , his onetime radio show, his consulting gig for a TV pilot based partly on his life, his ongoing quest tolaunch a dramatic TV series based on web sleuthing. Todd is the subject of, or quoted within, a slew of newspaper and magazine stories, and a Memphis filmmaker is working on a documentary about him.
    â€œYou look for things to fill that hole in your heart that you cannot ignore,” Todd once wrote to me, referring to the deaths of two of his siblings. “Others being eased from suffering does hold Rx for the soul—it does. But you have to keep going. It’s a temporary fix. There’s no real cure, you see. It’s about managing the cycle like a recovering addict.”
    I couldn’t have imagined when I met Todd that, less than two years later, he would be voted off his own island. But nothing changed the fact that Todd Matthews was at the center of a revolutionary era for law enforcement and the Internet. And there were others like him, obsessed with a nameless body.

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    F or decades, Provincetown police chief James J. Meads kept the skull of the Lady of the Dunes on his desk, vowing he wouldn’t retire until he uncovered her real name.
    I met Jimmy Meads in June 2010. He had retired reluctantly eighteen years earlier, the woman’s identity still unknown, but he had cemented his reputation as the gutsy, strong-willed chief who continued to champion her case. Third-generation Provincetown, Meads descended from Portuguese fishermen. He lived in a traditional Cape on a narrow lane off Commercial Street’s leather shops, art galleries, and restaurants, a short walk from the harbor where his father used to launch his boat before dawn.
    Opposite Meads’s house was one of the most chic and popular guesthouses in town. The then owner, Park Davis, with close-cropped graying hair and an engaging smile, told me a man once shot a woman execution-style in a public parking lot not far away. One of Davis’s poodles, perched at a window, was the only witness. Police eventually located that assailant, but no witnesses, not even canine ones, saw the murder of the Lady of the Dunes.
    At seventy-seven, Meads, in jeans and a navy blue T-shirt with a fire department insignia, still had an iron jaw and the physique of a bodybuilder. If I had broken the law I wouldn’t want to meet his ice-blue gaze, but retirement seemed to agree with him. Mild-mannered, he showed me his collection of antique blue glass lining the shelves along his kitchen ceiling and the birdhouses he’d built and mounted in the backyard. He’d boughtand renovated the house around 1974, the year of the infamous case.
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    That year, on July twenty-sixth, a couple and their daughter visited a local artist at her primitive shack nestled among the dunes. The dune shacks had been thrown together more than a century earlier, shelters for crews who kept watch for ships running aground in storms and fog. By the 1970s the shacks had been turned into artist studios and rustic beach getaways. Isolated, with no electricity, indoor plumbing, or telephone, they promised uninterrupted solitude and refuge.
    Tooling along featureless Route 6, the Cape’s only divided highway, you’d have to have faith that the endless roadside scrub oaks and crabgrass hid something worthwhile. Even the Pilgrims had ditched Provincetown for Plymouth. But the dunes, spooky and wild and tall after all the flatness, make this tiny place alluring.
    You can disappear here, a longtime resident told me. Those seeking to distance themselves from the world make their way to Provincetown.
    That Friday, as afternoon slipped into evening, the couple’s thirteen-year-old daughter set off for a walk with her beagle. They wandered toward the Coast Guard station on Race Point, named for the fierce riptides that tear