THIS IS A SECTION TAKEN OUT OF BRIGETTE ALOIS'S PUBLISHED MEMOIRS OF HER TIME CHASING THE MAGGOT MAN MURDERS, AS A REPORTER.

--File 019: "Truth About the Flies": The Lost Ones--

Whoever it was that coined the name of "Lost Girls" for all those tragic deaths was a genius. At one time, I thought it was profiteering off of their deaths, but then I realized that by giving them this name, these girls achieved as much notoriety as the Maggot Man had, if not more. They deserved it then, and they deserve it now. They deserve to be remembered more than he does. It's their names that people should be remembering, not his.

Not that the media didn't profit off of these deaths. Like any serial killer story, every news station in a ten mile radius of any of the killings jumped at the chance to cover these cases personally... which is why I have the information I have at all. I didn't stop at the end of my jurisdiction, either. I chased after him, alongside so many others. I didn't know it then, but I would be included in the quiet report detailing the "Lost Ones".

I was in that list of failed, broken, obsessed nutjobs.

Let's be real. There were so... so many people affected by these murders. The numbers across America were insane. Jake Grantham's journey started him on the East Coast, at which point he traveled across the Northern half of America, moved South, and then traveled back across the middle-to-southern half of the country, before making his way home again. He left a string of deaths in nearly every city he traveled through, every town he slithered across.

I was there when he was caught. The footage of the little girls- their faces concealed- screaming and pointing into the foliage, only to reveal the monster himself watching them so intently... I caught that. My camera man had been sick, and I dragged our massive, cordless camera out into the woods to follow after the Police, and I arrived just in time to capture that infamous moment of Grantham taking off like a shot through the trees and Agent Bartosz sprinting after him like a bat out of hell. I was the one running in high heels- I know, my fault- after them in the woods while the rest of the cops all stood in shock back in the clearing with the little girls.

I was there.

There's so much about this particular case that just cannot and will not die. Even when Grantham is gone, so many things remain unanswered. So many of us lost ourselves to Grantham's murders. Bartosz lost his wife, his children, his credibility, his mind, and then his job. I lost my husband, quit my job as a reporter, and became a true crime novelist. You might wonder to yourself, "Why? Why stick around in a subject that clearly terrifies you?"

I'm trying to drown it out. If I can just see ten more crime scenes, maybe, just maybe, it'll release the death grip this case has on my whole life.

On anyone's life.

I can't bear to see another crime scene, because I'll just see those little girls all over again. I can't bear to where a dead body might be because even the sound of one little fly will set me off into a hard panic, the kind that involves far too many cleaning supplies and the sort of OCD that ends marriages, apparently. I haven't been able to keep a relationship for 15 years. Too neurotic, they tell me; too nervous.

Grantham took something from every single person that was involved. Bartosz and I weren't the only ones. Around the country, Detectives hung on by a thread, volunteering with the "Fly Swatters"- hazmat dudes armed with super sucker vacuums and, occasionally, flamethrowers- and quitting the second it was all over with. I heard one city in Oklahoma had a sudden epidemic because all of their forensic pathologists quit, after spending so much time doing autopsies and working with entomologists to figure out those flies and maggots.

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A lot of cops quit, and if they didn't quit, they died.

The jury that convicted Grantham seemed ill the day he was convicted, and the Judge hung himself a week after, even though Grantham had received the highest form of punishment he could be given: the death penalty.

Grantham affected people in a way that those who did not directly deal with him, in some way, couldn't understand. The upstairs suits at the FBI waved Bartosz off and ultimately fired him, unwilling to see sense in his desperate ramblings. Precincts probably struggled to deal with the PTSD left in Grantham's wake for any officer who ever saw those horrific flies. The Forensic Pathologists who conducted the autopsies disappeared into the ether.

There were a lot of suicide attempts.

Things were bad, and the media was trying to keep it together, by keeping it all hushed. I don't think there's ever been a moment in the history of the United States of America, and I don't think there ever will be another moment again, where all the stations seemed to be functioning on the same wave length. None of us wanted to start the wildfire of panic that would erupt across America if we so much as breathed a hint of the truth of the nature of these killings.

This is all, of course, without taking into account the flies problem.

Those fuckers were a near plague. I can suddenly imagine the sheer horror the Pharaoh of Egypt must have felt, during Exodus, when God blankets the ground with locusts.

"They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen. They will devour what little you have left after the hail, including every tree that is growing in your fields. They will fill your houses and those of all your officials and the Egyptians- something neither your parents nor your ancestors have ever seen from the day they settled in this land till now." -Bible Exodus 10:5-7

I can begin to imagine what the Egyptians must have felt.

There were so many flies at each and every crime scene, that I couldn't actually film them all. Getting near the body was a task of Herculean effort. It was like wading through sludge, muck, grime, and maggots, all of it moving and all of it capable of transmitting too many diseases.

The list of the "Lost Ones" was a tragic one, passed around and added to across the country. Employers at Pest Controls found resignation letters (and worse) on their desks, and names were added to the folio. They're lost. The Maggot Man got them, too. They're not coming back.

And we weren't. I only found out about the list because when I handed in my resignation, my boss didn't seem at all surprised.

"You seem almost like you expected this," I said to him.

"I did," he said. I remember how sad he looked. "You're a 'Lost One'. You haven't been yourself in months. You can't let him go."

None of us could.

Grantham planted himself in our heads. Every buzz of a fly set us off, made us flinch. We were like ghosts at the markets, looking around jerkily as we tried to find our produce and not have a full-blown meltdown over the sound of a mostly innocent house fly.

I can't imagine the Fly Swatters had a good time. Those guys had to get in there and actually deal with the cleanup, and these weren't guys who dealt with the dead. Not just the dead- dead little girls, innocent of literally any crime ever in the world, except for the one of existing.

I see him in my dreams. That blank, wide-eyed stare. The lack of surprise when he was caught, despite his running. The way people watched us with wide, owlish eyes as we traversed back through town.

Not a single shred of surprise on any of them.

I close my eyes and I see Jake Grantham. I go on a date, and I see him in their eyes. I hear him in their voice. I see him in the woman who looks at me with a dirty expression because I jerked away from a simple house fly buzzing lazily around my head.

I am a Lost One. I kept my credibility in tact, unlike so many, but I am a Lost One.

I will never recover from Jake Grantham, nor will I ever recover from the reality that we weren't done. None of this is done.

None of it.