Bob Siders waited twenty years for justice. He never got closure.
I met Bob while researching my standalone novel, Hole in the Woods, which was inspired by the real cold case of his daughter, Shannon. In the book, Shannon becomes a girl named Nina Laramie — a high school grad in 1989 who heads out one summer night with her friends and is never seen alive again. Three decades later, a Detroit cold-case detective named Riley St. James picks up Nina’s file with something to prove and a past that mirrors the victim’s. The pages are mine. The wound underneath them is Bob’s.
I went looking for a story. I came back with a friend.
Shannon was murdered in a small Michigan town. The case went cold. For two decades, Bob carried the weight of not knowing — not who, not why, not whether anyone would ever answer for what had been done to her. Twenty years of waking up in the same house, going to the same restaurant on Fridays, walking the same streets, knowing the people who had killed his only girl were somewhere out there getting on with their lives.
I’ll tell you what twenty years of that does to a man. It builds a love that refuses to quit. It builds a grief with nowhere to put itself down.
In 2015, two brothers were finally arrested, charged, and sentenced for Shannon’s death. Bob got the verdict. He got the headlines. He got every piece of justice the legal system is built to hand out.
And he told me, with the kind of plain honesty only a man who has lived through it can offer, that closure was never going to come.
Bob passed away in October of 2025. The wound to his heart never fully healed. But at least he is finally home and at peace with his beloved daughter.
Justice and closure are not the same thing. They never were. Bob Siders is the reason I will always make that distinction.
The Story I Owe My Readers, and the Truth I Owe Myself
I write crime fiction. I love this genre. It challenges me and I love that. The genre has rules.
The biggest one is that on the last page, justice has to be served. The chaos at the start has to be ordered. The trail of evidence has to pay off. The killer has to be caught. The detective has to do the impossible, brutal, beautiful work, and walk out the other side carrying just enough of herself to do it again.
I lean into that. I don’t apologize for it. P.D. James said it best, and I keep Phyllis Dorothy’s words pinned to the bulletin board in my office where I look at them every single day:
"What the detective story is all about is not murder but the restoration of order."
That’s my north star. When a reader opens one of my books and encounters a messy murder, I believe they are trusting me to put the world back together by the end.
So in Hole in the Woods, Riley St. James gets her witness. In every Coroner’s Daughter novel, Emily Hartford solves her cases. They do the meticulous work — the body, the timeline, the small detail nobody else thought to check. They prioritize the good, the right, and the true. Comfort and giving up don’t enter the calculation. Black and white justice. Story justice. Clean justice.
Real life doesn’t grant us that. And I have to be willing to say it, even when it’s the harder thing to say.
When the Unknowing Was the Worst Part
Years ago, I worked in PR and fundraising at a social service agency in Chicago. A young mother in our organization had a young son. One day, he didn’t come home.
For almost a week, they searched. We all remained pensive. Hopeful. But gutted inside. We feared the worst, and the not knowing was intolerable.
Eventually, they found his body in a nearby forest preserve. He had been mutilated. He had been murdered.
It was devastating. But even when the truth is unbearable, knowing gives a person somewhere to stand. A place to move forward from.
I think about that mother often. I think about what that week did to her. And I think about what the next week will do, and the next year. And now two decades later. That son would probably have a child of his own.
I’m grateful for the knowing… because at least she could grieve a real son in a real place instead of an absence she couldn’t bury.
The hard truth is something we can eventually learn to live with. Injustice is harder. Being wronged is one of the worst things a human being can experience. And wronging someone, out of malice, out of carelessness, out of plain thoughtlessness — is one of the worst things a human being can do.
Writers, take that to your villains. The man who hurts a child without even noticing he’s doing it is far more chilling than the one who twirls his mustache. Carelessness is its own form of evil. Look around. You don’t have to look far. You know exactly what I mean. Maybe it’s even close to home, in your own family circles.
The Hole in the Woods
In my novel, Hole in the Woods, Nina Laramie’s body is found in a place the locals call the Hole in the Woods — a remote clearing where teenagers go to drink and party and get away from the adults. Unspeakable things can happen there, and no one will ever know or find out.
I named the book after that place because that’s what injustice is. A hole in the woods. A clearing where the truth gets buried, and the world keeps walking by.
Riley St. James spends three decades pulling Nina’s truth out of that hole. The witness is still alive. The killers are still out there. The evidence has been waiting for someone willing to listen.
That’s what justice is, when you take the gloss off. Justice is the work of going in there with a flashlight. Justice and Closure Run on Different Clocks. Justice and closure don’t run on the same clock. They never have.
Justice, in theory, is something every person needs and deserves. We can’t have a sane, functioning society without it. Justice in practice has two systems running in parallel: the legal justice of the courts, and the moral and ethical justice of being human. Sometimes legal justice never arrives. Sometimes moral justice is overlooked entirely. The truest justice, the kind worth pursuing, is always rooted in mercy.
Closure is something else. Closure is what the heart does, in its own time, with its own logic, on no one’s permission. Some people find their way to it. Some people don’t. Bob didn’t. The mother in Chicago, I don’t know if she ever did. I moved on and I suppose she did too, in the ways she needed to.
When I write Riley working a case, or Emily working a body, I let them have the satisfaction of an answer. I owe them that. When I sit at my desk and think about real grief, I know better than to confuse the two.
The Lie We’ve Been Selling Each Other
Here’s where I’ll get unfashionable for a minute. Stay with me.
We’ve been telling ourselves a comfortable lie for a long time now: I can create my own truth. What I do and how I live is my business. It’s a tidy philosophy. It sounds like freedom. It sounds like maturity.
It is none of those things. It is an irresponsible lie.
You can not manufacture your own truth, and your decisions are never just yours. Every choice you make ripples. Step outside of integrity and morality in even the smallest way, and the chaos finds its way to someone else’s doorstep. Sometimes that step is big and it stomps on the doorstep of a man who will spend the next twenty years of his life looking for a justice that won’t bring his daughter back.
How do we know when we’re acting badly and stepping out of what’s good for ourselves and others? It is innate. There is a moral truth that lives inside human beings, and we feel the pressure under our ribs… or throbbing in our temples when we go against it. And we don’t feel better until we make things right.
Heroes and villains in fiction work the same way. Nothing in their story rests or feels cathartic until the wrong is set right.
Heavy stuff? Yes. It’s our human reality, and we can’t escape it just because the culture has gotten cleverer about pretending otherwise.
What Does The Good, The Right, and The True Actually Ask of Us?
In reality or off the page, the good, the right, and the true demand personal integrity.
It’s a daily, unglamorous, sometimes lonely striving. Even when it seems like no one else cares about being integrous. We don’t get a pass.
Integrity and personal conscience grow the way a tree does — slowly, invisibly, and only because someone planted it and watered it.
Integrity asks us to put others first. To be honest about our own ego and selfishness. To stay accountable to a community of people who love us enough to keep us in check. For me, that work is rooted in prayer, in my relationship with God, sometimes in therapy, and always in the people who refuse to let me drift. My close community to whom I’m accountable.
The fruit that comes with this is a deep, deep joy. Not always happiness. Happiness is a feeling. Feelings come and go. What I get from nurturing the good, the right, and the true, and what I try to write toward, is something deeper, a fulfilled life, with order and resolution and a peace nothing can fully take from us.
Bob Siders never got closure. He lived with integrity. He never let go of his daughter. He never let go of the good, right, and true. I’m told he died with a caring person at his bedside. And at peace.
I smile at that, and my own heart is at rest.
His life and his striving for his daughter’s justice were not clean and tidy.
But at the end of the day, it was ordered. It was just. It was redemptive.
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Hole in the Woods is available in print and on Audible. It is being re-released next April, 2027. Currently, the project is being shopped as a TV series. Shannon’s story — told through Nina, walked through by Riley — has a chance to reach people who will never crack the book. I’m sharing the TV development journey as it unfolds. The meetings. The maybes. The waiting. Come along on TikTok at @jen.dornbush. If any of this has stayed with you, I’d love for you to walk this part of the road with me, too. See behind the scenes nitty-gritty of how Hollywood really works.
