A Body in the Ashes: Discovery in Lampblack Swamp The morning of December 26, 1907, dawned cold and gray over Harrison, New Jersey. Along the Passaic River, a local man cut across a stretch of wasteland—a grim patch of ash heaps, cinders, and marsh where industrial refuse met stagnant water. It was the kind of place where the city dumped what it didn’t want to see. There, in a shallow pool of filthy water, he saw her. The woman was completely naked, lying face-up in the blac

Alexis Sharkey’s death was one of those cases that instantly lit up every corner of the internet—because it collided at the intersection of influencer culture, a beautiful young victim, and the ugly, familiar pattern of intimate partner homicide. And for months it looked like it might stall, the way cases sometimes do when the truth is inconvenient. But Houston detectives kept working it, built the timeline, established motive and opportunity, and in the end they did what the