Preface: No-Body Homicides
“You can have a seat if you’d like,” offered my sergeant as he guided me into his office.
Instead, I stood next to the chair, hoping to shorten the meeting.
“Jim, I need you to carry the Hayes case across the finish line,” he said, pointing to the chair. “Can you do that for me?” Kyle was more than my supervisor; he was also my friend. We had worked together for years as part of our undercover team and then on SWAT. Now we were both assigned to the homicide unit. I was the lead investigator in our cold-case detail; Kyle supervised my team along with the other homicide detectives.
“I was afraid you were going to ask for that,” I said as I resigned myself to sitting in the chair beside his desk. “You know how I feel about that case.”
“I also know you can solve it,” he replied with an all-too-familiar smile. Kyle barely attempted to disguise his order as a request, and I knew I would eventually have to acquiesce.
“I really want this case solved, and I’ll do all I can to help you,” he said.
“That’s because the case matters to you. I’m up to my neck in two others right now, and they’re much stronger. How can I possibly add a third case with so little evidence?”
“That’s why I said I would help you,” he replied.
I knew Kyle was an outstanding investigator in his own right, but since he was a sergeant supervising an entire team of detectives burdened with “fresh” homicides, I feared he would be too distracted to help much with an old unsolved murder.
“I’m not even sure it’s true her husband killed her,” I said, hoping to demonstrate how much work still needed to be done in the case. Steve Hayes had been the primary person of interest in his wife Tammy’s disappearance for nearly ten years, but no one had been able to collect enough evidence to prove she had been murdered. I read the case but had prioritized it behind several other cold homicides that were stronger evidentially.
“Look, Jim, I’m going to retire next year, and you’re not far behind me. I remember when this crime occurred. I was a brand-new patrol sergeant, and it was the first homicide I had to work as a supervisor. It does matter to me. I’d really like to see it solved before we’re retirees.”
“NO-BODY HOMICIDE”
“No-body homicide” cases are incredibly difficult to investigate and prosecute. Few of these cases are ever filed with the district attorney because prosecutors must (1) prove the victim was murdered (and isn’t simply missing) and (2) prove that the defendant committed the crime. These types of murders require a special approach to solve and communicate to a jury. This unique approach can also be used to investigate the case for Jesus.
I walked back to my office and looked at the stack of notebooks and reports on my desk. How was I going to add Tammy Hayes to my caseload? Not a single piece of physical evidence had been booked under her case number. Worse yet, we didn’t even have her body.
Tammy’s disappearance appeared to be a “no-body homicide” case: she and her husband, Steve, moved to our city in April 2000. A month later, Steve reported her missing (three days after having an argument). He claimed Tammy drove off in anger and still hadn’t returned. The initial officer took the report as a missing person case because that’s all he believed it to be. Tammy’s husband seemed certain that she would return, and Tammy—raised in the county foster care system—didn’t have any other close relatives to interview. As a result, the officers trusted Steve’s version of the story. No one photographed Tammy’s home, and CSI wasn’t called to collect any evidence. The detective later assigned to the case interviewed Steve and set the case aside with the expectation Tammy would return once she “cooled down.”
And that’s the way the case remained for years .
By the time another generation of detectives decided to follow up on Tammy’s disappearance (to close the case for recording purposes), Steve had completely remodeled their home. A new detective contacted Steve, expecting to find that Tammy had returned. She hadn’t. She never came home, never tried to call Steve, never wrote to ask him for a divorce. Instead, Tammy had vanished . No contact. No credit history. No sightings. It was clear something happened to Tammy, but detectives were unable to determine the truth about her disappearance. The case went cold. Steve remained a person of interest, but detectives were frustrated by the lack of evidence.
That was about a decade before my conversation with Kyle.
WHAT’S TRUE AND WHAT MATTERS
“I’d like to go tomorrow,” Susie said one Saturday afternoon. “Ben and Arlene promised to meet us in the parking lot and sit with us during the service.”
For three years I’d successfully postponed this day. Susie had wanted to go to church for years, but when we moved to a new town, I tried to extend the delay. I wasn’t raised in a Christian home, and I didn’t have any Christian friends during my high school or college years. Most of the outspoken believers I met at work were people I had occasion to arrest . I wasn’t impressed, and I often mocked Christians in front of my friends and coworkers.
God didn’t matter to me because I didn’t think he existed, and the Bible didn’t matter to me because I didn’t think it reported anything true.
I was similarly disinterested in the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and Grimm’s Fairy Tales . There’s a relationship between what’s true and what matters. Few of us order our lives around, spend time thinking about, or make decisions based on our belief in Bigfoot. As a thoughtful nonbeliever, I considered Jesus and the Bible equally fictional and irrelevant.
But I loved my wife, so I told her I would be willing to go to church, at least occasionally . She wasn’t a Christian, but she believed in God and wanted to raise our kids with a similar belief. I didn’t like the idea, but I agreed to visit our friends’ church.
As we entered the huge sanctuary, I could see Ben was watching me. We had been friends for years, and I recognized the mischievous expression on his face.
“You’re making me nervous,” I said. “Stop staring at me.”
“I’m just watching to see if you’re going to spontaneously burst into flames,” he joked. He knew it was my first time in an evangelical church for anything other than a wedding or a funeral.
“Very funny. Will the holy water burn?” I replied.
“You’re safe. We don’t use holy water here.”
The assembly space resembled a large open warehouse, the music was loud, and the atmosphere was very informal. Susie, who attended Catholic masses as a child, leaned over and whispered, “It doesn’t seem very reverent, does it?”
Eventually the pastor appeared on the stage and started preaching from a Bible. He was surprisingly . . . normal. He talked with charm and confidence, referencing New Testament passages as though they were true. None of this impressed me,
however, until he said something that grabbed my attention:
COLD CASES
Most crimes have a shelf life. Thefts, assaults, burglaries, and robberies must be solved in a limited amount of time, depending on the statute of limitations governing a jurisdiction. But not murders. Murders stay open until they are solved; they have no “statute of limitations.” Cold cases are, therefore, simply unsolved murders. As a new investigator of Christianity, I applied my expertise as a coldcase detective to the execution—and resurrection—of Jesus.
“Jesus was the smartest man who ever lived.”
Really? That’s a bold claim, I thought. But he didn’t stop there.
“The teaching of Jesus transformed the world because Jesus is God incarnate.”
What? God incarnate?
“What does that mean?” I asked Ben.
“It means Jesus, who is God, became a man,” he whispered.
I thought about it all the way home. This pastor acted like Jesus mattered, like Jesus was something more than an ancient fairy tale told by uneducated, unscientific people in an uninspiring era. At one point he said Jesus even claimed he was God. If that were true, why would anyone think Jesus was the smartest man who ever lived? I was more inclined to think Jesus was crazy.
Maybe that’s why Susie looked surprised when I told her I wanted to buy a Bible. The pastor’s words piqued my curiosity. How could he—or anyone else—think Jesus was the smartest man in human history? Why did he believe Jesus was God? Why would someone foolish enough to claim this about himself matter to anyone, let alone me?
I purchased a small pew Bible to find out. I spent less than seven dollars; I saw no point in wasting money to answer these simple questions. I began to read through the Gospels and found Jesus’s teachings admirable in several ways. He preached a high, counterintuitive moral standard. His concern for the disadvantaged was extraordinary. His love of the disaffected was remarkable. He called his followers to live a life of love, sacrifice, and service. The New Testament recorded the life and teaching of Jesus, along with his miracles, death, and resurrection.
I didn’t think any of it was true.
Why would someone trust this ancient collection of carefully crafted myths? This tale of a miracle-working Jesus who thought he was God might have been impressive to ancient sheepherders and farmers, but why would anyone raised in the twentieth century (or beyond) believe it? Why would anyone think this ancient, fictional character matters?
I spent the next six to eight months trying to determine if the Gospels were anything more than irrelevant fiction. I investigated the claims of the Gospels using every tool I possessed as a detective. I tested the Gospels as eyewitness accounts, investigated the history of early Christianity, evaluated the nuanced differences among the New Testament texts, and applied forensic statement analysis to the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I’ve written about this analysis in Cold-Case Christianity , but there was another important aspect of my investigation I’ve never written about, until now:
I also investigated Jesus as if he were a person of interest in a no-body homicide case.
The Hayes case lacked a crime scene. No scene was ever photographed or recorded in any way. Not a single piece of physical evidence existed when I reopened the case at Kyle’s request. To make matters worse, we didn’t even have Tammy’s body. Yet five years later, we successfully prosecuted Steve for his wife’s murder. It wasn’t easy, but I took a unique approach tailored to cases that lack a body and a crime scene.
The case for Jesus can be investigated in a similar way. As in the Hayes case, we don’t have Jesus’s body, and we don’t have a “crime scene” to provide us with physical evidence. Despite these limitations, we can still make a case for the historicity and deity of Jesus. We can do it without a body —and without any evidence from the New Testament.
You read that correctly.
The more I investigated the existence and deity of Jesus, the more I realized the Bible wasn’t the only available source of information. I didn’t need the evidence provided by the Gospels to know the truth about Jesus . If some evil regime had destroyed every Christian Bible before I was born—if there hadn’t been a single New Testament manuscript to testify about the life or deity of Jesus—I would still have been able to determine the truth about him. If I had investigated the case for Jesus like a no-body homicide cold case, I would have discovered everything I needed to know.
Join me as I employ the simple investigative strategy I used to solve the Hayes no-body homicide case. Once I’ve revealed it to you, we’ll apply this approach to the case for Jesus. If you’re someone who rejects the New Testament as I did, you may be shocked at how much you can still learn about Jesus. If you’re already a believer, this book will help you understand why Jesus still matters .
As in my other books, I’ll teach you how to be a good detective. You’ll learn some of the techniques I’ve used to solve our agency’s most difficult cases. Many of my investigations have received national attention. I’ve been told by network producers that I’ve appeared on NBC’s Dateline more than any other detective in the country. For this reason, I’ve changed several names and swapped details of my criminal cases to protect the identity of victims (and suspects) and to safeguard the progress of cases still under investigation. Despite this, you’ll discover the truth about what happened to Tammy, and you’ll also discover the truth about Jesus.
If Jesus was truly the smartest, most interesting, and most transformative man who ever lived—if he was truly God —we ought to be able to make a case for his existence and impact, even without a body or any evidence from the New Testament. When our investigation is complete, we’ll determine if Jesus matters. We’ll discover if he was a work of fiction, just another ancient sage, or history’s uniquely divine person of interest.