OBSERVATIONS: The Moments That Don’t Make It Into the Case File

Case files are built on what can be recorded.

Dates.

Times.

Locations.

Statements that can be repeated without changing shape.

They’re meant to be clean. Defensible. Something you can hand to someone else and trust they’ll see the same thing you did.

But real moments are rarely that cooperative.

There’s always a space between what gets written down and what actually happens in a room. Between what’s said out loud and what lingers after the recorder stops.

Those are the moments that don’t make it into the case file.

They aren’t evidence.

They can’t be cited.

They don’t survive cross-examination.

They show up as pauses that last a beat too long.

As answers that arrive too quickly.

As a detail offered before the question finishes forming.

A laugh that doesn’t match the subject.

A glance toward the door when no one’s leaving.

None of that belongs in an official report.

And yet — it’s often the first thing you notice.

Case files don’t have room for impressions. They rely on things that can be confirmed, repeated, verified by someone who wasn’t there. Feelings don’t qualify. Neither do instincts. Neither does the subtle shift that happens when someone thinks the “formal part” is over.

That’s not a failure of the system. It’s how the system works.

But it comes with a cost.

Because once the questions stop, the room doesn’t immediately return to neutral. There’s a moment — sometimes brief, sometimes heavy — where people reset themselves. Where voices change. Where the energy shifts just enough to register if you’re paying attention.

Those moments don’t disappear.

They just don’t have a place to land.

What stays with you after a case isn’t always what happened.

It’s what almost got said.

It’s the sentence that started, then got rerouted.

The topic that got skirted instead of addressed.

The way someone talked around a person instead of about them.

The way silence filled the space where an explanation should have been.

Some cases close neatly on paper. The file gets stamped. The timeline is complete. Everything important is technically accounted for.

But that doesn’t mean it’s finished.

Over time, I realized those unwritten moments were the ones shaping how I thought about crime — long before I ever tried to put it on the page. Not the dramatic reveals or clean conclusions, but the quiet gaps between them. The parts no one could officially point to, but everyone felt.

When I write now, that’s where my attention goes.

Not just to what happened, but to what was avoided. Not just to the act itself, but to the behaviors that made it possible to overlook. The places where certainty should have formed — and didn’t.

Fiction gives those moments a home. It lets them exist without needing permission to be provable. It lets silence carry weight instead of being mistaken for peace.

In real life, what isn’t documented slowly becomes easier to dismiss. Memory fades. Context thins. Paper outlasts people.

But absence isn’t innocence.

And silence isn’t resolution.

Some of the most important moments never make it into the case file.

That doesn’t mean they didn’t happen.

It just means someone noticed — and had to carry them instead.

-Loretta

Villains Welcome.

*If you’re drawn to dark truths and the stories they leave behind, start with The Dollmaker of Point on Amazon.