Longreads

In the summer of 2012, a homeless man named William Greer Jr. was bludgeoned to death in a park in Austin, Texas. Greer's case remains unsolved, and his daughter is determined to find answers:

"In the weeks that followed her dad's death, Tangie drove to Austin three times: once to speak to police, once to speak to reporters, and once to commemorate what would have been Greer's 50th birthday on July 29. On one of those visits, Tangie went to the spot where her father lost his life. She spoke to a transient named Chris who sleeps nearby and asked him if he had seen anything the night of the murder. She knew detectives had already questioned him—and eliminated him from their investigation—but maybe he had forgotten to tell them something that could prove crucial. 'I was playing detective in a way,' Tangie told me.

"Chris told her he didn't remember her dad, but that he did recall another transient sleeping at the same spot before Greer's murder, and afterward. He gave her a description of the man, and Tangie relayed the information to detectives. But she says they told her Chris wasn't reliable. 'If you interviewed him eight times, you'll get eight different answers,' a detective said."

Parents of children on the autism spectrum are wading through a considerable amount of information on the Internet purporting effective treatment and "cures" for autism. A majority of the treatments have been discredited:

"Almost by accident, Laidler says he and Ann, discovered the diet they’d put their son on didn’t work. 'He was gluten-free and we thought it was a miraculous cure for our son because he’d made pretty dramatic strides from the age of 3 to 4. We were starting to see real progress. But on a trip to Disneyland, he grabbed a waffle off the table and ate it before we could stop him. Doctors had told us that one drop [of gluten] would cause a dramatic relapse—we’d been told anecdotal stories that a speck of wheat bread would cause an autistic child to have weeks of bad behavior. And nothing happened.'

"The Laidlers had also tried chelating their son, and as physicians they had helped other families who wanted to try it. 'Nobody ever told me it did any good. So to regain my sense of mental balance I started asking a lot of pointed questions: Have you tried chelation? What was the result? Ninety percent of people I asked said they saw no improvement.'"