The Last Place You'd Look Read Online Free PDF

reason. For families working their way through this uncharted territory, there are many pitfalls to avoid and very few maps.
    I tell many of the heartbreaking stories I encountered on the following pages, and I attempt as well to offer insight into the agencies that work these cases, including what they are doing right and where there is room for improvement. Some of the suggestions come from members of “the club no one wants to belong to,” as Ed Smart puts it. And they speak, through me, with honesty and the hope that others never, ever have to walk in their shoes.
    In the next chapter you will meet Bill Kruziki. I first encountered Bill’s story when we corresponded about something I wrote for a law enforcement trade magazine at which I am a columnist. I later met him and his wife, Ellen, and was impressed with their ability to live their lives after suffering terrible tragedy. They have been kind enough to allow me to share their story with you.
    Brandon Victor Swanson. Courtesy of Brian and Annette Swanson.

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Two Brothers: A Federal
Marshal Confronts the Unthinkable
    Don’t expect anybody to do anything. You have to go on the offensive big time. The police are not going to spend all of their time working your case.—Bill Kruziki, retired U.S. marshal
    M att Kruziki grew up in the upper-middle-class Milwaukee suburb of Hartland. His dad, Bill, was a deputy sheriff, then sheriff, who had made the transition from local to federal law enforcement with an appointment to the U.S. Marshal’s Service. In high school Matt and his older brother, Chris, played sports, made decent grades, and had plenty of friends. As close as two brothers could be, they were, nevertheless, individuals in their outlooks on life. Matt, an outgoing liberal with a penchant for social causes, provided a contrast to the more introspective Chris, who adopted a conservative stance on politics and social issues.
    Both boys attended college for a while, but neither was quite sure what he wanted from life. Matt found his calling in the nonprofit realm. He started as a volunteer, then parlayed one gig into a paying job. The gregarious young man thrived in his position’s travel, mission, and, most of all, opportunities to make a difference.
    “He was hooked on nonprofit work,” says his dad, Bill.
    During his nonprofit career, Matt encouraged inner-city voters, worked with unionized health care, and made sure the less advantaged had a say in the issues that affected them. He was passionate in his quest to represent the voiceless and unabashed when it came to meeting new people and making friends. Relationships were as necessary to Matt’s existence as air.
    “He wasn’t afraid of anything,” Bill says. “He could make friends with a wall.”
    It was later, after Matt vanished in a tiny town hundreds of miles from home, that Bill would discover how many friends Matt had and how many other hearts he touched along the way. But the journey to finding out how much Matt meant to others was first complicated by the journey to find Matt—and to find out what happened to him.
    R
    On an icy-cold Christmas Eve in 2005, twenty-four-year-old Matt Kruziki disappeared while on a trip that led him to the city of East Dubuque, Illinois. With a couple thousand residents, the small river town once known as Dunleith flanks the muddy Mississippi and is connected by a bridge to the larger metropolitan area of Dubuque, Iowa, with its population of more than fifty thousand. Dubuque, perched at the juncture of three states—Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin—is a college town dominated by schools with religious affiliations, a place where the proverbial sidewalks roll up early. Many who hope to party late into the night slip across the Julien Dubuque Bridge to head for the strip of bars clustered along Sinsinawa Avenue in East Dubuque, where the fun continues until the wee hours of the morning.
    It was one of the bars in this strip noted for Dubuque college kids,