The Murder of Stephanie Isaacson
Death and I were once colleagues. When I was a young woman, Death and I were close associates for about 10 years, when I was working the front desk of the Las Vegas police department’s crime lab.
Since I was part of the office staff, I didn’t go out to crime scenes. My daily duties revolved around forensic reports, pictures of crime scenes, and suicide notes. I also took calls from dispatchers requesting crime scene investigators, the people everyone knows now from the popular television series.
Working around death changes you, even when you’re a step removed from it. It invades your dreams and makes you acutely aware of how close it is to all of us. For people who work in law enforcement, death becomes routine, except for those cases that hit too close to home, when it strikes a note that echoes. Those cases stay with you forever. For many of us working at Las Vegas Metro in the late 1980s, one of the cases hardest to shake was the murder of Stephanie Isaacson.
In 1989, 14-year-old Stephanie Isaacson left for school early one morning. She never made it there. When she didn’t come that night, her dad and his friends went out on horseback looking for her. They found her books scattered in a vacant lot. Police units arrived and discovered her body. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. Her body was violated in ways no one should…
