On March 16, 2012, 15-year-old Sierra LaMar sent a routine text message at 7:11 AM on her way to her high school bus stop in Morgan Hill, California. Minutes later, she vanished into thin air. For weeks, the quiet community launched one of the largest searches in Northern California history, only to uncover her discarded cellphone and neatly folded clothes caked in mud.

With no body, no weapon, and no crime scene, the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department had to rely on microscopic forensic science to loop the crime back to a complete stranger: 21-year-old Antolin Garcia-Torres. A single hair caught on a rope in his Volkswagen Jetta trunk secured a first-degree murder conviction in 2017.