Following the paper trail in writing A STRANGER KILLED KATY
ABOVE: A page from Brian McCarthy's prison file. In the summer of 2018, I sat at a desk inside the village police station in Potsdam, New York, and thumbed my way, page by page, through a department case file that was more than 30 years old. By reading that 2-inch-thick folder – which I was permitted to see after filing a Freedom of Information Law request – I was transported back to 1986, back to that horrific morning of August 29 when officers got the call about a brutal at