James Wakefield

James Wakefield, a 58-year-old White man from New Orleans, was killed in a case that has lingered in the city’s public cold-case listings. The way his name appears there is spare and unsettling—no long narrative, no courtroom docket attached—just the stark classification of murder and the fact that the New Orleans Police Department is the investigating agency.

What that kind of entry suggests is the quiet aftermath that follows the initial shock: detectives working what they can, l ...