Mae Hall

Mae Hall, a 38-year-old Black woman, was found dead on December 9, 1958, in Baltimore, Maryland, her body left out on the hard ground behind the rowhouses—on concrete in a back yard or alley setting, the kind of place where sound gets swallowed and footsteps don’t always draw eyes to windows. Investigators determined she had been killed by strangulation, and the timeline suggested she had been dead for days before anyone discovered her.

In the weeks and months around her death, the c ...