Aretha Martin

On June 4, 2008, Aretha Martin, 36, a Black woman from Buffalo, New York, became the victim in a homicide case that investigators would ultimately list as unsolved. The killing was tied to the Walden Avenue corridor in Buffalo’s 14211 zip code, a detail that has remained one of the few consistently repeated reference points in public summaries of the case.

In the days that followed, the case was categorized simply and starkly: murder, with the cause not publicly specified and no suspec ...