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## The Last Six Months
The period between May 18, 2021, when Conrad died, and November 2021, when Peter Elliott made the public announcement, was six months in which the family sat with a secret that was already partway out of its container.
Ashley and Kathy had discussed what to do. Their plan, Ashley has said, was to wait approximately a year before contacting law enforcement. They were grieving. They needed time to process what they had learned and to figure out how to navigate the disclosure.
This plan was preempted. Peter Elliott found the obituary in the fall of 2021 and confirmed the identification through his own investigative work. When federal investigators arrived at the Lynnfield house, the family did not need to explain everything from the beginning—they were confirming what investigators had already concluded. The conversation was structured around the investigators’ established knowledge rather than the family’s disclosure.
Whether this was better or worse for the family than the alternative—going to law enforcement first—is impossible to know. The outcome for the family was the same in either case: the identification was made, the case was closed, and no charges were filed. The route to that outcome was simply different from what they had planned.
The knock on the door—Ashley’s word was “terrifying”—was the moment the external world entered the private grief. For six months, what Conrad had told them had been their knowledge, held between the three of them and whatever private conversations they had had with each other in the weeks since his death. When the marshals knocked, it became a case file. It became a press release. It became coverage in NBC Boston and CNN and the Associated Press.