Allow me to turn to a more personal, less literary/artsy subject today…
I was in Chicago on the weekend with friends. I came back on Sunday night, got home, and out of habit checked the stats on this blog – a habit borne of curiosity generally, and my occasional question of whether this is a worthy pursuit specifically. I was stunned to see more than triple the average number of visitors to the site on the weekend.
After more searching through the stats, I discovered that the majority of visitors were coming from search engines like Google, and all were searching the name of my late uncle, Michael Cahill, whom I’d written about here and here.
Noting that this couldn’t have been a random surge, I searched for a while and noticed that America’s Most Wanted had re-broadcast their story on his murder (which I originally wrote about here). Furthermore, a news blog in Virginia recently focused on the crime also.
It’s several days later and I’m still getting a lot of traffic from people, from all over N. America and even Europe for that matter, looking up Michael’s murder. Strange. The whole thing is strange – the incident itself, tragic obviously as it was, and now this surge of interest which more than eclipses all of the previous Michael-related traffic I’ve received since AMW first broadcast the story. I don’t quite understand the invigorated interest, but I’m happy that more people are curious; it means that there are that many more people who may be able to help out in solving the case.
Helps that Berkeley Breathed is involved I guess, which is one of the more hard-to-believe aspects of the story.
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UPDATE (April 2020): http://imagitude.com/michael-cahill/michael-cahill-coda/
