Let me begin by saying that this is the short version…
For those who haven’t been following my blog, my uncle, Michael Cahill, was shot and killed in 1979, in Austin Texas. This happened as he came upon someone burglarizing his apartment, who fled on foot with my uncle’s prized possession — a Guild D40 acoustic guitar. As I covered in 2006, this sad episode in my family’s life was resurfaced by journalist Denise Gamino of the Austin American-Statesman (Gamino is now a former staffer and her very excellent article is no longer on their site, however I’m linking to a copy of it here). Fortuitously, a producer from America’s Most Wanted came across it and reached out to my aunt for permission to spotlight this cold case on one of their episodes. And so, in 2007 I got to see the story of my uncle’s murder not only re-explained and re-contextualized, but also recreated with actors on broadcast TV.
And then…nothing happened. I wrote about it here and here and that generated interest. People reached out to share their theories, sometimes the odd story about Michael. Over time — especially given the cancellation of America’s Most Wanted (and the erasure of its online presence which wiped out all of the stories they covered, a crime in itself for families whose only hope for justice was the information that site provided) I grew ambivalent to any suggestion that I should be hopeful my uncle’s murder would find any sort of resolution.
On February 7th of this year, I got on a plane to Tulum, Mexico, for a vacation. When the jet landed on the tarmac of Cancún International Airport, I saw that I’d received a voicemail. I ignored it, assuming it was work-related, or maybe just spam — it was from an area code I didn’t recognize — until I returned to my office on the 18th. It was a Tuesday.
The message was from Randy Crafton the owner of Kaleidoscope Sound, a recording studio in New Jersey. While doing an inventory of their music equipment, they looked up the serial number of one of their studio guitars. Unlikely as it may seem, even as I write this, that serial number was the same as the one my uncle died chasing in 1979. It had likely changed hands many times; at some point I’m sure someone will investigate this.
This past Friday — Good Friday — the guitar was delivered by UPS to my father in Houston, just in time for the 41st anniversary of my uncle’s death. My family down there is, to say the least, ecstatic, and I am still gobsmacked at how this all came to be. Let’s face it, the probability is beyond calculation. I’m grateful, which feels like a tremendous understatement. Grateful to the people at the studio in New Jersey. Grateful to everyone who has shared Michael’s story (including that serial number!) on the web. I will most likely write something more comprehensive about this, because there are so many moving parts — names, places, people — and the story is much larger than what I’m able to encapsulate here. But I’ll get to that when the dust has settled.
