Just after 11:00 p.m. on December 3, 2003, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Luna was wrapping up a tough case that had tested his talents and sanity. Earlier that day, the 38-year-old Baltimore prosecutor—who rose from a childhood of poverty in the Bronx to a prestigious post at the Department of Justice—had failed to persuade an FBI informant named Warren Grace to testify fully against a pair of local heroin kingpins on trial for drug conspiracy, and had no choice but to cut a plea deal. Holed up all evening in his office at the Garmatz courthouse in downtown Baltimore, Luna traded phone calls with one of the defendants' attorneys and updated his wife, Angela—who awaited his return with their two young sons—on when he hoped to make it home.

Then, at 11:38 p.m., without telling anyone, Luna clocked out of his high-security office. Leaving his cell phone and eyeglasses on his desk, he took the elevator down to the garage and pulled his silver 1999 Honda Accord into the night. His route was baffling: He made his way north on I-95 toward Philadelphia, where Grace—a convicted heroin dealer whom he had visited in previous weeks to discuss the case—was incarcerated. But Luna never stopped at the prison. Records indicate that he withdrew $200 from a rest stop ATM in Newark, Delaware, at 12:57 a.m., and two hours later, boomeranged across the Delaware River Bridge onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike heading west. The toll plaza surveillance video is grainy, but whoever was behind the wheel got a paper ticket even though the car was equipped with an E-ZPass—suggesting that the driver was either unfamiliar with the vehicle, attempting to avoid a credit card paper trail, or being directed against his will. After more than an hour on the turnpike, the car pulled off at Exit 286 near rural Denver, Pennsylvania, 70 miles from Baltimore and deep in Amish country.

An hour and a half later, just before sunrise, Luna's Accord was found tipped into a shallow creek on the wooded property of Sensenig & Weaver Well Drilling, about a mile from the highway. Pennsylvania state police swarmed the scene and found blood smeared on the open driver's-side door, cash strewn about the car's interior, and Luna's body, still dressed in a business suit, lying face down in the nearby creek. The killer had worked quickly—not pausing to turn off the car's engine—and with a primal rage, stabbing Luna 36 times with the prosecutor's own penknife. There were no definitive signs that he had been tied up, but the large amount of blood in the backseat and pinprick cuts all over his body suggested both a violent struggle and the possibility that Luna could have been wounded into submission, forced to lie down in the back—right next to his son's car seat—and driven out to this desolate area to be dumped. At 8:05 a.m., he was pronounced dead by the Lancaster County coroner, the victim of "fresh water drowning" and "multiple stab wounds."