The boundary between life and death is supposed to be sacred a final curtain that provides a sense of peace and closure for the grieving but for Kim Erick the passing of her son was only the beginning of a decade long descent into a waking nightmare. In 2012 her twenty three year old son Chris Todd Erick was found deceased in his bed at his grandmothers home in Midlothian Texas. While the official police reports attributed his sudden passing to an undiagnosed heart condition that triggered two separate heart attacks Kim remained unconvinced. Her grief was immediately complicated by a series of events that felt rushed and clandestine as Chris’s father and grandmother arranged for a rapid cremation before Kim could even process the magnitude of her loss. She was handed a necklace containing what she was told were his ashes but a deep instinctual feeling told her that something was horribly wrong.

Kims suspicions were set ablaze when she eventually obtained police scene photographs from the bedroom where Chris died. To her eyes the images revealed physical traumas and troubling signs that were never mentioned in the initial medical reports. She became convinced that her son had not died peacefully in his sleep but had instead suffered through forty eight hours of agony. Despite a 2014 homicide investigation concluding there was no evidence of foul play Kim dismissed the results as a total cover up. She spent years searching for answers haunted by the idea that the remains in her necklace were not her son at all. Then in a twist of fate that seems pulled from a psychological thriller she walked into a Las Vegas museum and saw a sight that made her blood turn to ice.