Pine Barrens research pass — September 7, 2026

Three research agents worked independently on new entries and two halves of the existing collection. The coordinating pass examined all 123 entry files for catalog structure and sourcing, incorporated the research, and repaired discovery pages. This does not mean all historical claims in all entries received fresh independent verification.

Delivered

Four new stories: Double Trouble, Whitesbog blueberry domestication, the 1977 Bass River fire, and Chestnut Neck privateering.
Ten existing stories expanded or corrected: Craig Bender, Mary Ann Forge, Soden/Caldwell, Imbo/Petrone, Giuseppe Mercurio, Sidney Reso, Allen Bodine Scott, Theodore Pohlig, James Wainwright, and Thomas Mulcahy.
Eight open questions for readers, linked from the homepage and topics page.
Full catalog inventory: 115 public entries and eight excluded legacy, duplicate or source-only pages.
New-story source audit, A–M case research, and N–Z case research.

Coordinating research: Thomas Mulcahy

Read the full 2008 appellate opinion and relevant 2014 post-conviction opinion. These are judicial accounts of the trial evidence, not direct examination of exhibits.

The earlier page compressed collection and discovery into one location and supplied an age inconsistent with the appellate opinion. The revision distinguishes Butler Place collection, Red Lion discovery, and the separate Parkway recovery; attributes age to the court; adds the Toronto reexamination and Maine database sequence; and links the conviction and appellate history. The two charged killings remain separate from evidence about other deaths. The page uses the standard site navigation and viewport metadata.

An additional search for later resolution of the 1934 Ong’s Hat triple homicide did not produce a reliable new disposition. No claimed solution was added. An attempted Library of Congress page retrieval failed; the new research does not describe it as inspected.

Catalog repair

Before this pass, search.json held 111 public records but the people index rendered only one card. Homepage, metadata, and visible index counts disagreed (118, 117, and 108). Homepage summaries also called developed entries provisional. All public pages are now represented once in search, the people index and topics; homepage cards use current titles and summaries. Explicit noindex exclusions remain excluded.

python3 script/pinebarrens-catalog.py regenerates those navigation surfaces from the entry headers. It preserves legacy year metadata where the page lacks a date, prefers title dates over old filing dates, and supports an explicit data-year attribute. Repeated execution is idempotent. Run it after future story edits.

Validation

Jekyll build succeeded with output isolated at /tmp/pinebarrens-research-build. Existing Ruby extension warnings did not prevent the build.
Checked all 115 search records against their page headline, summary and status; checked one-to-one coverage in people and topics.
All internal Pine Barrens HTML links resolve to files or directories.
Catalog regeneration produced identical output on a second run.
Playwright confirmed that searching “blueberry” shows the Whitesbog story and announces one matching entry. Homepage visual check completed.
Git whitespace/error check passed for changed Pine Barrens files and the catalog script.

Changes remain in the local workspace; no deployment or commit was performed in this pass.