Round nine, “stalled leads” — final attempt log (2026-09-13)

Round nine, “stalled leads” — final attempt log (2026-09-13)

Fourth research pass (after three prior passes, including the round-eight “harder leads” lane of 2026-09-12, research/2026-09-12-round-eight-hard.md) on the same four leads: the Chew Road stabbing (Waterford Township, 2004), Robert L. Burns (Philadelphia, missing 1962 / skeleton found 1963, Carranza Road), Wilson L. Ryan / Jones Mill Gun Club beating (1985, Budai/Bodine), and the 1978 Marlton insanity case (Penn Swamp-Quaker Bridge Road). No forks, no other agents, no catalog script, no git touched, per instructions. search.json was not re-checked this round since round eight already confirmed (and this lane trusts) that none of the four are covered by an existing entry.

Outcome: all four leads closed out unsourced. Zero new entries. round-nine-stalled-items.json and locations/round-nine-stalled.json are both empty arrays. Every route below was actually tried this session — no fact below is invented, and no entry was written from forum recollection.

Routes tried this session, with results

CourtListener (MCP search and call_endpoint/get_endpoint_schema, rate-limited ~5/min, respected)

• search type o (opinions), q="Budai Bodine", court=njsuperctappdiv — 0 results.
• search type o, q="Ryan Jones Mill Gun Club Woodland Township" (no court filter) — 1 irrelevant result (a 2015 Texas Court of Appeals civil case that happens to share the surname “Ryan” among unrelated parties; read the caption, confirmed no connection).
• search type o, q="Robert Burns Bermender Carranza Road" — 0 results.
• search type o, q="Ancora Psychiatric Hospital insanity infant Marlton" — 0 results.
• search type o, q="Waterford Township Camden County stabbing Chew Road" — 0 results.
• Tried a combined court filter court="nj,njsuperctappdiv,njsuperctlawdiv" for the Budai query; rejected by the API as an invalid choice string (only single court slugs accepted per call), so reran with njsuperctappdiv alone as above.
• Checked the parties and dockets endpoint schemas (get_endpoint_schema) specifically to see whether name-based lookups beyond opinion full text were possible, as the brief suggested (“dockets”/”parties” endpoints, or a later post-conviction/parole opinion). Both endpoints only back RECAP — i.e., federal PACER dockets — and none of these four matters is a federal case, so no query against parties/dockets could ever surface a New Jersey Superior Court criminal conviction, guilty plea, or state-court insanity commitment. This is a structural limit of the tool, not a query-phrasing problem, so no further calls were spent there.
• Verdict: CourtListener genuinely cannot reach any of the four leads. A 7-year 1985 plea/ sentence (Budai/Bodine), a 1978-79 NGI committal (Marlton), a 2004 indictable arrest (Chew Road), and a 1962-63 disappearance (Burns, which was never a court matter at all) would only appear on CourtListener if a losing party appealed and the Appellate Division published or even unpublished the opinion — and the direct opinion-text search across all of these terms returned nothing. This confirms round eight’s identical finding from the other direction (there, only a literal Budai party-name search was tried and matched an unrelated 1986 civil case).

NJ Department of Corrections offender search (www20.state.nj.us)

• curl to https://www20.state.nj.us/DOC_Inmate/inmatefinder (and a query-string variant) returned HTTP 200 but a 212-byte stub page whose only content is an Incapsula bot-protection loader script (/_Incapsula_Resource?...) with an empty <body>. The real search form/results are served only after this challenge is solved client-side (JS execution + likely a cookie/ fingerprint check), which a bare curl cannot do. Unreachable from this environment, not a query-phrasing problem.

NJ State Parole Board

• https://www.nj.gov/parole/ loaded fully (49,690 bytes, real content, no bot wall). It is a general informational site with no offender-lookup search tool exposed at that URL — the Parole Board does not publish a public case-lookup database the way the DOC “inmate finder” nominally does. No path forward found here for Budai/Bodine specifically without a working DOC search.

County prosecutor sites

• Camden County Prosecutor’s Office (camdencountypros.org): loads, but is a client-rendered SPA on a third-party “mypolice.net” platform — every path tried (/, /press-releases/, /search?q=..., /unsolved-cases) returned the identical 18,217-byte shell HTML (confirmed by byte-for-byte size match), because the real content is fetched by JavaScript after load and never appears in the raw HTML a curl request receives. No 2004 Chew Road content reachable.
• Burlington County Prosecutor: co.burlington.nj.us and the guessed /162/Prosecutors-Office path both HTTP 301-redirect to the county’s actual current domain, burlingtoncountynj.gov; following that redirect for /162/Prosecutors-Office returned HTTP 404 (95,214-byte generic county 404 page) — the prosecutor’s office page has moved to an unknown new path on the new domain, not found by direct guessing.
• Ocean County Prosecutor: co.ocean.nj.us/OceanCounty/Prosecutor/ returned HTTP 404 directly. Not applicable to these four leads’ counties anyway (Camden/Burlington), but tried per the brief’s suggested list.
• Verdict: none of the three prosecutor sites yielded a usable historical press item; two are technically unreachable at the guessed paths (JS SPA / 404) rather than confirmed to lack the content.

NamUs and Find a Grave

• NamUs: the public UnidentifiedPersons search endpoint (www.namus.gov/api/CaseSets/...) returned HTTP 405 on a plain GET (“does not support http method ‘GET’”), confirming round eight’s finding that it requires an authenticated POST with an internal field schema this session cannot reverse-engineer. Moot in any case for Burns (identified by his wallet’s military ID, so never an unidentified-persons case) and for the 1978 infant (also identified, and the case does not involve an unidentified body). Not pursued further.
• Doe Network: doenetwork.org/cases/ returned HTTP 403 — blocked outright.
• Find a Grave: ran actual memorial searches — firstname=Robert&lastname=Burns&deathyear=1963&location=New+Jersey and firstname=Wilson&lastname=Ryan&deathyear=1985&location=New+Jersey — both pages explicitly render “No results found” (confirmed by string search in the returned HTML; the only memorial links present were unrelated names pulled in from page-wide “similar memorials” widgets, not search matches). No Find a Grave memorial exists for either man under these terms.

Internet Archive

• archive.org/advancedsearch.php does run true full-text search this round (its query JSON shows text:"..." clauses, not just metadata fields — worth correcting round eight’s note that this endpoint only indexes metadata). Ran it for all four leads with case-specific phrases: "Jones Mill" gun club Burlington (0 hits), "Carranza Road" skeleton (0 hits), "Chew Road" Waterford stabbing (0 hits), "Penn Swamp" Quaker Bridge Road (2 hits, see below), Ancora Route 40 crash 1982 (0 hits), Winslow trailer park stabbing 2004 (0 hits), "Robert L. Burns" Bermender (0 hits), Wilson Ryan Jones Mill Gun Club (4 hits, all clearly unrelated — 1930s “New Bedford scrapbooks” volumes and an ESP research-notes item, matched only because the OR logic scattered-matched individual words), Budai Bodine shovel (0 hits).
• The one substantive hit, heartofpinesghos0000pear (“Heart of the Pines: ghostly voices of the Pine Barrens”), matched both “Penn Swamp” and “Quaker Bridge Road.” Tried to read it: the _djvu.txt download returned HTTP 401; the BookReader search-inside API returned “Item not available… due to issues with the item’s content” for every query term tried (Marlton, Ancora, Penn Swamp, infant). The item is access-restricted (a controlled-digital-lending book, not an open scan) and this session could not open, borrow, or search inside it by any method tried. No usable text was ever read from this item — it is not cited anywhere, and it cannot rule the Marlton case in or out.

Township/municipal sites

• waterfordtwp.org loaded (163,758 bytes after a redirect) but contains no mention of “Chew Road” as a search string.
• woodlandtwp.org (and www.woodlandtwp-nj.gov) returned no connection at all (HTTP 000) from this sandbox — the domain either doesn’t resolve here or the actual township site uses a different name not guessed correctly this session.

Google Books API

• All four queries ("Jones Mill Gun Club", "Robert Burns" "Carranza Road", "Chew Road" Waterford stabbing, "Penn Swamp" Quaker Bridge Road 1978) returned HTTP 429 quota exceeded for the whole session (same shared daily quota exhaustion round eight hit). No data retrieved.

Lead-by-lead verdict

1. Chew Road stabbing, Waterford Township (2004)

No contemporary account, prosecutor press item, or court record reached this session by any route. CourtListener opinion search on the exact facts: 0 results. Prosecutor sites (Camden County, the relevant county) are an unreadable client-rendered SPA at every guessed path. Archive.org full-text and Google Books: nothing. Genuinely unreachable from this environment — closed, no entry.

2. Robert L. Burns (Philadelphia, 1962 disappearance / 1963 skeleton, Carranza Road)

No newspaper, book, court record, or memorial page reached this session. Find a Grave confirms no memorial under his name/year/state. Archive.org full text: nothing, including under his full name with Bermender. This was never a litigated matter, so CourtListener was never going to help, and didn’t. Closed, no entry — same verdict as round eight, now confirmed from additional angles (Find a Grave, corrected archive.org full-text search) rather than repeating identical dead ends.

3. Wilson L. Ryan / Jones Mill Gun Club beating (1985, Budai/Bodine)

CourtListener opinion search against njsuperctappdiv for “Budai Bodine”: 0 results — no appeal of this conviction was ever published, or CourtListener simply doesn’t have it. NJ DOC’s offender finder is blocked by Incapsula bot protection outright (not a search-syntax problem — the page never renders without solving a JS challenge). NJ Parole Board’s public site has no case-lookup tool. Find a Grave: no memorial for a “Wilson Ryan” matching. Archive.org and Google Books: nothing. Genuinely unreachable from this environment — closed, no entry.

4. 1978 Marlton case (Penn Swamp-Quaker Bridge Road, infant, Ancora, 1982 crash)

Per the brief’s explicit instruction for this lead: write only if contemporary published reports carry the facts, and drop rather than guess if sourcing is thin. Sourcing here is not thin, it is absent: CourtListener has no NGI-commitment or Route 40 fatal-crash record under any phrasing tried; the one archive.org book hit that matched the location terms (“Heart of the Pines”) could not be opened or searched inside by any method tried (access-restricted, HTTP 401, “item not available” on every search-inside query) and so is not and cannot be cited. Dropped, exactly as instructed when sourcing is absent rather than thin — closed, no entry.

What would actually resolve these, for a future pass

The blocking factor is consistent across all four: none of the tools reachable from this sandbox can search 1960s-2000s New Jersey newspaper full text (Courier-Post, Burlington County Times, Philadelphia Inquirer) or a state-court criminal docket that never generated a published opinion. Fixing this needs either (a) authenticated access to newspapers.com/GenealogyBank/fultonhistory.com proper search interfaces, (b) a working, JS-capable path into the NJ DOC’s Incapsula-protected inmate finder, or (c) a direct records request to the Camden or Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office or Superior Court clerk — none of which this session’s toolset can substitute for.