Aspiring Comic Creator Jake Tinsley, 14, Seeks Justice for Unsolved Murder in His Latest Book

Fictional murders and detective stories have become increasingly popular in comic books, yet at least one new comic is addressing a very real unsolved murder. In the upcoming comic "Amber Hagerman Deserves Justice," 14-year-old Jake Tinsley writes about a murder that captured the attention of the nation and spurred the creation of a new program to rescue abducted children.

Although the kidnapping and murder of 10-year-old Amber Hagerman in 1996 lead to the creation of the national Amber alert system for abducted children, her murderer was never caught. When Tinsley recently learned that the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute was reexamining Hagerman's murder, he decided to bring attention back to the unsolved crime by featuring it in a self-published comic.

"Amber Hagerman Deserves Justice," which comes out in October from Tinsley's own Wham Bang press, revisits the details of Amber's disappearance in a superhero comic featuring Tinsley's superhero Night Owl (not to be confused with the Nite Owl of "Watchmen" fame), a defender of justice devoted to protecting children.

Like most comics today, however, Tinsley's book is not intended specifically for children, but rather to inform a broader audience about the crime. Even Sheryl McCollum, the Executive Director of the Cold Case Investigate Research Institute, has hopes that it may spark new leads in the case, telling NBC that "a number of people are going to pick that up and go, 'Oh yeah, what did happen to her?' We're going to start this conversation that's not going on right now. Somebody knows something."Elsewhere on the web:

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