She was initially drawn to the subject of the murders when she was assigned to write a piece on the potential demolition of the apartment building in which John Allen Rubio and Angela Camacho killed their family. But sensing that there was more--much more--to the story than "merely" what would become of the building in which it happened, Tillman kept digging. And digging. And digging. What emerged at the bottom of that digging is The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts, which is as much an account of the crime as it is an account of the context in which the crime happened, and the role it continues to play in the neighborhood in which it occurred.