When Her Dad Didn’t Come Home from Work in 1987, Kate Crane Went Looking for Answers

Writer Kate Crane was 12 years old on September 10, 1987, when her father Eddy Crane failed to come home from work at the trucking company he co-owned in South Baltimore. His abandoned car was found a few days later at the airport, and his Rottweiler Sherlock, who always went to work with him, turned up unharmed after a couple of weeks, but Eddy was never seen—and for 20 years, rarely spoken of—again. 

The Wire creator David Simon worked as a journalist at the Baltimore Sun at the time and took an interest in the case. In 1992, he wrote about where the investigation stood after five years: evidence had pointed to a shooting in Eddy's office, where blood matching Eddy’s type was discovered, but no body was ever found. A detective on the case said they believe Eddy's body was disposed of, and Eddy was legally declared dead. 

Those close to Eddy, like his brother Bob, sent investigators in the direction of Eddy's business partner William "Augie" Augustin Jr. In 1986, Eddy had accused Augie of stealing money from the company, and they had been feuding for about a year. But there was nothing concrete to link Augie to Eddy's disappearance, and Augie claimed it was Eddy who had been stealing money. Investigators said there wasn't enough evidence to charge anyone with any crime. While Simon incorporated the story into episodes of The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street, the Cranes stopped talking about Eddy altogether.

In 2007, as the 20th anniversary of his disappearance approached, Eddy's eldest daughter, Kate, decided it was time to change. That was when she started working on her memoir, Whatever Happened to Eddy Crane?: A Memoir and a Murder Investigation. As she tells A&E Crime + Investigation, it was like she "snapped awake." 

"When you're a little kid, there are written rules like chores, and then there are unwritten rules that shape who we are and how we live our lives. I think those are the ones that send people into therapy," she says. "The unwritten rule was we don't talk about Dad. It was eating at me, but I didn't know it was eating at me." 

For almost another 20 years, Crane tracked down detectives, case files and old friends and family members and tried to piece together the puzzle of her father's disappearance. What she found may not satisfy true crime fanatics who seek concrete answers to real-life mysteries, because while she suspects murder, Eddy's remains may never be found. There will never be any murder charges or arrests, but for Crane, it was never really about the ending; it was about confronting the unspoken trauma that had been hanging over her entire life. 

"I saved my life working this puzzle," she says. "I'm a person I can live with now. I love life in a way that wasn't available to me before I worked this puzzle." 

Crane reveals where she stands now in the journey to solve her dad’s disappearance and how she really feels about the true crime genre. 

This call started with a ton of laughter as your phone hung up on me, and then my phone wouldn't stop beeping, so I'm going to start with asking this: What have you learned about balancing the lighter parts of life with the heavy stuff you've been carrying for so long?

There's that old saying about necessity being the mother of invention. Like, I didn't have a choice. If I was going to work on this project and I also had to work to support myself and I wanted to have some kind of life, then I had to figure it out as I went along. A lot of the humor was sort of the way our call started, just things blowing up in funny ways. There is a part in the book where I had lunch with my old boss from Radar magazine, and he's like, "You should be dating," and I'm like, "I can't." I tell people I'm working on a book, and they're like, "What's it about?" And I'm like, "You don't want to know." And then they say, "Now I really want to know." And then I'm like, "Well, my dad was murdered in 1987, and then 20 years later, I was like I have to do something about it." And the look on people's faces was either like, "Okay, nice to meet you, I gotta go," or "Tell me more." I think I always had a sort of black sense of humor and working on this and trying to balance being a human being who wants to have friends and wants to date and read books and do fun things, the humor just happens. 

How does it feel to have this book coming out after 20 years of thinking about it, and nearly 40 years of being so affected by the story?

That is the hardest question. I did this thing that I set out to do that felt impossible until like November 2024 when the second draft of the book was due. I thought I couldn't do it. I kept thinking someone was gonna jump out of the bushes and be like, "You're an imposter! You're a faker! There is no book here!" That lingered until almost a year ago and now I'm holding it, and the book is exactly the book I set out to write. I don't know that every author can say that, but it is. 

It must have been interesting to be writing this as the world's relationship with true crime exploded over the last 20 years. 

In the two hours before we got on the phone, I was racing to finish this essay about true crime, my mini magnum opus on why I cannot stand the true crime genre. It desensitizes people. I really feel that there's a segment of the true crime fan base that does not understand there are differences between fact and fiction, particularly around ethics. I love detective fiction, but in fiction a crime is contained within the pages of a book. You've got a beginning, a middle and end. The point is to solve the puzzle. But in real life, there's an ethical minefield of people whose lives have been forever affected by the fact of the crime. 

So how did you wrestle with writing a book that delves into that genre, especially when your story has so many moments that are even stranger than fiction? 

Seriously. There are all kinds of things like that. I did almost walk away from the project 100 times, 500 times. I didn't want to feed this story to the vultures, so what I landed on was rooting the book in memoir. I'm standing in my apartment, in front of the memoir shelf. I've got Jeannette Walls and Joan Didion and Michael Gilmore and J.R. Moehringer. It felt like I began studying that form, and I never used to read much memoir, but I realized that it is a really worthwhile art form. The more I studied that form, I thought this is how I do my book in a way that I can live with. I root what happened to my father and its ripple effects on my life and my family. 

As you sought out all of these people and case files, were you worried you wouldn't have an ending to the book, or that it all might not amount to anything? 

I think I knew going in that this book is not going to have a big splashy finish. Maybe no one's even going to want this book, because it seemed unlikely that I was going to figure out how to find my dad's body or that anyone would go to prison. And one thing I know about being a writer is that if you are engaging with your work, with integrity and with all of your being, the story, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, helps pull you down the path. You work on a piece and then door No. 2 appears, and you're like, "Oh, I didn't think about that," and then a light turns on. The book and I created each other. It shaped me, I shaped it. There came a point where I knew that the end of the book would be me saying, "I've gotten what I need to survive at this point." I also knew the ending was going to probably make a lot of true crime fans unhappy, but I dealt with this genre that makes me uncomfortable by contending with this [supposed] crime that affected my whole life on my own terms. I decided when I had had enough. I decided I need this and I don't need that, and what justice means. There are writers who have gone down rabbit holes with murdered family members that ate their entire lives, and I didn't want that. 

So what do you do now that you've freed yourself from the story of your father? 

I don't know. I'm working on another book, but this time, it's going to be fiction so that I don't have to toss and turn for 18 years about making sure I'm being compassionate enough and keeping the power imbalance top of mind. We are in a very strange timeline in 2026, and yet I love life. I was very deliberate that I did not want to come out of this project broken and embittered, like I'll walk away if it's too much. And I came out of this book with better writing skills. I have more fortitude. I'm a more resilient person. I'm someone that I want to live with for another few decades, and I do hope my life is a little less monk-like going forward, now that this is out of my head. 

What do you want people to take away from the book? 

It might be funny to say this about a book that has got one foot in the true crime genre and one in the memoir genre, but my No. 1 wish is that people come away from this book thinking that there are so many different ways to make a life, and I can make unusual choices about my life path, and it might work out, and it might open the world up to me in ways I didn't think were possible. What are the ways in which I'm just sort of living according to an unwritten rule book that I've never even considered? Are there things I could do differently that would equate to going my own way in a way I hadn't thought about before? I can make unusual choices, and it might lead to incredibly rewarding—if at times confusing and frightening—places. 

Do you feel you have closure and can leave your dad's case totally behind you? 

I don't believe in closure. That's not a word you'll ever hear me use, but the metaphor I use is as we go through life, the backpack gets more and more full of heavy rocks as we encounter challenging life experiences. I have figured out, in terms of my dad, how to distribute the weight in the backpack in such a way that I feel like I can carry it. It's survivable. I did what I needed to do here. Never say never, but I don't have any plans to [keep investigating]. If anything, maybe I bring him into a novel as a character. Maybe I never tell readers that that's my dad. I think there are ways to keep him in my writing life that are more fun, but that also might stay private, that I might never talk about. But this specific story…I want to do other things.