It’s been two years now since Calletano Cisneros died. A lot of people won’t know who he was, but he made a big impression on me. I interviewed him for our fourth true crime book, COLD CASE MUNCIE, which was published by History Press in 2023.

For those of you who don’t know, longtime writing collaborator Douglas Walker and I wrote about cold cases – unsolved murders – in the area of Muncie, Indiana for a few decades for The Star Press newspaper. This entailed going over old cases, some of them dating back decades and some of more recent vintage, and reviewing the facts, looking at old files and articles and often interviewing police investigators, prosecutors, coroners and, most importantly, surviving family members. Cold cases have an impact on all of those people but especially, of course, on surviving family members.

Sebastian Cisneros – that’s him in the upper right photo of the book cover above – was killed in April 2009 in Muncie, which is marred by dozens of unsolved murders. Sebastian Cisneros was killed outside his house on Ribble Avenue in Muncie.

We wrote about the case at the time and wrote about it as a chapter of the Cold Case Muncie book because it was a compelling story, made all the more so because I interviewed his father, 75-year-old Calletano Cisneros. When we spoke via long distance – he lived in Texas – he volunteered something that I hadn’t known when I called him: He himself had killed a man in a bar fight when he was 17 and had spent 10 years in prison before he was released by the governor. He’d lived with that past for a half-century and had, in the past several years, lived with the murder of his own son.

Calletano Cisneros told me he wanted justice for his son and wanted his son’s killer to be tried and sentenced to prison just as he had been more than 50 years earlier.

“I did my time. I’d like to see the same justice done in my son’s case.”

Calletano Cisneros didn’t live to see justice for his son. He died in January 2024.

Cold cases are cases that often don’t see justice done.

You can read about the Sebatian Cisneros case in our third true crime book: