In June 2003, Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, reopened the controversial and high-profile 120-year-old cold case of Billy the Kid. The states of New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas each claimed to harbour the legendary outlaw’s remains, and Richardson wanted to prove his state’s case.

Richardson called on the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator to exhume Billy the Kid’s purported corpse and test it for DNA evidence. State forensic pathologist Debra Komar was given an unlimited budget and access to the governor’s plane to solve the matter.

Opposition to the investigation halted Komar’s work a year later, but the experience wasn’t totally fruitless. It inspired Komar, a Canadian who spent the bulk of her career as a forensic anthropologist working outside the country, to seek out other centuries-old murder cases that could benefit from her modern analysis.

Komar’s long-time interest has culminated in the release this month of The Ballad of Jacob Peck, the first in a four-book, true-crime series being published by Fredericton’s Goose Lane Editions. A second title, The Lynching of Peter Wheeler, will appear in spring 2014.

Call to mind any atrocity from the past two decades, and you’ll likely find it mentioned on Komar’s résumé. Much of her career has been spent digging up mass graves in Bosnia and Serbia, identifying victims for the United Nations and Physicians for Human Rights. Now retired and living in rural Nova Scotia, Komar has written several scholarly essays and co-authored a forensic anthropology textbook, but her dream was to walk into a “real bookstore” and see a book she wrote.

Named after a 1992 song by folk musician John Bottomley, The Ballad of Jacob Peck revisits the 1805 murder of Mercy Hall by her brother Amos Babcock, who believed he had received instruction from God. The Shediac murder was only the third on record in New Brunswick, and has long been the subject of ghost tales. Tied up in the crime was nefarious itinerant preacher Jacob Peck, who is thought to have instigated Babcock’s violence.

In Peck, Komar saw a small-scale version of the manipulators of mass murder she had been studying for decades. “In a post 9/11 world, this idea of Imams, mosques, and people who gain control of other people to act … it’s the exact same question as Peck,” Komar says. “If we look for examples, they keep coming up, and we still don’t have an answer to the question of culpability.”

Komar spent four months researching the book, assisted by staff at provincial museums and archives. The collaborative “treasure hunt” was a pleasant experience for someone who, for most of her career, was forced to rely on subpoenas and police assistance to access records.

Having testified in countless court cases in Canada, the U.S., England, and The Hague, Komar knows what makes a good case. She frames the Peck legend like a prosecutor before a jury, reconstructing the context surrounding the crime and sticking to corroborated facts, while maintaining a tone reflective of the era.

Komar’s diligence involves highlighting holes in the historical record, using dead ends and what’s unknown about minor characters to illuminate the true history as much as the facts. “You have to look at everything going on around [the crime],” she says. “It isn’t just about figuring out why someone got a crime right or wrong, but why did we get [the history] wrong?”

While Goose Lane has published many regional history titles, The Ballad of Jacob Peck is its first venture into true crime. Colleen Kitts-Goguen, Goose Lane’s head of non-fiction acquisitions, says she was wooed by Komar’s voice and background.

Kitts-Goguen admits there is a limited market for local lore, but says Goose Lane is more interested in quality than sales. “In the end, we probably won’t sell 20,000 copies, but we’ll sell enough, and we’re glad we put them out there,” she says.

Komar’s straightforward voice sets The Ballad of Jacob Peck apart from the traditional true-crime and regional history genres. Komar, who admires the work of journalistic non-fiction writers such as Erik Larson, purposely wants to distance her version from previous iterations of the tale, saying it’s antithetical to her professional training to skirt truth for story.

“Just having people’s stories be told as they want to be heard is a measure of justice,” says Komar. “Murder is pretty interesting on its own. You don’t have to embellish.”