Producer Chris O’Connell describes how he and the “48 Hours team uncovered the story of Carolyn Abel’s murder, after discovering a rarely-used law in a previous story.

As a producer at “48 Hours,” I inevitably get asked one question over and over when I tell people what I do for a living: “How do you find your stories?” It’s a question with many answers.

Sometimes we do stories because they are obvious, and everybody is talking about them, whether it be the Jody Arias trial or Amanda Knox’s years long struggle to get out of an Italian prison. Other times detectives, lawyers or other sources we have interviewed in the past call or write us with a tip. And then, there are the rare instances like in this week’s episode “Out of Reach” about the 30-year-old murder case of Carolyn Abel, where while digging through court records and just kind of going to down an Internet wormhole we stumble upon a truly compelling story that has almost been lost to time because the world has moved on.

See the entire story and video here