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Samuels was reported missing March 4th 2006.

Her friends and family had no clues and no leads.

Her body was discovered less than two months later, and a suspect was in custody within days.

There was no dramatic twist like a husband who had been acting suspiciously and interefering with an investigation. There was no foreign police force giving a worried mother the runaround. There were no tantalizing eyewitness accounts of Samuels leaving a party with suspicious individuals. There was no outstanding subpoena for Samuels to testify to a rape charge. Samuels was not pregnant.

Samuels was sexually propositioned by a random man who lived in her building and when she rebuffed him he killed her and concealed her body.

These are not exciting, soap operaesque, movie-of-the-week details. Her story is one of a very cut-and-dried act of brutality.

If Natalee Holloway had disappeared from her local Birmingham, AL apartment and her body was found weeks later and some anonymous local guy who lived in her apartment complex confessed a few days later to killing her after she wouldn't sleep with him, it would have been a purely local story.

But Holloway went missing in exotic Aruba on a supposedly chaperoned school trip. Her parents were given the runaround by island officialdom. There was dramatic witness testimony from her friends and classmates about her last hours. The main suspect is the son of a prominent judge. No body has ever been found and the details of her death remain a mystery. No one has ever been indicted in her death.

Dominique Samuels was murdered in Boston, I know far from exotic but did her murder get day and night coverage on every network?

Dominique Samuels is easy to check on. There are several stories about her on the net.

She didn't disappear without a trace. She wasn't listed as a missing person. The first sign anything was amiss with her was when her body was found; the circumstances were not photogenic (an understatement).

About 15 years ago, a female student "of color" from a city near my home disappeared while she was at college (the college in question is also nearby). She was missing for several months. Her story, name, and picture were on the news every night during that time. The college she attended offered a substantial reward for information about her fate.

Her remains were eventually found in a basement in a seedy part of the city. The details were extremely graphic and revolting; think Jeffrey Dahmer.

The perpetrator was caught soon after her body was found. He was also "of color," and had a long history of -- shall we say -- problems.

The story quickly disappeared from the local news. Do you think it disappeared because of racism? Or do you think it would have been racism for local media to keep the story alive? To do so would have meant putting nice big pictures of her killer on local TV every night.

Do the majority of killers of women of color themselves share any particular racial characteristics? Are most of them rich white playboys from wealthy European countries? Or do they (the killers) come from other ethnic communities? Communities whose local leaders are not anxious for wall-to-wall mass media coverage of their sorrows.