I met Alex Murdaugh once. Well, I was at a reunion of my wife’s family, and Murdaugh showed up with his wife and sons. She was the distant cousin of a distant cousin, so it was said.

I thought about the South Carolina attorney, convicted this month of murdering his wife and one of their boys, as I looked at a black-and-white booking photo in Millersville. It was an image of the man identified by the latest DNA evidence as Pamela Lynn Conyers’ suspected killer in a decades-old cold case.

The 16-year-old was abducted after shopping at Harundale Mall in Glen Burnie on Oct. 16, 1970. Her family’s Dodge sedan was discovered days later off Mountain Road in Pasadena, and a few steps away police found Conyers’ keys. And then her body.

I don’t believe you can see evil in someone’s face. I’m not even sure it exists. It’s an old-fashioned concept, one you don’t hear much about anymore.

Is Alex Murdaugh evil? A cottage industry of documentaries and podcasts has popped up around the saga of his crimes, all playing on our willingness to believe in evil.

Was Forrest Clyde Williams III? That’s the man whose photo Anne Arundel County Police projected Thursday morning on a wall screen in a second-floor meeting room of police headquarters.

“Mr. Williams died in 2018,” Anne Arundel Police Chief Amal Awad said. “If he were still alive, he would have been charged with the murder of Pamela Conyers.”

That’s a legal answer, not a moral one.

Williams was 21 when police say he killed Conyers. She was a Glen Burnie High School student, buying shoe dye to match the dress she planned to wear to the school homecoming dance.

Police at the time suspected she walked back to her car in the parking lot, where she was abducted. Autopsy results indicated she was strangled the same day.

There was no other connection between Conyers and Williams. He graduated from nearby Northeast High School and then worked as a carpenter. He got arrested for drunk and disorderly offenses, minor stuff.

Eventually, he moved to Virginia. He died in a Salem, Virginia, assisted living center in 2018, his obituary says, leaving behind family in Maryland and Virginia.

After police Lt. Bob Switzer found Conyers, police collected soil samples and other evidence. Along with her pants and the inside-out sweater she was wearing when police found her, the evidence was sent to the FBI crime lab.

A month later, police said the results didn’t offer any real clues. And so the case sat for decades until investigative genetic genealogy came along the same year Williams died.

“We use crime scene DNA and its analysis to develop a profile,” said Tom Sobocinski, FBI special agent in charge at the Baltimore office. “We then use publicly accessible database information to identify potential relatives of a suspect or the victim.”

Someone related to Williams may have gone to a genealogy website to learn more about their family history, and the analysis of that DNA sample found its way to the FBI office in Baltimore. A team there is building family trees for different purposes — to connect victims and perpetrators.

How must it feel to find out your father or your brother committed an act of evil? Were they evil all along, or did they become evil through a series of bad decisions?

Police won’t say more about the evidence. They are still investigating, and wouldn’t comment on whether Williams is linked to other unsolved crimes from that era. There are several.

Joyce Helen Malecki, 20, from Lansdowne, was a clerical worker at Fort Meade. She was raped, stabbed and then dumped in a wooded area of the Army post 13 months before Conyers’ murder.

And Elizabeth Grace “Gay” Montagne, 16, was last seen getting into a car at Franklin High School in Reisterstown 11 months after Conyers’ death. Her body was found in a South Baltimore cemetery.

The temptation is to assume there is a calculating evil at work, that a serial killer connects these homicides even when the evidence doesn’t clearly support the idea.

Certainly, the 2017 Netflix series “The Keepers” went down this road. It made connections between the November 1969 murder of Catholic nun Catherine Cesnik, whose body was found in Lansdowne, and Maleki’s death. Others have made the leap to Montagne and Conyers.

Even as they left open the possibility of additional crimes being linked to Williams, police were indulging in none of that speculation last week.

“We do not believe there is any connection to Kathy Cesnik,” said Lt. Jackie Davis, Anne Arundel police spokeswoman.

If serial or mass murder is evil, Anne Arundel is no stranger to it.

Five years ago, a man with a shotgun murdered five of my colleagues in the Capital Gazette newsroom: Rob Hiaasen, Wendi Winters, John McNamara, Gerald Fischman and Rebecca Smtih.

One year before that, the son of a prominent attorney was convicted in the murder of Holly Carol Smith, 24, of Dundalk and Jessica Lynn Lee, 20, of Brooklyn Park.

In 2007, a man imprisoned for stabbing a woman in Prince George’s County admitted murdering three women: Boontem Anderson, 34, in Gambrills in 1986; Mary Elaine Shereika, 37, in Gambrills in 1988; and Lisa Haenel, 14, in Glen Burnie in 1993. He was charged in 2004 after police used DNA evidence to tie him to the killings.

Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman was at the announcement of a breakthrough on Thursday, a job he’s done a few times since first taking office in 2018. He praised the police and offered empathy for Conyers’ surviving friends and family.

“I think it says something about who we are as human beings that we don’t give up,” Pittman said. “We are shaken by these crimes when they take place. And I don’t think we ever recover from them.”

Afterward, I waited outside the chief’s offices for Pittman. When he emerged, I asked him if he believed in evil. Are some people evil?

“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said, confused by the question. “I would like to think that everybody could be reformed and become a productive member of society. But I don’t believe that everybody can.”

In his regular letter to constituents last week, Pittman wrote about his administration’s support for reformation. Turnaround Thursday is a new program organized by the advocacy group Anne Arundel Connecting Together and run by the Anne Arundel Community Action Agency, a nonprofit anti-poverty organization.

It supports people returning to their communities from prison, connecting them with help and, hopefully, jobs. The underlying assumption is that people are not evil just because they broke the law.

No one is convicted of being evil. It’s an outdated and ineffective way to paint people who commit a crime. No one has been convicted of killing that high school student 52 years ago.

And yet, even as I don’t want to believe in evil, people like Williams and Murdaugh give me doubt.

Maybe it is out there. Maybe it’s just very good at hiding.

rick.hutzell@thebaltimorebanner.com