It was Dr. Reev who recognized it. Not immediately. He had worked dozens of cases involving equipment left in the back country, and camera bags of that era were not so distinctive that they leaped from the pile of institutional memory at first glance.
What triggered his recognition was the bag’s brand marking, [music] which was still faintly legible through the degradation on the inside of the flap once it was carefully opened in the evidence lab.
A small manufacturer’s mark reading SNW in a stylized serif font. The logo of Sherman and Walsh, a mid-tier photography accessories manufacturer based in Rochester, New York, that had produced this specific bag model, the FieldMaster 2, exclusively between 1972 and 1976.
It was a 4-year production run. It was a rare bag. And there was in the park’s digitized archival files scanned from the original paper records by a summer intern in 2019, a photograph of Daniel Aldrich Voss taken in the spring of 1974 by a fellow Cornell graduate student in which he was standing at the edge of Kauga Lake with his Nikon F2 on its strap and hanging from his left shoulder a black Sherman and Walsh Fieldmaster 2 camera bag.Buy a New Camera
