She was alone in a remote Bay Area farmhouse. A killer found her.

The farmhouse sits back from Marsh Creek Road down a long private drive, invisible from the road and tucked into the middle of 200 acres of stone fruit orchards in the flat, sunbaked farmland of Contra Costa County. By October, the peaches and apricots are done for the season, the crews have moved through and the property settles into the quiet after the harvest. Emily Courchesne, 37, had helped out with her uncle’s business since she was a teenager, selling at farmers markets across the East Bay. The farm also delivered to Whole Foods and Chez Panisse in Berkeley, and Emily knew the property well, having house-sat there before.

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On the morning of Oct. 6, 2017, a young farm employee walked up to the farmhouse and knocked on the front door. No one answered, so she tried the handle. She stepped inside and made her way to the master bedroom, where she found Emily, lying on her back on the bed, bleeding from the head. There were bullet holes in the pillow and headboard. There was also a dog in a crate who had been shot at twice but somehow survived. Nearly nine years later, no one has been arrested for Emily’s death.

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Marj Courchesne is 78 now. She moved from Concord to Dixon last year to be near her daughter Gail. She lives in a new tract home just off I-80. When I arrived on a recent hot June day, a man was installing a water softener on the new lawn outside. Marj’s two poodles greeted me at the door.

Inside, she has set aside a room for Emily. The walls are covered in her daughter’s artwork, including an intricate ink drawing of a gothic farmhouse and a framed cross-stitch that reads, in pixel lettering, “If life gives you lemons, construct a crude electrochemical battery.” There’s a quilt made from Emily’s old T-shirts that’s draped over a rocking chair, as well as some hand-painted dragon glasses. On the wall, a photo collage from Concord High School, class of 1998, is filled with hearts and shows a little girl in a cowboy hat.

We talked for a couple of hours at her kitchen table in Dixon. When the conversation turned to what happened inside the farmhouse, Marj slowed. She composed herself and then raised both hands in front of her face — palms out, fingers spread — showing how she believed her daughter had died. “She was left-handed,” Marj said. The bullet had gone through her hand first.

Emily had three gunshot wounds in her left hand and one to her right forearm, according to the coroner’s report reviewed by SFGATE — injuries consistent with someone defensively raising their hands toward their face as shots were fired. “It looks like she was in bed, and they said it was very fast,” Marj said. “Her death was very fast.”

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Emily was born on Dec. 18, 1979, in Concord, where she grew up with her sister Gail, 22 months younger, and half-siblings on both sides. She and Gail were, as Gail put it, “soul sisters” in a blended family of six kids.

“She was super chatty, always involved in everything that she possibly could be,” Gail said. “She was nerdy but like a self-proclaimed nerd. She loved science, she loved reading, she loved learning.”

“Everyone preferred to talk to her just because she was so warm and chatty,” Gail added. “I didn’t realize how much she carried conversations until she wasn’t there anymore.”

Emily was diagnosed with ADD, now more commonly referred to as ADHD, during her senior year at Concord High, a late diagnosis that explained years of frustration. She was, her mother said, “a brilliantly expressive person who couldn’t do her homework.” But when she was hyperfocused, something else happened. In eighth grade, a teacher called Marj in specifically to show her a story that Emily had written. An astronomy class at Diablo Valley College opened her mind. She transferred to the University of Arizona and earned a physics degree in 2005. She also sometimes struggled with depression, Gail said.

Back in the East Bay, Emily worked as an assistant at a small structural engineering firm in Orinda and also worked at farmers markets, selling her uncle’s fruit and jams on the weekends. She tutored her cousins and her nephew in math, played catcher for an adult softball team in Concord called the Shenanigans, joined a planetary astronomy club, and had a regular poker game with friends.

“Emily was just so smart. She just was so brilliant, so articulate, somebody who could hold a lot of different ideas at once, you know,” said Becky Courchesne, her aunt. “She just was really able to see all sides of things.” 

Six months before she died, Emily moved out of the family home in Concord to rent a room in Danville, wanting her own space. She was 37 and, by everyone’s account, still figuring out what came next.

Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2017, was Gail’s birthday. The family met for dinner at Urban Plates in Pleasant Hill: Emily, Gail, their mother, Gail’s boyfriend and Gail’s son Isaac. Her boss would later tell Marj that Emily had seemed upset that day, apparently over threatening calls about a student loan. She kept it to herself. “She only shared the good stuff,” Marj said.

After dinner, Emily turned down an offer to come back to Gail’s place and help Isaac with his math homework, saying she was too tired. From the restaurant, she made the 40-minute drive to the farmhouse in Byron where she was house-sitting for her uncle Al and aunt Becky, who were on vacation in Spain. Gail called her at the farm at around 10 p.m. and asked if they could go over Isaac’s homework over the phone. “I’m super tired. Can we do it tomorrow?” Emily said.

“She rarely ever said no,” Gail said. “So the fact that she said she was tired and wanted to do it the next day was weird. But I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”

In the years since, Gail has turned that phone call over in her mind many times. “The more I think about it, the more I think it was off,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not just making s—t up in my head.” Marj has since wondered if Emily’s assailants were already in the house.

The next day, Emily didn’t show up to work in Orinda. She had called out sick before but never no-showed. Thursday was also her regular girls’ night out, so when Gail tried calling and received no answer, she assumed Emily was out with friends.

By Friday, her boss called Gail, saying he was worried about Emily. Marj sent Gail to check out the Danville rental while she drove east toward the farm. Marj called the farm office first and asked someone to check on Emily. The young employee then walked to the farmhouse and found Emily unresponsive on the bed.

Marj arrived at the farm to find police already there. She sat with other family members in the shade of cherry trees in front of the farmhouse and waited. She refused to leave until the coroner brought out Emily’s body.

“All that they would tell us on that Friday is that she didn’t die from natural causes,” Marj said.

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The Contra Costa County Office of the Sheriff’s investigative report describes what deputies found. Inside the single-story Spanish-style home, Emily was lying on her back on the bed, cold to the touch, with rigor mortis set in. She had bled severely from the head. Large amounts of coagulated blood were on the pillow beneath her and on the carpet below. At least one gunshot wound was visible above her left eye. The pillow had at least three holes consistent with gunshots. There was a bullet hole in the headboard. A screen at a rear window of the house had been removed and was left lying against the outside wall.

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Deputies recovered six 9 mm shell casings from the area to the right of the bed, but they didn’t locate a firearm. The report notes that there were no signs of a struggle. The interior of the house was “fairly clean and uncluttered.” Emily’s car was in the driveway, untouched. Her purse, laptop and phone were inside the house.

Forensic pathologist Dr. Arnold Josselson performed the autopsy. The cause of death was listed as two fatal gunshot wounds of the head. She was in bed when it happened and likely raised her hand toward her face as the shots were fired. There was a dog in a crate in the master bedroom. Two shots were fired at the crate, but the dog was not hit.

The family didn’t see the autopsy report for months. A reporter covering the first anniversary since her death obtained a copy from the coroner’s office and gave it to the family. The autopsy also noted a tattoo on Emily’s right forearm that read: DON’T PANIC. It was also her Facebook cover photo. The account is still up today, frozen in 2017.

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When Becky and Al returned from Spain and reentered the farmhouse, they noticed things that weren’t right, according to Marj and Gail. Emily’s keys were found in one of the cousins’ bedrooms, a room Emily had no reason to enter and, by her family’s accounts, never did. A kitchen knife drawer was open, and a knife was on the counter. In the bathroom that led out to the pool, Marj said, there were swimming clothes on the floor, suggesting Emily had been in the pool that evening. And there was an unexplained gouge in the side of the doorframe leading into the bedroom. There was also an amount of food on the table that Marj thought might have been bought for two people.

“The sheriff’s office didn’t tag anything, they didn’t take very much,” Gail said. “They released it within less than 24 hours.” By Sunday, two days after Emily’s body was found, the scene had been cleaned.

In the nearly nine years since Emily’s death, the case has passed through the hands of at least five detectives. Theories have emerged, but contact from the sheriff’s office has now largely dried up. The family started to wonder if the case had gone cold.

“We asked several times — is this a cold case?” Gail said. “And they said the definition of a cold case is when they’re out of suspects. And they’re not out of suspects.”

According to Marj, investigators told the family they had caught farmworkers making statements during questioning that they shouldn’t have been able to make, details that implied some knowledge of what had happened. 

Some of those details made their way back to the family through an unlikely channel. One of the lead detectives was at a neighborhood barbecue when, by chance, a friend of Marj happened to be there too. He began talking about the case, sharing details the family hadn’t been told. When word got back to them, it was the first that they’d heard of it. The detective was embarrassed, Marj said.

At the time of her death, Emily had been seeing someone she met through a dating app — a married man, Gail said, though Emily might not have known that. Gail gave detectives what description she had of him. He was a U.S. air marshal, and investigators were able to account for his whereabouts on the night of the killing; he was on a flight. That largely cleared him, according to Gail.

What the family has been told is that the case may be connected to the farm’s workers. The theory, shared by Gail and Marj and consistent with what detectives have implied, is that someone knew the farm’s owners were away on vacation and that Emily had recently worked a farmers market without yet depositing the cash earnings. Someone might have believed there was money in the house. “It’s not like somebody just randomly wandered back there,” Marj said. “You’d have to know the house was there.”

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Questions have long surrounded the sheriff’s office’s handling of the case. The coroner’s investigative report contains at least one significant factual error: It states Emily was last seen alive at her mother’s home at approximately 9 p.m. on Oct. 4, after the birthday dinner. The family confirmed to SFGATE that Emily did not stop at her mother’s house that night; she drove directly from the restaurant to the farmhouse. It is unclear how investigators got it wrong.

SFGATE made repeated attempts to reach the sheriff’s office for comment on this story, including multiple phone calls, voicemails and emails to the department’s public information officer and to the detective who currently has the case. None were returned. The office will not confirm on record if the case remains open or if it is still trying to find Emily’s killer.

The sheriff’s office is navigating a wider turbulence within Contra Costa County’s government agencies. Last month, after an internal investigation uncovered alleged criminal conduct within the agency, a longtime employee of the department was arrested on suspicion of burglary, receiving stolen property, embezzlement and possession of an assault weapon. In a separate matter, FBI agents recently served search warrants at the Contra Costa County Assessor’s Office as part of an ongoing investigation.

The Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office did respond to an inquiry, but its reply raised its own questions. Spokesperson Ted Asregadoo wrote that he had “looked into commenting on this cold case” but said that since it was “still under investigation,” the office could not comment on “open investigations — even on cold cases.” 

Marj told SFGATE that she was told by detectives that a potential piece of forensic evidence, DNA on a bullet casing, was compromised by a procedural failure at a lab, rendering it unusable when it was sent to a second facility for confirmation. As with the other issues raised, the sheriff’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

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Back in the room in Dixon, Marj showed me Emily’s things slowly, pausing at each one. “People think it’s weird,” Marj said of the room. But she doesn’t think it’s weird. This is where she keeps what’s left: the paintings on the wall, the quilt stitched from old T-shirts, the wax cast of Emily’s hand made in an art class, with the fingers spread, reaching.

The family’s reward for information leading to an arrest remains unclaimed at $10,000. Anyone with information on the case can contact the Contra Costa County Office of the Sheriff’s Investigations Division at 925-313-2600, or submit an anonymous tip at 925-313-1166.

Before I left the home in Dixon, Marj showed me a small photograph: Emily at 5 or 6 months — round-cheeked, bright-eyed and already looking at the world like it owed her something good. “She came out smiling,” Marj said.