Every story we tell also belongs to the people they're written about. We thank you all.

Good morning, New Jersey.

One lesson young reporters learn early is that you'll work some holidays, or at least the days just before and after, when anyone with a whiff of seniority is off. It's on those days, the Black Fridays and July Fourths and Passover weeks, that a kid journalist could stumble into a "big" story.

For me, it was Black Friday, 1994, my first year out of college, when a woman I'd never met named Jodie Lynn Myers became part of my own history. She was 20, just two year years younger than me. I spent that Thanksgiving with my family peppering me with questions about my new job -- Why would you go into that industry, you know newspapers are dying? When are you going to be on the front page? -- when Jodie Lynn Myers died at the hands of her fiancé, a violent abuser named Forrest Fuller.

The next day at work, and for several days after, I helped tell Jodie's story. How she tried to leave him. How Fuller instead had strangled and stabbed her, then put body into his Camaro. He phoned her family from the road and harassed them with wild stories about how they were going to get married and he'd mail them her finger with the wedding ring.

Fuller was arrested on the road and is 25 years into a 30-year sentence. Myers' high school principal told me how bright and intelligent she was, pointing to her smiling photo in an old yearbook.

The story about Jodie Myers' murder made the front page, forever linking my own career "first" to an abused woman's death. It began what felt like a never-ending litany of stories I worked on early in my career about women roughly my age killed by men who claimed to love them.

There was the housewife found stabbed in her Camden County home, whose frightened neighbors brought me in and peppered me with as many questions as I had for them. It bothers me that I can't remember her name.

In 1995, it was April Gates in Atlantic City, whose friend sat across the living room and explained how a violent ex had walked into a house party and shot Gates dead where we were standing, in the beginning of a multi-state killing spree.

On July 4 in 1997, Christine Campbell was viciously stabbed by her ex in the parking lot of the grocery store where they worked until a man came running from a nearby liquor store and used a shopping cart to stop the attack. At the police station, I met a distraught woman, a medical resident at a nearby hospital, who'd tried to help the dying woman. A few days later, Campbell's family talked about the abuse in their daughter's relationship as her small son offered me his toys.

Anna Heffner was a mom who just wanted her son to do his homework. He didn't want to, so in 1999 he shot Anna six times and spent a few days partying with her car and money until he was caught. The son was only 17, but we know any child with a gun can pretend to be a tough guy.

Again and again, the families, co-workers of these slain women took me into their homes and told versions of the same story: He was violent. She tried to leave. We were afraid he'd kill her some day. I think they trusted me because I was young and female and not afraid to sit and cry with them. Those women deserved my tears.

I tried to be sensitive, but still often felt like a vulture. Eventually, I caught on to the fact that once the killer heads into court, his fate becomes the story. The window is short in which we get to tell the world about these women who'd lived, and who she was before she became some violent man's victim.

Decades later, years away from my crime-reporting days, I carry their stories with me. Men are still killing women they claim to love, and this week's rash of headlines -- so many men killing so many women it's hard to keep them all straight -- shows it. There are fewer reporters now to sit with families and bear witness to the lives of their loved ones, but the murders just keep coming.

Katherine Kelemen. Ruth Reyes. Melissa Kolonich.

We owe those lost women many things, and as it's Thanksgiving week, it felt right to take a moment to say their names and stand in gratitude for the lives they lived.

I hope you all enjoyed a safe and happy Thanksgiving with people who love you.

See you next week, friends.