A little girl is found dead in a farmhouse on Christmas Eve. Police charge the lesbian lover of the girl's mother with second-degree murder. And there's only one thing you can count on with any certainty: Questions. How could someone kill a child?

Why did it take police six hours to find the body?

Why have police charged the mother's partner with "causing an indignity to a dead body?"

Was the child's body buried or hidden?

What was the cause of death?

Why have police charged the partner's mother with being an accessory after the fact?

What did these women do? How? Why?

So many questions and so few answers.

But why is that? Why are the answers so few and far-between?

One reason is a troubling 10-word sentence found in Tuesday's front-page Free Press story: "Investigators told the family not to speak to the media."

The dead girl's grandmother told a Free Press reporter that police told her not to talk to the media.

Why not?

I asked OPP officials. The official response from the OPP's corporate communications department, relayed to me by Const. Caroline Kennedy:

"It is not the practice of the OPP to instruct individuals not to speak to the media. The OPP believe it is an individual's decision as to whether they want to do that or not."

I could only stammer.

Maybe that's the policy put on paper. But it's not the one practised on the street.

Reporters regularly knock on doors and are just as regularly met by people who say they've been instructed by police not to talk to the media.

There are, of course, good reasons why police sometimes do -- and indeed, should -- tell people to steer clear of reporters.

Some information may hamper an investigation or harm a trial.

"We don't generally have an issue with individuals talking to the media," says Const. Paul Martin, public information officer with London police.

"Where the problem lies is when they speak to the media about evidence.

"If they want to talk about generalities -- as far as what this person was like, or what impact did this have on you -- that's emotional, that's more of an opinion," says Martin.

"They just have to safeguard against anything that could bring the court proceedings into jeopardy."

There are, however, laws in place designed to prevent reporters from jeopardizing a trial. That's why one should never read a story that states: "After robbing the bank, Joe Blow ran into the street, waving a gun. Then he was tackled by police."

Instead, you should read an account of the robbery provided by witnesses who, thankfully, haven't been muzzled by police. You should read that a man was tackled while running from the bank with a gun in his hand. And then you should read something like this: "Joe Blow is charged with armed robbery."

Because we can't -- and don't want to -- convict an innocent person. That's for the courts to decide.

So, yes, we withhold information. (I once read that a novelist writes 10 times what he knows, while a reporter writes one-tenth.)

And yes, as Martin explained, sometimes there's evidence -- such as the details surrounding the cause of death -- known only to the criminals and the police. And if that information is revealed, a case could collapse.

And yes, reporters have a vested interest in information because we need it to tell stories. (You might argue we want to sell newspapers, but reporters mainly want to write a good yarn.)

But I don't think police should be our sole source of information. I don't think anyone or anything -- be it police, politicians or journalists -- should control or determine what we can and cannot know.

I think that, in most cases, more information is better than less. I think the media has a job to do and so do the police. And I think the police should stick to their job -- and let the reporters do theirs.