Latest / True Crime: Killer Confessions / Frozen Glasses on Route 9: The Unanswered Return of Michelle Long

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Frozen Glasses on Route 9: The Unanswered Return of Michelle Long · True Crime: Killer Confessions

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At 5.47 in the morning on November 14th, 2019, a
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: pair of wire-framed glasses sat upright on the center line
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: of Route 9 in Fenton County, Iowa. Temples folded down,
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: lenses facing east. Frost had settled evenly across both frames,
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: which meant they had been placed there before 2 in
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: the morning, in the dark, by someone who was gone
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: before dawn. Michelle Long had been missing for 36 years,
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: to 2019. and no one could explain why her glasses
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: had just appeared on the road where she vanished. There
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: is something about that image that refuses to let go.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: A frozen Iowa highway, pre-dawn silence, and a pair of
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: reading glasses sitting perfectly upright on the center line, like
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: they were waiting for something. The prescription was unusual enough
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: that investigators would later describe it as effectively unique. Those
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: glasses were hers. And yet no one, Not the man
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: who was eventually convicted of her murder, not the investigators
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: who spent years rebuilding this case, could account for how
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: they got there. What follows is a story about a
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: woman who was meticulous, dependable, and deeply loved. About two
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: witnesses who told the truth, then changed their minds on
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: the same day. About a cassette tape that sat in
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: a dead detective's storage box for about 34 years. And
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: about a cold case investigator who pulled one thread until
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: the whole cover unraveled. 36 years after the night, Michelle
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: Long drove home from a teacher's conference and never arrived.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: Crestfall is the kind of small Iowa town where the
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: grain elevator marks the skyline and everybody knows what everybody
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: else drives. In 1983, it had a hardware store, a
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: diner on the county road, a single elementary school, and
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: the kind of social geography where a new face in
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: a parking lot got noticed. Michelle Long had lived inside
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: that geography for more than a decade, and she had
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: become part of its rhythm the way a reliable clock
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: becomes part of a room. She was 44 years old.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: She had taught third grade at Crestfall Elementary for 11 years.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: Former students remembered her by her wire-framed glasses and by
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: the particular patience she brought to the kids who struggled,
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: the ones who needed someone to sit beside them and
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: try the same problem, six different ways. Colleagues said she
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: was organized to a degree that occasionally embarrassed them. Her
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: lesson plans were filed. Two weeks ahead. Her grade records
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: were immaculate. Her desk was the tidiest in the building.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: She lived alone, but she was not isolated. Her sister,
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: Patricia Vance, lived 40 minutes away, and the two spoke
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: almost every day. Patricia drove to see her sister monthly
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: for 14 months. Michelle also shared her home with two
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: diabetic cats named Lincoln and Grant. Both animals needed insulin
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: injections at 7 in the morning and 7 in the evening,
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: and for three years prior to her disappearance, Michelle had
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: administered those injections on time. After she vanished, Patricia drove
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: to the apartment monthly for 14 months to administer insulin
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: and keep the schedule Michelle had never broken. Not once
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: in those three years had she been more than 15
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: minutes late. That detail matters more than it might seem.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: Because the cats were not simply pets. They were, in effect,
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: a biological clock that measured Michelle's reliability against a medical
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: standard she had never once failed to meet. On the
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: morning of November 8th, 1983, Michelle attended the final session
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: of a regional teacher's conference in Cedar Falls, roughly 90
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: miles northeast of Crestfall. She had been there two days.
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: Colleagues at the conference later said she seemed relaxed, even cheerful.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: She mentioned grading a set of science projects she was
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: looking forward to returning to her class. She talked about
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Lincoln and Grant. She left Cedar Falls in her tan
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: 1979 Buick Leigh Sabre, the one with the cracked rear bumper,
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: sometime in the early afternoon. She never called Patricia to
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: say she had made it home. That was unusual. Not
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: a rule, exactly, but a habit built from years of
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: an easy sisterhood. Patricia waited. 7 o'clock came. The cat's
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: injection window opened and closed. Patricia called the house at
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: 8 in the evening and got no answer. She called
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: the Fenton County Sheriff's Office 20 minutes later. By the
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: time she hung up, Michelle Long had already been missing
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: for hours. Her cats had missed their insulin and somewhere
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: on Route 9, three miles north of the grain elevator
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: that marked the Crestfall skyline, a tan Buick LeSabre sat
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: on a gravel shoulder, with the driver's door unlocked, the
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: keys in the ignition, her purse on the passenger seat,
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: and the insulin kit on the floor behind the driver's seat.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: The engine had not failed. There was no collision, no
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: signs of a struggle on or around the vehicle. No
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: one had seen Michelle leave the car. What investigators found
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: was a scene that looked, in every visible respect, like
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: a woman who had simply stepped out for a moment
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: and intended to step back in. She never did. And
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: the question of why? The question of what actually happened
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: on that stretch of highway on the night of November
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: 8th would remain officially unanswered for the next 36 years.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: But the answer had been there from the beginning. It
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: just needed someone willing to look at a fuel gauge,
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: find a cassette tape, and ask why two witnesses changed
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: their stories on the exact same day. The fuel gauge
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: said a quarter tank. That was the first impossible number.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: Route 9 north of Crestfall is not a shortcut. It
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: is not a scenic road. It is a flat, dark
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: stretch of Iowa highway that a driver from Cedar Falls
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: would have no logical reason to travel unless she had
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: already passed the turnoff for home or unless she had
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: been directed onto it. The distance from Cedar Falls to
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: Michelle Long's house ran about 90 miles. A quarter tank
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: and her Buick Laysaber translated to roughly four and a
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: half gallons. A 1979 LeSabe averaged between 13 and 15
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: miles per gallon on the highway. The math did not work.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: Either Michelle had stopped for fuel somewhere between Cedar Falls
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: and Route 9 and the stop was never logged, or
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: the car had been driven further than her conference route
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: would explain, or the fuel level had been tampered with
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: after the car was left on the shoulder. Fenton County
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: Detective Ray Murch noted the gauge reading on the evidence form.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: He did not connect it to anything else. The form
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: was filed, and the file was shelved. Alongside it sat
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: a repair invoice from Stiller's Auto, dated November 7th, 1983,
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: one day before Michelle disappeared. A mechanic named Doug Ames
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: had replaced a serpentine belt on a dark green 1980
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: Ford Ranger. He noted in his handwriting that the previous
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: belt had been close to failure, specifically under cold start conditions.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: The temperature on the night of November 8th dropped to
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: 31 degrees. That invoice was in the evidence file. It
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: had been there for 34 years. Nobody had drawn a
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: line from it to the car found on Route 9.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: Those two documents, a fuel gauge and a repair receipt,
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: sat in the same manila folder through four decades of
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: cold winters. Dennis Haig, a trucker, had placed a dark
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: pickup alongside Michelle's Buick at around 7.30 in the evening
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: on November 8. Pat Odom, a gas station attendant, had
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: seen Michelle stop near Crestfall at around 7 and had
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: seen a man approach her. Both gave investigators a name.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: Jeffrey Campbell, 31 years old, Fenton County resident, occasional handyman
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: for the school district, owner of a dark green Ford Ranger.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: Campbell was interviewed twice in November of 1983. He acknowledged
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: knowing Michelle. He acknowledged owning a truck matching that description.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: He said he had been home alone that night and
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: had no corroboration. With no body and no physical evidence,
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: the investigation could not advance. Then on March 3rd, 1984,
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: which is four months after the disappearance, Dennis Haig and
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: Pat Odom recanted their statements. The same day, Haig said
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: he had been mistaken about the truck's color. Odom said
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: he had confused the date. The case was filed as
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: an open missing persons report, and Ray Murch moved on
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: to other work. Two witnesses, one name given independently. Both
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: gone by the same afternoon. Spring of 2017, a cold
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: case investigator named Sandra Brooks with the Iowa Division of
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: Criminal Investigation was assigned Michelle Long's file. She was not
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: the first person to review it. She was the first
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: person to treat the fuel gauge and the repair invoice
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: as a connected pair. The serpentine belt was the key
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: she held up first. A near-failed belt under cold start
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: conditions in 31-degree weather, a man who knew Michelle's face,
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: knew her schedule from the school district, and drove a
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: truck with a belt that could convincingly simulate a breakdown.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: Brooks later described the invoice as the engineering blueprint for
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: what she believed had happened on Route 9. She could
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: read the scenario. A truck pulled across the road at
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: an angle in the dark, hazard lights on or headlights
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: pointed wrong. A woman who recognized the driver. Woman who
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: recognized the driver. A woman who would stop precisely because
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: she knew him and had no reason to fear him.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: That scenario explained, something that had always sat unresolved in
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: the record. Michelle Long was not naive. She had lived alone,
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: maintained her own home, made her own choices for 11 years,
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: in a small town where everybody's business was visible. There
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: was no profile that suggested she would stop for a
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: stranger on a dark road at 7.30 at night. But
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: she would stop for someone she recognized, someone she had
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: probably seen at Crestfall Elementary, fixing a boiler or hanging
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: a door, someone whose name and face carried the low-level
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: trust of institutional familiarity. Brooks pulled every piece of paper
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: in the file. She found the cassette in the summer
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: of 2018. It was in a box of Ray Murch's
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: old work materials, a cassette tape marked only with the date,
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: March 3, 1984, the same date as the recantations. Brooks
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: had it digitally transferred. The recording ran 42 minutes and
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: contained two separate phone calls made on a departmental line.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: No approval form existed in the file. The voice on
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: both calls was identified as Curtis Vane. a former coworker
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: of Campbell's at a grain operation in Fenton County. In
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: the first call, Vane reached Pat Odom. He identified himself
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: only as a friend of Jeff's. He referenced an employer matter,
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: something that could be exposed, something that could reach Odom's livelihood.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: Odom's response, according to the transfer, was three words, I understand,
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: I will. In the second call, Vane reached Dennis Haig.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: The leverage was different. A commercial driver's license. An unreported citation.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: Something Haig could not afford to have surfaced. Haig said
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: almost nothing. He did not need to. The recantations had
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: not been confusion. They had been instructions. And the evidence
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: that proved it had been sitting in an unlabeled cardboard
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: box for about 34 years. Picture Route 9 on the
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: night of November 8th. At roughly 7.30 in the evening.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: The temperature is just above freezing. The road is flat
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: and straight. with no streetlights between Crestfall and the Grain Elevator.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: Three miles north, a woman driving a tan Buick is alone,
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: returning from a conference, probably tired, probably running the evening's
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: logistics in her head, the cats, the insulin kit on
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: the floor behind the seat, the grating she had mentioned
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: to a colleague hours earlier. Then she sees a truck
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: pulled sideways across the road. Hazard lights or headlights at
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: the wrong angle, no obvious way around it. She slows.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: She recognizes the man standing near it. That version of
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: events rests on a convergence of the fuel anomaly, the
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: repair invoice, both witness identifications before the coercion, and what
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: Jeffrey Campbell eventually said himself. But here is where the
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: story diverged for a long time from where the evidence pointed.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: For 36 years the working assumption, even among those who
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: believed something had happened to Michelle, was that Campbell had
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: acted alone, and impulsively, That November 8th was an opportunity
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: he seized in the moment. The repair invoice seemed to
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: support it. A man with a truck that could fail,
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: a road he knew, a night that was cold enough.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: Then consider Susan Hollis. In November of 1980, three years
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: before Michelle disappeared, Hollis was driving on a county highway
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: outside Crestfall when a dark green pickup pulled across the
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: road at an angle in front of her. She drove
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: around it through a ditch. She filed a report that
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: was logged and not connected to anything. That report sat
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: in a different file, in a different drawer, for nearly
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: four decades. After Campbell's arrest on November 5, 2019 Hollis
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: saw his booking photograph. She identified him. She testified at trial,
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: the night on Route 9 was not improvisation. The belt
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: was not the opportunity. Campbell had used this method before.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: had rehearsed it in the same county, on the same
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: type of road, three years earlier, and the system had
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: filed the complaint and forgotten it. That recontextualized the invoice entirely.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: The repair was not the setup for a spontaneous act,
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: it was maintenance on a tool he had already proven worked.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: After Campbell's arrest, a cellmate named Steve Pruitt documented what
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: Campbell said in intake holding. Campbell described stopping Michelle by
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: pulling his truck across Route 9, at an angle, knowing
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: she would recognize him and stop. He described the outcome.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: He said she was left somewhere the ground stays frozen.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: A long time. He did not say where. He did
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: not mention the glasses. The wire-framed glasses found on the
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: center line of Route 9. On the morning of November 14, 2019,
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: 36 years after Michelle vanished, nine days after Campbell's arrest
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: on November 5, 2019, sat with temples folded down, lenses
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: facing east. Frost settled evenly across them placed there before
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: two in the morning. The prescription matched Michelle Long's. The
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: configuration of lenses was described by optometric records as unusual
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: enough to be effectively unique. Campbell's confession, entered formally in
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: January of 2020, did not mention them. Sandra Brooks marked
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: the entry in her summary report with a single handwritten
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: question mark. She left it there. Some questions stay open,
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: not because the answer is missing, but because no one
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: who knows has chosen to speak. Jeffrey Campbell was 67
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: years old when Fenton County deputies arrested him on November 5, 2019.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: He was already inside Iowa Correctional Institution at Anamosa. serving
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: time on an unrelated aggravated assault conviction from 2011. The
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: arrest for Michelle Long's murder required a transfer of paperwork,
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: not a manhunt. He confessed formally in January of 2020.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: The confession placed him on Route 9 on the night
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: of November 8, 1983. It confirmed the angled truck, the
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: simulated breakdown. Michelle stopping because she recognized him. It described
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: what followed. It did not describe where her body was left,
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: except for one phrase. Somewhere the ground stays frozen a
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: long time. No coordinates, no landmarks, no disclosure that would
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: let anyone bring her home. The trial ran in September
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: of 2020. The jury convicted on first-degree murder. The sentence
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: was life without possibility of parole. Campbell will die inside
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: the Iowa correctional system. He has said nothing further about
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: Michelle's location. Curtis Vane, 72 years old at his sentencing
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: in 2020, pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice. The two
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: recorded phone calls, his voice pressuring Pat Odom and Dennis
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: Haig into recanting on the same afternoon in March of 1984,
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: stood as the evidence. He received a suspended sentence and
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: two years of supervised release. He did not go to prison.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: Patricia Vance stood before the court and said she found
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: that outcome insufficient, but not surprising. She had been saying
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: for 37 years that something had been covered up. The
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: legal system confirmed it and then returned Curtis Vane to
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: his home. Ray Murch, the original detective who worked the
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: case in 1983 and never connected the fuel anomaly or
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: the repair invoice to anything, Retired in 2004 and died
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: in 2012, he did not live to see what Sandra
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: Brooks found in his own storage box. Sandra Brooks closed
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: her case file in the fall of 2020. The summary
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: report runs to 112 pages. On the page that references
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: the wire-framed glasses found on the center line of Route 9,
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: on November 14, 2019, she wrote, one handwritten question mark.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: nothing else. The glasses appeared nine days after Campbell's arrest
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: on November 5, 2019. The frost across the lenses was even,
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: consistent with placement before two in the morning. No tire marks,
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: no footprints, no explanation. Campbell did not mention them in
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: his confession. No other party came forward. The question mark
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: is still there. Michelle Long's body has not been found.
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: Searches of frozen ground in Fenton County, conducted after Campbell's conviction,
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: did not locate her. The phrase somewhere the ground stays
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: frozen a long time covers a great deal of Iowa
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: in November. There is something specific about this case that
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: resists being set down. It is not the conviction. Convictions happen.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: It is not even the 36 years. Cold cases crack.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: It is the image of Patricia Vance driving 40 minutes
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: to her sister's apartment monthly for 14 months, measuring out
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: insulin for two diabetic cats named Lincoln and Grant, keeping
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: a schedule Michelle had never broken in three years, waiting
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: for a phone call that would not come. Lincoln and
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: Grant died. Patricia kept showing up to testify, to file inquiries,
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: to stand in courtrooms for decades. She called that outcome insufficient,
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: but not surprising. That sentence carries the specific weight of
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: someone who expected very little and still got less. Michelle
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: Long taught third grade at Crestfall Elementary for 11 years.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: She came back from a teacher's conference on a cold
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: November night. She knew the man who pulled his truck
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: across the road. She stopped because recognizing someone in your
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: own county, on a road you drive often, feels safe.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: That was the mechanism. That is what he counted on.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: Jeffrey Campbell is serving life without possibility of parole. The
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: place where Michelle was left has not been given back
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: to her family. The glasses on Route 9 have no
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: explanation on any record that exists. Sandra Brooks marked the
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: question and left it alone because that is all the
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: record allows. The case is closed. Michelle Long is not found.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: Some people keep driving. Some people stop. The difference on
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: Route 9 on November 8, 1983, was everything. Patricia Vance
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: has never stopped asking where her sister is. That question
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: is still unanswered. It may remain so. This show is
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: made by Oboe Media.