Latest / Gone Cold - Texas True Crime / The Disappearance of Kathleen Ranft
Transcript
- 0:01Speaker 1: Gone Cold. Podcasts may contain violent or graphics subject matter.
- 0:05Speaker 1: Listener discretion is advised. Sageine, Texas, April fifth, nineteen eighty five,
- 0:13Speaker 1: Good Friday. The workday was winding down at lip Tire Center.
- 0:18Speaker 1: The move to a new location had everybody pulling long hours.
- 0:23Speaker 1: Just before six pm, twenty nine year old Kathy Ramft
- 0:27Speaker 1: stepped out the door and into the early evening light.
- 0:30Speaker 1: A young mother trying to steady her life after a
- 0:33Speaker 1: recent separation. She was in blue jeans and a blue
- 0:37Speaker 1: and white flowered western shirt, had a Seiko watch on
- 0:41Speaker 1: her wrist and the small diamonds on the wedding band.
- 0:44Speaker 1: She still wore nine tiny stones set in gold, shined
- 0:48Speaker 1: as they reflected against the sun. She was supposed to
- 0:52Speaker 1: meet friends later, maybe do some dancing at one of
- 0:55Speaker 1: the local bars, where neon glowed over a gravel lot
- 0:59Speaker 1: and the Jews box inside blared honky tonk. She'd been
- 1:03Speaker 1: going about a month, easing back into a social routine
- 1:07Speaker 1: while she got back on her feet. But Kathy never
- 1:10Speaker 1: made it inside the nightclub. By dawn, her car sat
- 1:14Speaker 1: in the parking lot locked. The owner swore it wasn't there.
- 1:18Speaker 1: At one am when he closed up the place, but
- 1:21Speaker 1: it was there at eight am when he returned. Two
- 1:25Speaker 1: cigarette butts and a child's wristwatch were found in the car.
- 1:30Speaker 1: Back at her apartment, Her purse and makeup were untouched,
- 1:33Speaker 1: but her wallet and keys were gone. Kathy was gone.
- 1:39Speaker 1: Over the next days and weeks, the sheriff's office beat
- 1:42Speaker 1: the bushes, the family pleaded for help, and a psychic
- 1:46Speaker 1: from Dallas led a caravan of deputies and reporters to
- 1:50Speaker 1: the yawning clay pits of the Acme brick plant. The
- 1:54Speaker 1: search became a spectacle, and then it stopped. No answers,
- 1:59Speaker 1: no resoulutelution, and no Kathy. Kathleen Laura Atwood was born
- 2:30Speaker 1: on February eighteenth, nineteen fifty six, in Harris County, Texas.
- 2:36Speaker 1: Known as Kathy to most, she grew up tight with
- 2:40Speaker 1: her mother, Glenn Francine. Later Glenn would say that as
- 2:44Speaker 1: an adult, her daughter called every couple of days routine
- 2:48Speaker 1: check ins that, in hindsight became anchors or timestamps. Like
- 2:55Speaker 1: a lot of young Texans of her era, Kathy stepped
- 2:58Speaker 1: into adulthood fast. In March nineteen seventy three, when she
- 3:03Speaker 1: was just seventeen, she married nineteen year old Ronald Keith Rodriguez.
- 3:09Speaker 1: On January fifteenth, nineteen seventy five, she gave birth to
- 3:13Speaker 1: her first child, a son named Keith Lee, and the
- 3:17Speaker 1: small family settled into New Bronfels, a town folded into
- 3:21Speaker 1: the bend of the Guadalupe and Como Rivers, somewhere between
- 3:26Speaker 1: the German bakeries and the honky Tonks, and between the
- 3:29Speaker 1: schlitterbond summers and harsh realities. And such a reality hit
- 3:35Speaker 1: Kathy early in nineteen seventy six, Ronald died while serving
- 3:40Speaker 1: in the United States Army. A teenage bride became a
- 3:44Speaker 1: young widow. Kathy was devastated, but kept going, raising her
- 3:50Speaker 1: boy with help from her parents. Then, in the late
- 3:54Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, she met Dennis Lee Rafft. The two married
- 3:58Speaker 1: on September first, nineteen seventy nine. The family grew quickly.
- 4:05Speaker 1: Jamie Lee arrived on February nineteenth, nineteen eighty and Aaron
- 4:10Speaker 1: Lee on September eighth, nineteen eighty one. To the world outside,
- 4:15Speaker 1: it looked like a second chance for Kathy. A husband,
- 4:19Speaker 1: three boys, and a predictable routine in Guadalupe County, but
- 4:25Speaker 1: the marriage didn't hold. Friends painted the picture of a
- 4:29Speaker 1: house with raised voices and hard edges. There were allegations.
- 4:35Speaker 1: One acquaintance would later say Kathy showed up at a
- 4:38Speaker 1: store with bruises and confided in her the fear she felt.
- 4:42Speaker 1: That person said Kathy told her that if she ever
- 4:45Speaker 1: left Dennis, he'd kill her. That allegation was made decades
- 4:50Speaker 1: after the fact, and while it's unclear if this particular
- 4:54Speaker 1: account was ever given to the police, it echoes what
- 4:58Speaker 1: investigators knew contemporaneous. Kathy had sought help from the Segeen
- 5:03Speaker 1: Women's Shelter sometime just before April of nineteen eighty five.
- 5:09Speaker 1: Earlier that year, Kathy and Dennis had separated. She was
- 5:13Speaker 1: in the process of moving out of the estranged couple's
- 5:17Speaker 1: mcqueeneye home and into her own apartment on Country Club
- 5:21Speaker 1: Drive in Segeen. She'd made the first payment and, according
- 5:26Speaker 1: to her mother, planned to move in on Easter weekend,
- 5:30Speaker 1: splitting time with work to get her place of employment,
- 5:33Speaker 1: Lip Tire Service, ready for its new locations grand opening.
- 5:38Speaker 1: She also helped her parents when they traveled, which was often.
- 5:42Speaker 1: Kathy would pick up the mail and mind the small
- 5:45Speaker 1: but necessary business chores. If you were looking for a
- 5:49Speaker 1: portrait of a person pulling her life together after a
- 5:53Speaker 1: life changing blow, that was Kathy in the spring of
- 5:57Speaker 1: eighty five, a mother with a job, a plan, a
- 6:01Speaker 1: paid four apartment, family obligations on deck, and a social
- 6:05Speaker 1: life she was renewing slowly but surely. Sageene, Texas, sits
- 6:12Speaker 1: about thirty five miles slightly northeast of San Antonio and
- 6:16Speaker 1: is the seat of Guadalupe County. By nineteen eighty five,
- 6:21Speaker 1: its population hovered around eighteen thousand. It was big enough
- 6:25Speaker 1: to have its own character and small enough that everybody
- 6:29Speaker 1: knew someone who knew you. The town had always been
- 6:33Speaker 1: a crossroads US Highway ninety running through Interstate ten just
- 6:38Speaker 1: to the south, and its identity was pulled between rural
- 6:42Speaker 1: tradition and creeping suburban change. Historically, Sageine was a farming town. Cotton, corn,
- 6:51Speaker 1: and pecans came out of Guadalupe County for generations. Oil
- 6:56Speaker 1: discovered in the Darst Creek field back in nineteen twenty
- 7:00Speaker 1: added a second boom. By the nineteen eighties, Segeen was
- 7:05Speaker 1: trying to balance those legacies with newer industries, service jobs,
- 7:10Speaker 1: and light, manufacturing the rhythms of life. There were still
- 7:15Speaker 1: small town Texas. Weekends meant work, school, and errands on
- 7:21Speaker 1: Austin or Court streets. Evenings and weekends meant church socials,
- 7:26Speaker 1: Friday night football, and honky tonks on the edges of town.
- 7:31Speaker 1: One of those was the Country Cabaret on FM four
- 7:34Speaker 1: sixty seven, a modest dance hall and bar that drew
- 7:38Speaker 1: in locals from Segeen, the small unincorporated community of Mcqueeneye
- 7:44Speaker 1: and beyond. It was buzzing neon, walking baselines, thumping from
- 7:49Speaker 1: the jukebox, and a gravel lot, the kind of place
- 7:52Speaker 1: where you could let yourself go and dance the night away.
- 7:56Speaker 1: Like a lot of Texas towns in the mid eighties,
- 7:59Speaker 1: sage was changing, but not fast enough to feel different overnight.
- 8:04Speaker 1: The economy was diversifying, but agriculture and oil still mattered.
- 8:10Speaker 1: Families were rooted, sometimes for generations, and gossip traveled quicker
- 8:16Speaker 1: than the waters of the Guadalupe River. When someone went missing,
- 8:21Speaker 1: especially a young mother of three, it did not happen
- 8:24Speaker 1: in silence. The absence echoed across the community. That was
- 8:30Speaker 1: the backdrop to Kathy Ramft's disappearance. Sageine in nineteen eighty
- 8:35Speaker 1: five was neither a faceless suburb nor an isolated farm town.
- 8:40Speaker 1: It was a place where everybody thought they knew everybody else,
- 8:44Speaker 1: and where a story like Kathy's cut through the surface
- 8:47Speaker 1: of small town normalcy to reveal something much darker underneath.
- 9:04Speaker 1: Good Friday nineteen eighty five played out with the normalcy
- 9:08Speaker 1: that most folks expect out of the weekday, even on
- 9:11Speaker 1: a holiday. Kathy ramped left Lip Tire Center at about
- 9:16Speaker 1: five point fifty pm. Her employer, Glenn Phillips, later told
- 9:21Speaker 1: detectives that was the last time he saw her. Kathy
- 9:26Speaker 1: was going out and she looked it. She wore blue jeans,
- 9:30Speaker 1: a blue and white flowered western shirt, a wedding band
- 9:33Speaker 1: set with nine small diamonds, diamond ear rings, a gold
- 9:37Speaker 1: chain with a diamond pendant, two other rings, and a
- 9:40Speaker 1: Sako wristwatch. According to her estranged husband Dennis, Kathy stopped
- 9:47Speaker 1: by the house they once shared sometime between nine and
- 9:50Speaker 1: nine thirty that night, grabbed a few things, and said
- 9:54Speaker 1: she was headed to the Country Cabaret, the Roadside club
- 9:58Speaker 1: out on FM four sixty seven, where she'd been showing
- 10:01Speaker 1: up for about a month. To dance and start a
- 10:03Speaker 1: new social life. The Country Cabaret wasn't the kind of
- 10:08Speaker 1: place where you'd miss a car in the lot. It
- 10:11Speaker 1: was a modest night spot, a bar for music and dancing,
- 10:16Speaker 1: with a parking lot where dust floated under the glow
- 10:19Speaker 1: of the headlights. Kathy was supposed to meet friends, but
- 10:23Speaker 1: they later told detectives she never arrived late night comings
- 10:29Speaker 1: and goings can be foggy in a bar parking lot,
- 10:33Speaker 1: but in the case of a missing person, the timing matters.
- 10:37Speaker 1: There was no car at one am, but at eight
- 10:40Speaker 1: am there was. It implied someone moved it overnight after
- 10:45Speaker 1: the last of the patrons drifted off, maybe someone who
- 10:49Speaker 1: knew the rhythms of the roadside club, and likely someone
- 10:53Speaker 1: who knew the rhythms of Kathy Ramft's life. It was
- 10:57Speaker 1: her car on paper. It was almost like she disappeared twice,
- 11:03Speaker 1: once between leaving work and the time she was supposed
- 11:06Speaker 1: to meet friends, and again when her car materialized at
- 11:09Speaker 1: a place on a night she was never seen in
- 11:13Speaker 1: the space between those two things, Easter weekend began. Authorities
- 11:19Speaker 1: had no choice but to make up for the time
- 11:21Speaker 1: they lost between the time Kathy was last seen and
- 11:25Speaker 1: when her disappearance was reported, But unfortunately they made the
- 11:29Speaker 1: choice to wait even longer. Early Sunday would have been
- 11:34Speaker 1: family food and kids in church clothes Instead. Dennis Rampft
- 11:39Speaker 1: contacted the Guadaloupe County Sheriff's Office to tell them his
- 11:43Speaker 1: estranged wife Kathy, hadn't come home for the holiday. The
- 11:48Speaker 1: reply he got was something families in the nineteen eighties
- 11:51Speaker 1: heard too often. You have to wait seventy two hours
- 11:54Speaker 1: to report a missing adult. It wasn't a law then
- 11:58Speaker 1: anymore than it is now, but it was a practice
- 12:02Speaker 1: that pushed many cases out of their most urgent hours
- 12:05Speaker 1: and into irreversibly lost time. By Monday morning, April eighth,
- 12:12Speaker 1: Kathy hadn't shown up for work. That's when Lip Tire
- 12:16Speaker 1: Center's owner, Glenn Phillips, called the Sheriff's office to reporter missing.
- 12:21Speaker 1: The official machinery finally started moving. One of the first
- 12:26Speaker 1: stops in the investigation was a place where Kathy was
- 12:29Speaker 1: supposed to have gone, a place central to the ongoing mystery.
- 12:34Speaker 1: The owner of the Country Cabaret told Guadalupe Sheriff's investigators
- 12:40Speaker 1: that when he closed at approximately one am on Saturday,
- 12:44Speaker 1: April sixth, Kathy's car wasn't parked there, but again at
- 12:48Speaker 1: eight am. When he returned, it was there, a nineteen
- 12:52Speaker 1: eighty Chevy Citation, sitting cool and quiet in the morning light.
- 12:58Speaker 1: Inside the car, investigation gaters found two cigarette butts and
- 13:02Speaker 1: a child's watch that belonged to one of Kathy's boys.
- 13:06Speaker 1: The car was otherwise unremarkable. There were no obvious signs
- 13:11Speaker 1: of a struggle. Back at her apartment, deputies found Kathy's
- 13:15Speaker 1: purse and makeup, although those items were left behind. Her
- 13:20Speaker 1: wallet and keys were missing, as if she'd run out
- 13:23Speaker 1: for a quick errand Sheriff Melvin Harborth's deputies did what
- 13:29Speaker 1: you'd expect. They talked to friends, neighbors, family, the estranged husband,
- 13:35Speaker 1: cabaret club regulars, anybody who might have seen, heard, or
- 13:40Speaker 1: known something. They learned Kathy had been planning to move
- 13:44Speaker 1: her eldest son into the new apartment that weekend, had
- 13:48Speaker 1: already paid the rent, and had intended to work Sunday
- 13:52Speaker 1: and Monday to help Lip Tire Center prep for the
- 13:55Speaker 1: grand opening of their new location. She had called her
- 13:59Speaker 1: mother on the third day, April fourth, and sounded just fine, busy,
- 14:04Speaker 1: forward looking and even optimistic about the small steps she
- 14:08Speaker 1: was taking in her new life. Her mother was unambiguous,
- 14:13Speaker 1: and so were the facts. Kathy didn't leave voluntarily. Glenn
- 14:18Speaker 1: told the paper she spoke with her daughter every couple
- 14:21Speaker 1: of days. If Kathy had gone anywhere, she would have called.
- 14:26Speaker 1: That she hadn't was totally uncharacteristic. Her parents, who traveled,
- 14:32Speaker 1: often depended on her to mind their affairs when they
- 14:35Speaker 1: were gone. Deputies documented Kathy's description. She stood five feet
- 14:42Speaker 1: six inches tall, weighed around one hundred and thirty pounds,
- 14:45Speaker 1: blonde hair, blue eyes. They described the clothing she was
- 14:50Speaker 1: last seen wearing, and sent the alert out to the
- 14:53Speaker 1: Texas Department of Public Safety Crime Analysis Section in Austin,
- 14:58Speaker 1: which related to stay wide. The Sheriff's office also pushed
- 15:03Speaker 1: information to a Missing Person's Task Force and Corpus Christie,
- 15:07Speaker 1: and canvassed the area around the country cabaret Honky Tonk,
- 15:13Speaker 1: in the apartment, in the car. In the margins of
- 15:16Speaker 1: the life of a single mother who vanished on a
- 15:19Speaker 1: Friday night, they found only the smallest artifacts, the purse
- 15:24Speaker 1: and a wallet and keys that were no longer where
- 15:26Speaker 1: they should be. Within two weeks, nothing had broken open,
- 15:33Speaker 1: No meaningful witnesses placed her at the bar, no credible
- 15:37Speaker 1: sighting turned up. The sheriff told the local newspaper, the
- 15:41Speaker 1: Sagen Gazette Enterprise, that they were checking out every lead,
- 15:46Speaker 1: but that no one had reported any contact with Kathy
- 15:49Speaker 1: at all since the evening she left work. The questions
- 15:53Speaker 1: lingered and hardened. Did she walk away from her life
- 15:58Speaker 1: or did someone end it? The family's answer never wavered.
- 16:03Speaker 1: Someone did this to her. May turned to June, and
- 16:08Speaker 1: desperation bled into experimentation. Sheriff Harborth called a Dallas based
- 16:15Speaker 1: psychic named John Ketchings, who had presented himself to agencies
- 16:20Speaker 1: around the state as a finder of missing people. Catchings
- 16:25Speaker 1: said he worked free for law enforcement and by his
- 16:28Speaker 1: own tally, had helped find a dozen missing people since
- 16:32Speaker 1: nineteen eighty, most of them dead. He'd appeared on the
- 16:36Speaker 1: television show That's Incredible and had the gift of turning
- 16:40Speaker 1: media moments into momentum. The Sheriff's office sent the psychic
- 16:45Speaker 1: a packet about Kathy, photos basics, the known timeline, and
- 16:51Speaker 1: on Sunday, June ninth, nineteen eighty five, Catchings arrived in
- 16:55Speaker 1: Guadalupe County reporters were allowed, even in curb bridged to
- 17:00Speaker 1: trail the sheriff, investigators, and catchings. What followed was part theatre,
- 17:07Speaker 1: part field exercise, and, depending on your tolerance for the paranormal,
- 17:12Speaker 1: part hope. A five car caravan rolled away from the
- 17:16Speaker 1: courthouse around two pm. In the motorcade was the sheriff,
- 17:21Speaker 1: the psychic and his son in law, investigating deputies, and
- 17:26Speaker 1: newspaper crews from Sagein and San Antonio. The route itself
- 17:31Speaker 1: reads like a map of the case. Two three pm
- 17:36Speaker 1: the apartments on Country Club Drive, Kathy's apartments. The convoy
- 17:41Speaker 1: barely slows, looping through the lot. Catchings says little, appears
- 17:46Speaker 1: to concentrate, then waives them. On two five the country
- 17:52Speaker 1: Cabaret on FM four sixty seven. They parked for three minutes,
- 17:56Speaker 1: no pronouncements. Back onto Highway forty six. Two thirteen Lip
- 18:02Speaker 1: Tire Center, Kathy's place of employment. The caravan passes without stopping,
- 18:08Speaker 1: headed for Mcqueenee to eighteen arrival in Mcqueeneye, the lake
- 18:14Speaker 1: community just east of Sageen, where the acme brick plants
- 18:18Speaker 1: vast clay pits sit behind gates and chain. Two twenty
- 18:23Speaker 1: three Pecan drive the home Kathy once shared with Dennis.
- 18:28Speaker 1: The car's idle a minute, then they move again. Two
- 18:33Speaker 1: thirty two past the Acme Brick Company on FM seven
- 18:37Speaker 1: twenty five, the third car almost hits a deer sprinting
- 18:41Speaker 1: across the road. It's a small detail that reads like
- 18:44Speaker 1: a warning in hindsight, the randomness of movement against a
- 18:49Speaker 1: staged procession. Two thirty seven WW Materials Company property deputies
- 18:56Speaker 1: and reporters get out near clay pits, catching wanders. Nothing
- 19:02Speaker 1: back in the cars. Three point thirteen Outside the Acme
- 19:07Speaker 1: Brick gate, investigators confer with plant officials. The convoy sits
- 19:12Speaker 1: in the heat. Three point thirty the group drives to
- 19:16Speaker 1: a high point above the main pit, a place where
- 19:19Speaker 1: you can see the slope fall away to a broad basin.
- 19:23Speaker 1: They stand at the lip. Nothing is said. Then they
- 19:27Speaker 1: drop down to a park along the Guadalupe River, circling
- 19:31Speaker 1: back to the office to talk with ACME management. Four
- 19:35Speaker 1: forty five pm. Back on FM seven twenty five, Just
- 19:40Speaker 1: down from the ACME gate, a short chained off dirt
- 19:44Speaker 1: road leads toward the pit catchings points over the basin.
- 19:49Speaker 1: He tells the sheriff he believes Kathy was strangled on
- 19:52Speaker 1: the night she disappeared, and that her body lies beneath
- 19:56Speaker 1: dirt and debris at the base of the pit's northern
- 19:59Speaker 1: slope hope. On Monday, June tenth, nineteen eighty five, Guadaloupe
- 20:15Speaker 1: County authorities returned to the Acme Brick company with manpower
- 20:20Speaker 1: and machines. About twenty Reserve deputies dug with picks and shovels,
- 20:26Speaker 1: while county crews used a backoe and a front end loader.
- 20:30Speaker 1: They were looking for missing woman Kathy Raft. They built
- 20:35Speaker 1: a crude road along the lower portion of the slope
- 20:38Speaker 1: and carved a platform so the heavy gear could work
- 20:41Speaker 1: without tipping. A pump drained water pooled in the basin.
- 20:47Speaker 1: TV crews from San Antonio came and went. A helicopter
- 20:51Speaker 1: thudded over the site, filming the search from the air.
- 20:56Speaker 1: The next day, they pushed deeper, talked about hosing the
- 20:59Speaker 1: slow to create controlled sides, and debated where exactly the
- 21:04Speaker 1: base of the northern slope ended. Catchings maintained his certainty.
- 21:11Speaker 1: He said the body was there. He said Kathy had
- 21:14Speaker 1: been struck on the head and strangled. He said the
- 21:17Speaker 1: pit would give her back. It didn't. On Wednesday, after
- 21:22Speaker 1: two days of digging, the operation ceased. The psychic search
- 21:28Speaker 1: ended without a body, without evidence, without even a clue
- 21:33Speaker 1: that might have justified the spectacle. In the aftermath, the
- 21:38Speaker 1: sheriff said aloud what he'd likely already believed because so
- 21:42Speaker 1: much time had elapsed. He thought foul play was more
- 21:46Speaker 1: likely than a voluntary disappearance. But without a body, those
- 21:50Speaker 1: words changed nothing. The investigation returned to interviews and phone calls.
- 21:57Speaker 1: The clay pits returned to the business of swallowing industrial waste.
- 22:03Speaker 1: The ACME brick plant, where they deployed and utilized vast resources,
- 22:09Speaker 1: was the employer of Kathy's estranged husband, Dennis Ramped. Summer
- 22:16Speaker 1: turned to fall on paper. The sheriff's office was busy larcenies, burglaries, assaults.
- 22:25Speaker 1: A year end report tallied numbers and clearances and average
- 22:29Speaker 1: jail stays, but Sheriff Harborth said there was only one
- 22:33Speaker 1: major unsolved case from nineteen eighty five, the disappearance of
- 22:37Speaker 1: Kathleen Ramped. It remained open. Kathy's parents continued to press.
- 22:44Speaker 1: Her mother repeated the facts that mattered to them. The
- 22:47Speaker 1: new apartment paid for the plan to move her eldest
- 22:51Speaker 1: in over the weekend. The routine phone calls, the easter promises.
- 22:56Speaker 1: She didn't keep in those rhythms. They heard their daughter's
- 23:00Speaker 1: voice in the silence. They heard everything else. A decade on,
- 23:06Speaker 1: on April fifth, nineteen ninety five, the family placed a
- 23:10Speaker 1: memorial in the classifieds. It read, in part, A million
- 23:15Speaker 1: times we thought of you, a million tears, We cried.
- 23:18Speaker 1: If love could have saved you, you never would have died.
- 23:22Speaker 1: They signed it, Mama, Daddy and your three sons ten
- 23:27Speaker 1: years had done nothing to cauterize the wound. During the
- 23:32Speaker 1: course of the initial investigation and beyond, there were rumors,
- 23:37Speaker 1: as there always are, people in Sageen recalled seeing Kathy
- 23:42Speaker 1: visit the women's shelter before she vanished, confirmed by investigators
- 23:47Speaker 1: later on. There were whispers about bruises. Decades later. In
- 23:53Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, an anonymous comment appeared online from someone
- 23:58Speaker 1: claiming to have known her, that Cathy showed up at
- 24:01Speaker 1: work with black and blue marks that she said Dennis
- 24:04Speaker 1: had threatened to kill her if she left. The post
- 24:08Speaker 1: was furious and personal. Officially, the Sheriff's office named no
- 24:14Speaker 1: suspects and identified no persons of interest. Deputies said there
- 24:19Speaker 1: was little evidence beyond the car. Whatever had happened, it
- 24:23Speaker 1: left almost no trace. A small town department in nineteen
- 24:27Speaker 1: eighty five could turn into a case file that would
- 24:30Speaker 1: stand up in court. Kathy's boys grew up. They navigated
- 24:35Speaker 1: life without their mother. What they were told, what they
- 24:39Speaker 1: believe belongs to them, what the public knows remains the same.
- 24:45Speaker 1: A Friday night, a car that wasn't there, and then
- 24:48Speaker 1: was a family waiting for a phone call that never came.
- 24:53Speaker 1: Time is a kind of solvent. It can erase or reveal.
- 24:59Speaker 1: In two thousand and eight, nineteen thirty four years after
- 25:02Speaker 1: the disappearance, Guadaloupe County Sheriff's Office Special Investigations and Cold
- 25:08Speaker 1: Case Unit pulled Kathy's file back into the light. Sergeant
- 25:13Speaker 1: Robert Murphy spoke candidly. The original investigators, he said, had
- 25:18Speaker 1: mostly passed away, the Texas Rangers were still assisting, and
- 25:23Speaker 1: the only real physical evidence had always been the car.
- 25:27Speaker 1: In other words, they had almost nothing to test, and
- 25:30Speaker 1: the few things they did have had already been tested
- 25:34Speaker 1: long ago with tools far less sensitive than what's available now.
- 25:40Speaker 1: Murphy emphasized a detail that matters Kathy had just dropped
- 25:44Speaker 1: her children at the babysitter before she disappeared. That simple
- 25:49Speaker 1: fact made the family's conviction feel even more immovable. This
- 25:54Speaker 1: wasn't a woman walking away from her life. She had
- 25:58Speaker 1: Easter on the calendar, a grand opening at work, a
- 26:01Speaker 1: move into a new apartment, and beloved kids to pick up.
- 26:07Speaker 1: In that twenty nineteen push, the sheriff's office restated what
- 26:11Speaker 1: had been said in nineteen eighty five, and again and again.
- 26:14Speaker 1: Since there were no suspects, they asked the same thing
- 26:19Speaker 1: they'd asked in the first days. If anyone knows anything, however,
- 26:24Speaker 1: small call. The number hadn't changed much, except now you
- 26:29Speaker 1: had to dial an area code. There's an odd dignity
- 26:34Speaker 1: to a cold file that never fully closes. If everything
- 26:38Speaker 1: is as it should be, it means someone still checks it,
- 26:42Speaker 1: still thinks about it, still puts the name back in
- 26:45Speaker 1: the paper or onto the evening news, in the hope
- 26:48Speaker 1: that the thing somebody didn't say in nineteen eighty five
- 26:52Speaker 1: will finally get said in twenty nineteen or twenty twenty five.
- 26:58Speaker 1: The sheriff who ordered the dig at the hit has
- 27:00Speaker 1: long since moved on the country cabaret on FM for
- 27:05Speaker 1: sixty seven faded into memory. Somewhere in that continuity, a
- 27:10Speaker 1: person who knows something is still alive. Kathy was twenty
- 27:16Speaker 1: nine years old, five foot six, around one hundred and
- 27:20Speaker 1: thirty pounds, blonde hair, blue eyes. On the night she
- 27:24Speaker 1: vanished Friday, April fifth, nineteen eighty five, she wore blue
- 27:29Speaker 1: jeans and a blue and white flowered western shirt. She
- 27:32Speaker 1: was also wearing jewelry, a gold wedding band with nine diamonds,
- 27:37Speaker 1: diamond earrings, a gold chain with a diamond pendant, and
- 27:41Speaker 1: two other rings, plus a Sakoh watch. For a short time,
- 27:47Speaker 1: For far too long, law enforcement chased the possibility that
- 27:51Speaker 1: she'd left by choice, but the time that has followed
- 27:55Speaker 1: argues otherwise. If you have any infra about the disappearance
- 28:01Speaker 1: of Kathleen Kathy Ramped, please contact the Guadaloupe County Sheriff's
- 28:06Speaker 1: Office at eight three zero three seven nine one two
- 28:10Speaker 1: two four, or call Guadalupe County Crime Stoppers at eight
- 28:15Speaker 1: seven seven four zero three eight four seven seven. If
- 28:21Speaker 1: you'd like to join gon Cold's mission to shine a
- 28:24Speaker 1: light on unsolved homicides and missing persons cases, get the
- 28:28Speaker 1: show at free and have access to bonus content, you
- 28:32Speaker 1: can at Patreon dot com slash Gone Cold Podcast. You
- 28:37Speaker 1: can also support the show by leaving a five star
- 28:40Speaker 1: rating and written review on Apple Podcasts, or wherever else
- 28:43Speaker 1: you listen. However you choose to support Gone Cold, we
- 28:48Speaker 1: appreciate you. Thanks for listening, y'all,