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Five People Who Vanished Mid Errand · Crime Night

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Speaker 1: Culture. This. It is December fifteenth, nineteen ninety five. You
0:04
Speaker 1: are in the small, really tightly knit town of Bristol, Ohio.
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Speaker 1: It's a freezing afternoon.
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Speaker 2: Right proper middle of winter cold exactly.
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Speaker 1: So. You are fifteen years old. Your name is Ruth Markley.
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Speaker 1: You turn the knob on your front door after a
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Speaker 1: long day at school, and you're just expecting the normal,
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Speaker 1: familiar warmth of your.
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Speaker 2: House like anyone would, right.
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Speaker 1: But the moment you step inside, the silence is just
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Speaker 1: it's deafening. Yet underneath that silence there is this violent, urgent,
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Speaker 1: hissing sound coming from the kitchen.
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Speaker 2: Oh that is so eerie, it really is.
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Speaker 1: So you drop your backpack, you walk in, and the
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Speaker 1: coffee pot has been left on for so long that
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Speaker 1: the water has boiled completely dry. The glass is actually scorching,
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Speaker 1: like it's ready to shatter.
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Speaker 2: See from an investigative standpoint, that is the physical manifestation
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Speaker 2: of an interrupted life. Yeah, that singular detail, I mean
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Speaker 2: a boiling pot. It tells investigators that whoever was in
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Speaker 2: that house fully intended to return within a matter of minutes.
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Speaker 1: Well, the scene only gets more chilling as you walk
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Speaker 1: down the hall on your parents' bed, Their clothes are
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Speaker 1: laid out, just neatly pressed for a funeral. They were
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Speaker 1: scheduled to attend that evening.
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Speaker 2: So they were actively getting ready exactly.
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Speaker 1: And on the bathroom camera sits your mother's purse, her lighter,
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Speaker 1: and her cigarettes. Now, if you knew Shelley Markley, you
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Speaker 1: she never ever walked out the front door without those exact.
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Speaker 2: Items, her anchor items.
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Speaker 1: Yes, But then you reach the living room and your
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Speaker 1: blood just runs completely cold. Your soather's gun cabinet, which
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Speaker 1: is a fixture of the house that has been securely locked.
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Speaker 1: Your entire life is sitting wide open. The door is ajar.
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Speaker 2: Oh wow.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, and your parents, John and Shelley Markley are nowhere
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Speaker 1: to be found.
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Speaker 2: I mean, that level of domestic disruption is just terrifying.
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Speaker 2: It completely strips away that illusion of safety we all
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Speaker 2: associate with our own living rooms.
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Speaker 1: It really does.
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Speaker 2: And that brings us to why we are here. Welcome
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Speaker 2: to the deep dive, where today we are opening up
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Speaker 2: a stack of official investigative case files and field notes
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Speaker 2: detailing five incredibly baffling disappearances.
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Speaker 1: Some really unsettling stuff.
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Speaker 2: Today, right, we are not focusing on the massive cases
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Speaker 2: that have dominated global headlines for decades. We are looking
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Speaker 2: at the terrifying reality of people vanishing into thin air
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Speaker 2: during the absolute most mundane, ordinary moments of.
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Speaker 1: Life, the moments you don't even think about exactly.
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Speaker 2: Our mission today is to reconstruct these timelines, examine the
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Speaker 2: forensic and psychological clues left behind, and we'll try to
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Speaker 2: make sense of the senseless for you.
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Speaker 1: So let's pull apart the mechanics of this Mark Catholic case,
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Speaker 1: because the chaos that follows the discovery of that empty
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Speaker 1: house is just staggering.
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Speaker 2: The truck is found first, right.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, John's red Chevy Silverado truck is eventually found abandoned
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Speaker 1: outside a restaurant about twenty minutes away from the house.
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Speaker 1: Inside the cab, police find tarps, Shelley's cell phone, and
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Speaker 1: just a messy collection of potential evidence.
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Speaker 2: But the timeline of that truck is what's really fascinating.
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Speaker 1: It is I want to pause on the timeline because
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Speaker 1: this is where the forensic trail gets incredibly weird. That
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Speaker 1: exact same truck was spotted earlier in the day, parked
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Speaker 1: at a local Walmart. And we know this definitively, We
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Speaker 1: know it for a fact because John's young niece happened
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Speaker 1: to walk through that Walmart parking lot, saw the truck
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Speaker 1: all caked in winter grime, and playfully traced the words hi,
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Speaker 1: uncle John into the dirt on the side panel.
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Speaker 2: I love this detail because she essentially created a completely
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Speaker 2: accidental forensic pimestamp.
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Speaker 1: She really did.
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Speaker 2: By writing in the dirt, she inadvertently proved to investigators
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Speaker 2: that the truck had to have been moved from the
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Speaker 2: Walmart to the restaurant after she walked by.
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Speaker 1: Right, But I'm honestly stuck on the bank teller's report.
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Speaker 2: Oh the drive through.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, we know John and Shelley were actually alive in
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Speaker 1: that truck at some point that morning, because a teller
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Speaker 1: distinctly remembers them coming through the drive through to cash
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Speaker 1: a one thousand dollars.
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Speaker 2: Check, a pretty large amount for a normal errand.
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Speaker 1: Right, but the teller also noted something else. There's a
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Speaker 1: third person in the truck, a slim, dark haired man
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Speaker 1: sitting in the passenger.
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Speaker 2: Seat, which throws the whole dynamic off.
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Speaker 1: I mean, how does a bank teller hand over one
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Speaker 1: thousand dollars to a couple accompanied by a strange man
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Speaker 1: and not like hit a panic button. Do they not
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Speaker 1: seem distressed? Well?
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Speaker 2: The psychology of eyewitness testimony in mundane situations is notoriously flawed.
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Speaker 2: What do you mean unless someone is actively screaming or
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Speaker 2: you know, holding a visible weapon, our brain's default to normalizing.
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Speaker 1: The scene, just making it make sense. Right.
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Speaker 2: The teller saw a third passenger, but without an overt
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Speaker 2: signal of distress, the brain just categorizes him as a friend,
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Speaker 2: or a coworker or a relative.
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Speaker 1: Wow.
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Speaker 2: That teller's memory is the very last confirmed sighting of
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Speaker 2: the couple, And immediately after that, the entire investigation gets
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Speaker 2: hijacked by this absurd extortion plot.
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Speaker 1: Oh, the phone calls this part is wild, So John's
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Speaker 1: brother in law starts getting these ransom demands. A man
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Speaker 1: on the line claims John and Shelley are alive, that
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Speaker 1: they're being held captive by some shadowy cult up in Toronto.
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Speaker 1: A cult, Yeah, a Toronto cult, and to stop this
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Speaker 1: cult from sacrificing the couple, the family needs to hand
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Speaker 1: over ten thousand dollars.
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Speaker 2: Which is such a specific, almost movie like demand.
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Speaker 1: It's exactly which leads to this massive Hollywood style police
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Speaker 1: sting operation on New Year's Eve, the extortionist directs the
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Speaker 1: family to drop the cash inside a pile of penguin
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Speaker 1: sweatshirts at a local mall.
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Speaker 2: Penguin sweatshirts.
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Speaker 1: I know you can't make this up. So the police
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Speaker 1: swarm the drop, but they don't arrest some mysterious Toronto
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Speaker 1: cult member. They arrest Stephen Durst, who is a former
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Speaker 1: disgruntled employee of John's. He actually used to live with
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Speaker 1: the Markleys.
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Speaker 2: See, we have to look at the criminal mechanics here.
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Speaker 2: Extortionists who prey on missing persons cases are rarely criminal masterminds. Right,
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Speaker 2: They're opportunists exactly. They are scavengers. Durst weaponize the information vacuum.
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Speaker 2: He saw a desperate family on the local news and realized, Hey,
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Speaker 2: I can explain their panic for a quick payout.
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Speaker 1: That's awful.
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Speaker 2: But the truly tragic part is despite getting a conviction
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Speaker 2: for the extortion plot, investigators could never definitively link him
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Speaker 2: to the actual disappearance.
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Speaker 1: It just functions exactly like a magician's misdirection.
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Speaker 2: Oh that's a good way to put it.
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Speaker 1: Yeah. The human brain is drawn to the spectacle. We
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Speaker 1: get completely consumed by the flashy var elements. The mall sting,
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Speaker 1: the penguin sweatshirts, the wild cult store, the noise, right,
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Speaker 1: the noise. So we get so distracted that the real trick,
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Speaker 1: you know, the terrifying reality of how a married couple
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Speaker 1: vanished alongside a dark haired stranger at the bank, happens
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Speaker 1: completely out of sight, and.
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Speaker 2: That misdirection burned precious investigative time when the trail was
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Speaker 2: at its absolute freshest. Law enforcement was chasing a phantom
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Speaker 2: cult instead of looking for that dark haired man in
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Speaker 2: the passenger seat.
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Speaker 1: Now, the mark Leaves were invaded in the privacy of
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Speaker 1: their own home, right. Yeah, we often assume that stepping
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Speaker 1: out your front door into a crowd is what keeps
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Speaker 1: you safe.
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Speaker 2: Safety in numbers exactly.
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Speaker 1: Let's look at how the illusion of public safety can
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Speaker 1: just shatter in an instant. Put yourself in the really busy,
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Speaker 1: picturesque Welsh town of Langottlin on June sixteenth, nineteen.
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Speaker 2: Ninety So the environment here is drastically different from the
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Speaker 2: Markale's quiet house. Very it is a Saturday in broad daylight,
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Speaker 2: surrounded by foot traffic, local shoppers and tourists.
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Speaker 1: Right, So, fifty two year old Treveline Evans owns a
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Speaker 1: popular antique shop right in the middle of town. Her
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Speaker 1: husband has been out of town for a week. A
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Speaker 1: friend drops by the shop to give her some flowers,
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Speaker 1: and they casually make plans for a girl's night.
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Speaker 2: Completely normal day, super normal.
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Speaker 1: Sometime just afternoon, Treveline takes a piece of paper, writes
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Speaker 1: back in two minutes, and tapes it to her front door.
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Speaker 2: She never returns, and the inside of the shop is
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Speaker 2: what really bothers investigators.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, inside the shop, police find her car keys, her handbag,
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Speaker 1: and her makeup compact just resting right there on the counter.
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Speaker 2: We are back to anchor items. In nineteen ninety, a
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Speaker 2: woman's handbag was her central command. You do not abandon
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Speaker 2: your keys in your purse unless you are fundamentally convinced
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Speaker 2: you're only stepping away for a literal matter of seconds.
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Speaker 1: And that is the psychological hurdle I just can't get over.
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Speaker 1: Leaving your anchor items implies you are only walking a
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Speaker 1: few feet down the pavement, or it implies you are
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Speaker 1: leaving with someone you trust implicitly. I mean, why would
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Speaker 1: a smart business owning woman willingly walk away with a
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Speaker 1: total stranger without grabbing her purse. We know. Witnesses reported
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Speaker 1: seeing treveling walking and talking with an unidentified, smartly dressed
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Speaker 1: man in a suit carrying a briefcase, both in the
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Speaker 1: days prior and that very morning.
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Speaker 2: See the presence of the man in the suit suggests
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Speaker 2: premeditation on his part, but misplace trust on hers. How So, well,
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Speaker 2: if she perceived him as a professional, perhaps an appraiser
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Speaker 2: or a local official, she might step out to point
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Speaker 2: something out on the street, fully intending to step right
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Speaker 2: back inside.
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Speaker 1: Oh, like showing him something in the window exactly.
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Speaker 2: But she didn't. And when a daylight vanishing goes unsolved
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Speaker 2: like this, the silence breeds a very specific type of
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Speaker 2: community paranoia.
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Speaker 1: It really does. Yeah, we see the paranoia just metastasize
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Speaker 1: into the physical environment of the town. Fast forward to
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Speaker 1: twenty eleven. Her own husband is actually arrested and then
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Speaker 1: released without charges. But the real chaos happens in twenty nineteen.
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Speaker 2: The golf club incident.
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Speaker 1: Yes, two local brothers hear this persistent town rumor. They
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Speaker 1: decide to investigate the floorboards of a nearby golf club
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Speaker 1: on their own. They literally snake a tiny fiber optic
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Speaker 1: camera down into the dark under the floor and they
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Speaker 1: claim they find something resembling human remains.
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Speaker 2: They even take photographs, right they did.
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Speaker 1: But when the police showed up days later and tore
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Speaker 1: up that exact spot, they found absolutely nothing.
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Speaker 2: Because the forensic reality of searching under floorboards is incredibly complex.
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Speaker 2: The brothers insisted the evidence had been moved in the intervening.
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Speaker 1: Days, which sounds plausible until you think about it.
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Speaker 2: Right, moving a body or remains from a busy golf
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Speaker 2: club without leaving a massive trail of trace evidence DNA fibers,
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Speaker 2: a distinct odor is nearly impossible.
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Speaker 1: Yet the town's psychology was already totally fractured by then.
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Speaker 1: Suddenly these anonymous plaques started appearing, bolted the benches and
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Speaker 1: brick walls all around Llangollen, declaring that justice was being
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Speaker 1: denied and that Treveline's body was hidden at the club.
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Speaker 2: The town literally became haunted by its own missing two minutes.
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Speaker 2: It's so sad, But if we are dissecting the danger
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Speaker 2: of walking away with someone, we have to look at
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Speaker 2: what happens when the person you were walking with is
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Speaker 2: your own mother. Oh man, it's the splintering of proximity.
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Speaker 2: It is one thing to vanish from an empty shop.
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Speaker 2: It is entirely different to vanish when your family is
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Speaker 2: standing literally on the other side of a brick wall.
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Speaker 1: Right, we are jumping to December twenty eighth, nineteen ninety two,
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Speaker 1: the freezing wind battered northeast coast of England. In a
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Speaker 1: town called Saltburn. Twenty three year old Stephen Clark and
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Speaker 1: his mother Doris are on a routine two mile walk
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Speaker 1: along the beach boardwalk, a walk they've done before any times.
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Speaker 1: They reached the local pier and Steven says he needs
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Speaker 1: to use the restroom, so they split up. Doris goes
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Speaker 1: into the ladies room, Steven goes into the men's Doris finishes,
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Speaker 1: waits outside. Assume Stephen just you know, started walking home
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Speaker 1: ahead of.
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Speaker 2: Her, and she heads back and he isn't there.
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Speaker 1: He isn't on the path, he isn't the house. He
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Speaker 1: never comes home again.
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Speaker 2: We really have to evaluate Steven's physical and psychological profile
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Speaker 2: here to understand how bizarre this is. As a young boy,
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Speaker 2: he was struck by a car. The accident left him
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Speaker 2: with very limited use of one of his arms and
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Speaker 2: a highly distinctive limp. He was not like some covert
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Speaker 2: operative capable of slipping off the grid to start a
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Speaker 2: new life undetected.
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Speaker 1: No, how does a grown man with a severe, highly
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Speaker 1: visible limp just vanish from a beach boardwalk. There is
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Speaker 1: zero cover, none. He had no wallet, no passport, no cash,
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Speaker 1: and he was in a great place mentally. He had
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Speaker 1: literally just won an award for disabled workers. He had
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Speaker 1: a new romance. It is an outdoor locker room mystery.
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Speaker 2: It completely defied the laws of physics.
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Speaker 1: It does. Some people claim they saw him days later,
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Speaker 1: or walking with an older man weeks later, but it
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Speaker 1: all led nowhere.
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Speaker 2: The real tragedy of this case isn't just the disappearance, though,
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Speaker 2: It is the bureaucratic nightmare that swallowed the family decades later.
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Speaker 1: The twenty twenty arrest.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, in twenty twenty, cold case detectives, operating on nothing
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Speaker 2: but an anonymous, completely baseless letter, actually arrested Stephens's elderly parents,
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Speaker 2: Doris and Charles, on suspicion of his murder.
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Speaker 1: That is just mind blowing.
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Speaker 2: They brought heavy machinery into these elderly parents backyard and
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Speaker 2: literally tore the earth.
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Speaker 1: Apart, finding absolutely nothing, But the damage is done.
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Speaker 2: At that point irrevocable damage. I mean police departments often
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Speaker 2: face intense pressure to clear cold case statistics. Sometimes that
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Speaker 2: pressure results in horrible.
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Speaker 1: Tunnel vision, and innocent people pay the price.
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Speaker 2: You have parents who survived the agonizing, ambiguous loss of
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Speaker 2: a disabled child, only to be publicly humiliated, arrested, and
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Speaker 2: treated like murderers in their twilight years by the very
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Speaker 2: system that was designed to protect them.
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Speaker 1: It is genuinely enraging. But you know, if the Stephen
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Speaker 1: Clark case shows us how the system can unjustly target
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Speaker 1: a family decades later, our fourth file shows what happens
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Speaker 1: when the system targets the victims on day.
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Speaker 2: Right, derail the whole investigation exactly.
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Speaker 1: Let's travel to Augusta, Georgia, March eighteenth, nineteen ninety. Fifteen
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Speaker 1: year old fraternal twins Dennette and Jeanette Milbrook leave home
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Speaker 1: to walk to their godfather's house for bus money.
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Speaker 2: Just quick, errand yeah.
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Speaker 1: A gas station cashier remembers them stopping to buy chips
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Speaker 1: and soda. That is the final definitive siding. Their mother
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Speaker 1: reports them missing that exact same night, but the police
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Speaker 1: tell her to wait twenty four hours.
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Speaker 2: If that twenty four hour rule is one of the
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Speaker 2: most toxic myths in law enforcement history.
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Speaker 1: It's purely made up, isn't it. It is.
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Speaker 2: The first forty eight hours are statistically the only window
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Speaker 2: you have to recover an abducted child alive. Asking a
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Speaker 2: parent to wait is essentially asking them to let the
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Speaker 2: trail go cold.
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Speaker 1: Well. I can't let the administrative negligence that follows slide
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Speaker 1: because it acts like a massive firewall against justice.
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Speaker 2: It's a cascade of errors.
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Speaker 1: The officer misspells the girl's last name, he writes down
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Speaker 1: the wrong birthdays, he lifts the wrong home address, and
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Speaker 1: then the lead investigator formally slaps a runaway label on.
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Speaker 2: The file, which is absurd.
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Speaker 1: Let's break down this logic. You have two teenage girls.
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Speaker 1: They leave behind their essential daily seizure medication, They have
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Speaker 1: combined twenty bucks on them. They were literally just walking
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Speaker 1: to get buzzfair. How does a trained detective look at
14:32
Speaker 1: those facts and declare them runaways? I mean, it just
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Speaker 1: defies all common sense, right.
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Speaker 2: They don't look at the facts. They look through the
14:38
Speaker 2: lens of systemic bias. In nineteen ninety two, young lower
14:42
Speaker 2: income black girls from a rough neighborhood were statistically viewed
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Speaker 2: by the system as discipline problems, not victims, and that
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Speaker 2: runaway label has a massive, massive legal.
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Speaker 1: Consequences administrative black hole.
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Speaker 2: Precisely, the National Crime Information Center or NCIC database categorizes
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Speaker 2: a runaway as a juvenile status offender. It legally prevents
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Speaker 2: them from being listed as endangered.
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Speaker 1: Which means no resources.
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Speaker 2: Exactly that means no helicopters, no K nine units, no
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Speaker 2: grid searches, and no media alerts. The police even falsely
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Speaker 2: informed the mother that the girls were in foster care
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Speaker 2: without a single shred of paperwork to back it.
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Speaker 1: Up, which creates an enormous, completely unmonitored blind spot. And
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Speaker 1: who thrives in a blind spot predators. While the police
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Speaker 1: were ignoring the Millbrook twins, a man named Joseph Patrick Washington,
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Speaker 1: a suspected serial killer, was violently attacking women in that
15:34
Speaker 1: exact same neighborhood. He lived near the twins' father, a
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Speaker 1: man who also had a heavily violent history.
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Speaker 2: The police essentially handed a predator a permanent head start.
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Speaker 1: They really did. When investigators finally attempted to reopen the
15:48
Speaker 1: case decades later, the original files had mysteriously vanished from
15:52
Speaker 1: the precinct.
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Speaker 2: It is a sobering reminder that when administrative negligence intersects
15:56
Speaker 2: with human malice, people are effectively erased from existence.
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Speaker 1: Now, you might be listening to this and thinking that
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Speaker 1: all these cases are just relics of the nineteen nineties,
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Speaker 1: before smartphones, before GPS, before ring cameras on every single porch.
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Speaker 2: It feels like vanishing today should be impossible, right.
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Speaker 1: But our final file from October twenty twenty four proves
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Speaker 1: that a digital trail doesn't solve the mystery. It actually
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Speaker 1: just turns the victim into a digital phantom.
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Speaker 2: Because technology provides us with highly specific data points but
16:25
Speaker 2: absolutely zero human context.
16:27
Speaker 1: We are in South Carolina. Thirty two year old Zellig
16:30
Speaker 1: Williams is a charismatic, incredibly talented Broadway star who performed
16:35
Speaker 1: in Hamilton.
16:35
Speaker 2: And MJ the Musical Huge Talent.
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Speaker 1: He's staying at his mother's house and he drives off
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Speaker 1: in her red Ford Escape, taking his headshots with him.
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Speaker 1: The assumption is he's just going to a local print
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Speaker 1: shop to make copies, but less than an hour later,
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Speaker 1: his friends all the way in New York City was
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Speaker 1: even automatic SOS crash alert from his phone.
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Speaker 2: Let's examine the mechanics of that alert for a second.
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Speaker 2: Modern smartphones have advanced a accelerometers and gyroscope.
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Speaker 1: Right, they can tell when you drop them.
17:03
Speaker 2: More than that, they don't just detect a drop phone.
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Speaker 2: They measure sudden massive deceleration. They look for the specific
17:10
Speaker 2: G four signature of a vehicular impact. When that SOS
17:14
Speaker 2: goes out, the hardware is screaming that a catastrophic physical
17:18
Speaker 2: event has occurred.
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Speaker 1: So his mother obviously rushes to the GPS coordinates provided
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Speaker 1: by the alert. But there is no crash, no shattered glass,
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Speaker 1: no dented guard rails, and no zeleg So where was he?
17:29
Speaker 1: Hours later, that red suv is found parked in a
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Speaker 1: trailhead lot thirty minutes away. Inside the car, his shoes
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Speaker 1: are sitting on the floorboard. His clothes are neatly folded
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Speaker 1: and stacked on the driver's seat.
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Speaker 2: See the narrative violently shifts here from an accidental trauma
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Speaker 2: to an intentional or at least highly erratic disembarkation. I mean,
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Speaker 2: why take off your clothes and fold them after an
17:50
Speaker 2: alleged crash?
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Speaker 1: Well, the witness reports make the timeline completely surreal. A
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Speaker 1: park ranger speaks to a driver who claims he was
17:56
Speaker 1: passing near that exact trailhead when a red car is
18:00
Speaker 1: suddenly whipped around and followed him into the lot. Okay,
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Speaker 1: the witness parks and a man gets out of the
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Speaker 1: red car, but the man begins acting erratically. He strips
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Speaker 1: off his clothes, leaves them, and walks down the trail
18:12
Speaker 1: until he's completely naked, dancing wildly on a bridge railing
18:15
Speaker 1: over a river.
18:16
Speaker 2: We really have to inject the heartbreaking psychological reality here.
18:20
Speaker 2: Zilig's family disclosed that he was in a highly vulnerable state.
18:24
Speaker 2: He was struggling, He had recently stopped taking his medication
18:26
Speaker 2: and had been fasting, and dance was his deepest form
18:30
Speaker 2: of expression. He specifically danced to honor his two sisters,
18:34
Speaker 2: both of whom had tragically died in a car crash
18:37
Speaker 2: years prior.
18:38
Speaker 1: It absolutely looks like a severe mental health crisis. Huh.
18:41
Speaker 1: But I have to stop you here because the digital
18:43
Speaker 1: forensics contradict the physical sightings entirely.
18:46
Speaker 2: This is the crazy part.
18:47
Speaker 1: At the exact moment this witness claims to be watching
18:50
Speaker 1: zee Leig dancing naked on the bridge, Zelig's cell phone
18:54
Speaker 1: is pinging on a cellular tower ninety minutes away in
18:58
Speaker 1: a completely different.
18:59
Speaker 2: Town minutes away.
19:00
Speaker 1: Cell phones don't sprout legs. Wait, so if a man
19:04
Speaker 1: is on a bridge and his phone is an hour
19:06
Speaker 1: and a half down the highway, doesn't that fundamentally require
19:08
Speaker 1: a second person.
19:09
Speaker 2: It does, and a cell tower ping operates like a
19:13
Speaker 2: lighthouse beam. It sweeps over an area and registers the device,
19:16
Speaker 2: proving the phone was physically in that specific sector.
19:19
Speaker 1: It's hard data.
19:20
Speaker 2: Furthermore, GPS data pulled from the car showed the red
19:23
Speaker 2: suv had been driven in bizarre, repetitive loops for hours
19:27
Speaker 2: before finally parking at that trailhead.
19:29
Speaker 1: So someone who is driving in circles triggering a crash
19:32
Speaker 1: alert while someone else is allegedly dancing on a bridge.
19:36
Speaker 2: When you combine a severe mental health vulnerability with contradictory
19:40
Speaker 2: digital data like this, it points to a terrifying intersection,
19:44
Speaker 2: a crime of opportunity.
19:46
Speaker 1: You think someone saw he was vulnerable.
19:48
Speaker 2: It suggests Zelig crossed paths with someone harboring ill intent
19:52
Speaker 2: while he was incapacitated or in crisis, someone who took
19:55
Speaker 2: his phone or his vehicle while he was spiraling, and.
19:58
Speaker 1: The physical search was just a nightmare. Hurricane Hillon had
20:02
Speaker 1: just battered South Carolina. The river was raging and flooded.
20:06
Speaker 1: Drones ATVs and dive teams searched the water under that bridge.
20:10
Speaker 1: They searched the woods, the local hospitals. Nothing. Zella just
20:14
Speaker 1: stepped off the digital map.
20:15
Speaker 2: It shatters our modern complacency, it really does. It proves
20:19
Speaker 2: that despite our SOS alerts or GPS tracking and our
20:21
Speaker 2: constantly connected devices, the wilderness, both the literal flooded woods
20:25
Speaker 2: and the dark wilderness of human intention, can still swallow
20:29
Speaker 2: someone a whole.
20:30
Speaker 1: It's deeply unsettling, and I think that is the true
20:33
Speaker 1: thread connecting these five files. You are looking at people
20:37
Speaker 1: doing the most ordinary things imaginable, walking into a public
20:40
Speaker 1: bathroom on a beach, opening up an antique shop on
20:43
Speaker 1: a Saturday, getting a few dollars for bus fare, going
20:45
Speaker 1: to get head shots.
20:46
Speaker 2: Printed, just living their lives, and in a fraction of.
20:49
Speaker 1: A second, the timeline just stops. But the answers exist.
20:53
Speaker 1: They are out there, frozen in time, whether they are
20:57
Speaker 1: buried under floorboards, hidden deep in a flooded river, or
21:00
Speaker 1: locked away in the memory of a dark haired man
21:03
Speaker 1: sitting in the passenger seat of a pickup truck.
21:05
Speaker 2: Think about the last people to interact with these victims.
21:08
Speaker 2: The bank teller handing one thousand dollars to the Markleys,
21:11
Speaker 2: the friend dropping off flowers at Treveline's shop, the driver
21:14
Speaker 2: watching a man on a bridge. When they looked at
21:16
Speaker 2: those faces, they had no idea they were looking at ghosts.
21:19
Speaker 2: It leaves you with a chilling question. How many people
21:22
Speaker 2: have you passed on the street today who are quietly
21:24
Speaker 2: living out the very last ordinary moments of their lives,
21:28
Speaker 2: right before stepping off the map entirely