She Hid a Note in a Shoe - 11 Days to Outsmart a Killer

Missing person stories · Jul 25, 2026 · 20m

She Hid a Note in a Shoe - 11 Days to Outsmart a Killer

A woman carried a two-inch golf pencil for three years-and it became the tool that engineered her rescue: a folded paper tucked into a size eight dark canvas left shoe with a name, the bearing 270 degrees, and the letters R, T, four. How did a survivor map distance, direction, and a fragment of a plate into a single note that led to a conviction?

In this episode, we tell the sequence of events from the morning a road grader operator found a shoe in a culvert to the eleven days Tracy Zimmerman spent building a rescue plan in her head, and…