Crime Junkie - MISSING: Runaway Train Kids
Episode Date: February 6, 2024In honor of this past National Missing Persons Day, Ashley and Brit are going to take turns telling you the stories of seven missing kids that all have a certain connection. These are the stories of 7... out of 36 missing kids that are featured in the 1993 music video for the song Runaway Train by Soul Asylum. A majority of those cases have been resolved thanks to that video, but that means there are still too many left that need your attention – and maybe someone, somewhere out there holds the key to solving their cases.Don’t forget to tune into The Deck and Dark Downeast this week to hear the remaining 2 stories of those highlighted in Soul Asylum’s music video!Runaway Train by Soul AsylumIf you have any information about:Byron Page: Please contact the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Homicide Bureau at (323) 890-5500.Kimberly “Kim” Doss: Please contact the Davenport Police Department at (563) 326-7979.Patrick “Shawn” Betz or Jason Matthew Lea: Please contact the Upland Police Department at (909) 946-7624 or Crimestoppers at (800) 222-TIPS (8477).Wilda Mae Benoit: Please contact the Cameron Parish Sheriff’s Office at (337) 775-5111.Duane Fochtman: Please contact the Lincoln City Police Department at (541) 994-3636.Martha Wes Dunn and Eric Owens: Please contact the Morris County Sheriff’s Office at (903) 645-2232 or the Augusta Police Department of Public Safety at (316) 775-4500.Christopher Kerze: Please contact the Eagan Police Department at (651) 675-5700.If you or anyone you know is thinking about suicide, emotional support can be reached by calling or texting the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988, or by calling the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).PRECEDENT: Jacob WetterlingIf you are a law enforcement agency or a family member of one of the people we mentioned in this or any of the highlight episodes and you’re looking for coverage on the case – please reach out to us as CrimeJunkie@audiochuck.com. Did you know you can listen to this episode ad-free? Join the Fan Club! Visit https://crimejunkie.app/library/ to view the current membership options and policiesSource materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit: https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/missing-runaway-train-kids/Don’t miss out on all things Crime Junkie!Instagram: @crimejunkiepodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @CrimeJunkiePod | @audiochuckTikTok: @crimejunkiepodcastFacebook: /CrimeJunkiePodcast | /audiochuckllcCrime Junkie is hosted by Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat. Instagram: @ashleyflowers | @britprawatTwitter: @Ash_Flowers | @britprawatTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Text Ashley at +1 (317) 733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, random photos of Chuck, and more!
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host Ashley Flowers.
And this week, we're going to do something a little bit different.
You already got your full-length episode on Monday,
but February 3rd was National Missing Persons Day.
And so one story didn't feel like enough for the thousands
upon thousands of people still missing in the United States.
According to NamUs, at the time of this recording,
they have over 24,000 active missing persons cases
in their database.
And while we can't cover all of them,
we wanted to release these mini episodes
to highlight some missing people,
some whose cases have almost no information on them.
And we're gonna be doing this
across multiple audio check shows.
And the cases we've chosen are actually all tied together in a certain way.
They're all from a music video from back in 1993.
Now what I didn't know until recently was that the band Soul Asylum actually featured
pictures of missing kids in their video for runaway train.
Alongside the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,
they featured a total of 36 missing kids.
Now, 21 of those cases were resolved because of that video.
Several had sadder endings where the children were determined to be deceased,
but there were at least still answers.
However, we found out that there are still some children
from that original list of 36 that haven't been found,
even all these years later.
And we wanted to bring you those stories,
no matter how much information there was,
or more accurately, wasn't there for us to work with.
So today, here on Crime Junkie,
Britt and I are going to take turns telling
you about seven of those still missing kids right here on this episode. Then, be sure
to tune into the deck on Wednesday and then dark down east on Thursday for episodes on
those shows about two other cases from the videos.
But this story, our first story, is the story of Byron's story starts on January 29, 1992, when his mom, Jetty, gets home after work.
She's expecting her 17-year-old son to be there, but she's surprised to find their
home empty.
From what I can tell, it doesn't sound like she goes into full panic mode.
Rather, she calls one of Byron's friends, likely just hoping he's hanging out with
them.
And that friend says, yeah, I did see Byron earlier that day.
He was at a bus stop there in Los Angeles where they live.
From what he tells Byron's mom,
it sounds like they chatted briefly.
And then the friend tells Jettie that Byron had mentioned he was going to go to
a music and video store in West Hollywood,
which is about 20 miles away.
All of this hadn't seemed too strange to the friend because Byron made this trip a lot.
And he didn't have a driver's license yet, so public transportation was the way he got around.
But by 7pm that evening, both of Byron's parents were worried.
Their son, even if he was going to go to the music and video store or wherever he was going
to go with friends, was always home by then.
And not only was he not home, he still hadn't made any kind of contact to say that he had
run into trouble or he was hanging out with a friend or he was going to be late for whatever
reason.
So at this point, they're worried enough that they call the Los Angeles County Sheriff's
Department that same day to report him missing.
But despite Byron being a minor, the police aren't nearly as concerned as they are.
According to Reporting for CNN by Philip Rosenbaum
and Nancy Grace, which was our primary source
for this episode, Jetty is getting the distinct impression
that if Byron were younger, that they would be jumping
to try and find him and bring him home.
But like I said, he's not a little kid.
He's 17, he's applying to colleges.
So to the police, it's not an emergency.
But his parents know that he is not the kind of man
to just run off.
He has so much going for him.
He plays soccer at school, he's on the honor roll,
he has a perfect attendance record.
He even got a great score on the PSAT
and he was an aspiring writer.
He actually wrote reviews of comic books,
which he loves reading.
One of his reviews, he even sent to magazine, and while it wasn't published, the rejection
letter was even encouraging to him, made him want to continue writing.
And listen to be fair, all of that doesn't mean he didn't want to leave home, or was
maybe silently struggling with his mental health, but he had never once mentioned wanting
to leave.
And as far as I can tell, he didn't have a reason to.
And listen, even if he did leave willingly,
you would think he would have taken something with him.
His clothes, money that he had saved up,
those comic books he loved so much,
but everything he had was still there in his room.
Despite all of this, the police tell his terrified parents
that they can't do anything
for 24 hours. So they're left to spend the early morning hours of January 30th on their own,
driving up and down the streets of LA searching for their son. They don't find him. So they decide
to make flyers that include his photo and some key information. They call more of his friends, but none of his friends have any
information. And so, the days start to pass. I can't find anything about the police investigation
into his disappearance, if there even is one. I know someone, either police or his family,
go to the music and video store to see if he made it there that day, but none of the employees
remember seeing him. And I can't find anything about surveillance footage,
but it being the early 90s,
it's far before the days of security cameras
in every single store or corner or home.
So his family continues to try and search,
but if they find any leads, it has never been reported on.
In that CNN article, his mom talks about how painful it was
to go to his high school and to have to clean out his locker
and how they started getting college acceptance letters
in the mail from schools that he had applied to,
schools that he would never get to attend.
The painful days started to slowly slip
into painful weeks, which turned into months.
The fall semester starts,
which should have been the start of Byron's college career,
but he's not there to go.
And then the new year comes and goes
with no sign of the young man who had his whole
future ahead of him.
It was 1993 when Soul Asylum releases their song, Runaway Train, where Byron got featured
along with other missing children.
And while the song did generate additional media coverage for some cases, from what I
can tell, it didn't do much for Byron.
After 1993, the next update I can find is from 2010,
when Byron is added to the Namest Database
by a Los Angeles County detective
after a request for an interview for that CNN article
I keep referencing.
But after that, that's it.
A few blogs cover Byron's disappearance,
but nothing substantial comes of the coverage.
That CNN article states that there are a few sightings
over the years, but they don't lead to anything.
And to this day, Byron remains missing.
He has not thought to be a runaway,
but I can't find anything about what his family
or police believe did happen to him.
Today Byron would be 49.
At the time of his disappearance,
he was five foot eight wearing black pants,
a blue and white jacket, and a blue baseball cap.
We'll have an age-progress picture of him on the blog post for this episode.
If you have any information about his disappearance, you can contact the Los Angeles
County Sheriff's Department Homicide Bureau at 323-890-5500.
Don't forget to stick around. we have six more cases today.
Brit is up next to tell you about the disappearance of Kimberly Doss.
That's right now.
Hi, crime junkies.
I'm Brit, and this is the story of Kimberly Doss.
There's a lot about Kim's story that we just don't know.
Like a lot of teens thought to be runaways and, spoiler alert, she's thought to be a
runaway, there's hardly any reporting about her.
But I was able to put together a rough timeline of when she disappeared and when she was last
seen.
Kimberly vanished on or around September 1,, 1982, from Houston, Texas.
The 16-year-old had been at her boyfriend's house when they got into an argument,
after which she left clearly upset about whatever they'd thought about.
She didn't go home though. She met up with a few friends and went to one of their houses
to hang out for a bit before she ended up leaving again. Though the timeline here is a little fuzzy
because I don't know how long she was at this friend's house, only that she left at some point.
I do know that at some point later that night she called her boyfriend to talk, maybe about
whatever the fight was about, or maybe just because.
And during that conversation, she mentioned that she was at a different friend's house,
someone named Debbie.
Now, it seems like the boyfriend didn't recognize that name, but it didn't throw up any red
flags.
I'm sure they had different friends, and I don't even know how long they'd been dating,
so he might not have even met all of her friends yet.
But that phone call is the last time anyone heard from Kim.
She never called her boyfriend again, never called her mom, who she was living with at
the time.
She was reported missing on September 1st, but pretty much right off the bat, police considered her a runaway. I don't have any details as to
why, but I do know Kim's life hadn't been super easy right before she had vanished.
Her parents had gotten divorced, and she and her mom had recently moved to Houston from
Louisiana. Her aunt says in an article for the Quadsay Times by Jim Rancas that she'd
been having a difficult time with it all, which could have contributed to her wanting to leave.
But that's the problem.
There's no evidence stating that's what she wanted to do.
I couldn't find if she'd taken anything from her home, which if she'd been planning
to run away, you'd think she'd pack up something or maybe told someone.
But everyone seemed to be in the dark as to where
she could be or where she would go if she had left.
Now, if your first thought was Louisiana, like mine was, since that's where she just
moved away from, we might both be wrong.
Because almost four weeks later on September 27th, the first sighting of a girl who looked
like Kim came into police.
But this tipster said they spotted her at a Greyhound bus station in Davenport, Iowa,
which was significant because her dad lived in Iowa, so police at the time thought she
may have gone to visit her dad.
But the thing with that is, no one can be sure if that really was Kim at the bus station
that day.
And even if she was planning on visiting her dad, she never made it.
And after that possible sighting, the trail goes cold.
On October 3rd, someone who I'm assuming to be her mother posts an ad in the Quad City
Times addressed to Kim, asking her to contact her.
It says, quote,
Kim, I'm here from Texas.
I want very much to see you.
I miss you terribly.
I love you very much. I don't want to make any more problems
I just want you to call me and to let me know you are all right
The ad then lists a few phone numbers to call if anyone spots her but the plea goes unanswered
Her mom spends the next few years going back and forth between Houston and Davenport searching for her daughter
But never finds her
Kim's aunt tells Jim Rinkus for that Quad City Times article that she believes Kim was
abducted, that there's no way she would have stayed away for this long without so much
as calling to let her loved ones know she's okay.
But the police don't seem to agree, and it doesn't seem like they're all that concerned
with finding a 16-year-old who, as far as they're concerned, left on her own. Then, on her 18th birthday, Houston police do something I've never understood.
They close her case. Once she becomes a legal adult, they drop her from the database. Because
apparently, to Houston police in 1984, a missing child isn't worth finding once they're a
legal adult. We've seen this happen in other cases we've covered.
And every time I hear about it, it just blows my mind.
Like, adult or not, she's still missing.
And even if she did run away, they should at least make sure she's still alive
and in a safe situation, right?
But since there's no concern of foul play, they just weren't worried.
Now, the last possible sighting of Kim also happened in 1984. A man named
Dawn Austin, who founded Thursday's Child, which is a foundation to help at-risk youth,
came across a young woman who was being trafficked by a trafficker in Hollywood, California,
and he was convinced this young woman was Kim. Even though she had dyed blonde hair,
it wasn't much of a stretch to think Kim could have bleached her brown hair sometime
in the last two years she'd been missing. And not only did this woman have a gap between
her front teeth just like Kim did, but she went by the name Kimberly. Kimberly Kathleen Gardner.
But Kim's mom wasn't so sure and the police weren't either, so they just didn't do anything.
Don explains in an article for the Dispatch Argus by Brian Crands that he tried to help
the young woman get out of her situation, but soon after that first sighting, she disappeared,
and he never saw her again.
Now, a few years later, it seems like investigators changed their minds because they state in
that same article I just mentioned that they do believe Kim Doss and Kimberly Gardner are
the same person. But by that point, it was too late
and no one could find her,
not even after the music video came out.
At some point, the police in Davenport opened her case
and in 2003, Kim's mom submitted her DNA
for potential comparisons
if someone they thought was Kim was ever found.
But as far as I can tell, there have been no matches.
Kim might still be out there.
Maybe she did leave willingly. Maybe she went to Iowa to see her dad and met foul play along the way.
Maybe that was her in Hollywood. If she's still alive, she's 57 years old today.
We'll have her photo and an age-progressed image in our show notes in case you want to take a look.
And if you have any information about Kim, you can call the Davenport Police Department at 563-326-7979.
And don't forget to stick around. Ashley is going to tell up early the morning of Thursday, January 21, 1988, at her home
in Upland, California, she knew something was wrong.
Her son, Patrick Sean Betts, who went by his middle name, Sean, wasn't there.
Now, he'd been with the family at a local pizza joint the night before.
He'd been playing arcade games in the restaurant with the owner's kid, and before they even got to eat,
Sean asked his mom if he could attend
the local high school basketball game.
She said yes, and he left with a friend.
And listen, right up front, we don't know
if that friend he left with was the owner's kid,
or if he left with a different friend.
But either way, Barbara had meant to wait up
until he got home, but you know, it just happens.
It's exhausting being an adult and a parent.
And she'd fallen asleep instead.
But as she's looking around now that she's woken up, it seemed like Sean never made it
home.
His bed clearly hadn't been slept in and all his stuff was there, but he was nowhere
to be found.
Barbara and her husband Dennis, who Sean's dad made a report to the Upland Police Department.
And I can only imagine that they were relieved when an officer showed up to check things
out and hopefully start trying to track Sean down.
But that relief, if there was any, was fleeting.
Because the responding officer was unbothered by Sean's absence.
He told them not to worry about it.
Sean was clearly a runaway and the kid was going to have to eat at some point, right?
He'd be back soon as those hunger pains kicked in.
The officer was sure of it.
But the Betzes were adamant that Sean wasn't a runaway.
But when they mentioned his upcoming juvenile court hearing, the officer was pretty much
like, yep, my work here is done. Because
to him, Sean was just another kid who didn't want to face the consequences of his actions.
So he took off. To the officer, he wasn't the first, and he wasn't going to be the
last.
But this juvenile court thing wasn't really a huge deal. At least not to Sean and his
family. It was over a schoolyard tussle that presumably
got broken up by a school resource officer on a power trip. And Sean hadn't been stressed about it.
And they tried to explain that to the officer, but he'd already heard all he needed to hear.
His mind was made up. And listen, this is like not an okay response to any missing persons report,
let alone a missing persons report about a minor.
But I'm sure some of you kind of anticipated that this is going to be the response, right?
Like this was the 80s.
Things were different then.
A missing teen was almost always categorized as a runaway at first.
We've seen it so many times.
But here is what you probably didn't see coming.
Sean wasn't a teen.
Sean wasn't even a tween.
Sean was a little boy,
one who quite literally still fell asleep
with his blankie each night,
which for the record was in his room where he left it.
Point being, he was an 11 year old child.
That tussle he had gotten into
took place at his elementary school.
But the upland PD was steadfast in their stance.
According to a video put out by the YouTube account Crimehound, whose host did original
reporting on this case, even the bizarre call that Sean's school received the morning
he was reported missing didn't change their minds.
This call had come in before anyone even knew Shawn was missing, and it was from a woman
claiming to be his grandma.
She told the school that she's calling to let them know Shawn wouldn't be attending
anymore, like ever, because he was moving to Washington to live with her.
The family swears up and down they had nothing to do with the call.
For one thing,
Sean's grandma didn't even live in Washington anymore.
She had lived in Washington,
but she'd moved to California recently.
But even besides that,
the point of the call was to make the school think
that nothing was wrong when Sean didn't show up that day.
But that's not what his family wanted anyone to think.
They were convinced that something very, very wrong
had happened and they wanted everyone to know it.
And brief spoiler alert guys,
that call remains a total mystery to this day.
Feeling pretty much abandoned by UPD,
Sean's family mobilized to get word of his disappearance out.
They knocked on doors, they conducted searches,
posted flyers everywhere they could.
They even got Walmart to display a whole bulletin board with pictures of Shawn.
Basically all the things you would expect from a police department in this situation.
They also went to local media, or at least they tried to, but the media wouldn't touch
Shawn's case.
To them, police had classified Shawn as a runaway, and so there was nothing newsworthy
about that. Then police had classified Sean as a runaway, and so there was nothing newsworthy about
that.
The family was still intent on finding Sean, though, and they were able to gather a little
bit of information about his movements the night he went missing.
First, they found out that the game Sean had wanted to go to that night was actually an
away game, which I don't think Sean actually knew.
So him and his friend had come back to the pizza place.
The owner of the pizza joint said that Sean had been there until around 9pm when he left
alone to walk home. The family then found a woman who worked near the pizza place,
and she said that she'd seen Sean that night, but he wasn't alone. He was walking with a
teenage boy late that evening. Now, I don't know if this sighting was before
or after Sean supposedly left at nine.
Everything about the timing of that sighting is a little vague.
And another open-ended question is the age of the owner son
that Sean had been hanging out with.
Could he have been the older boy that Sean was seen with?
I have no idea.
Now, about four months after Sean's disappearance,
UPD suddenly took an interest in the case.
What sparked the interest is anyone's guess, but a detective came out to look around, ask
a few questions of the family.
And it was around this time that UPD took a person of interest into custody.
Great news, right?
Well, not so fast.
Because that person of interest was Sean's 15-year-old brother who was, by all
accounts, already devastated by his little brother's disappearance. How he became a person of interest
is unclear. What is clear is that when the police chief took him to the station for questioning,
no one bothered to inform his parents. It wasn't until five hours into his interrogation that his
parents figured
out where he was. By the time they got there, he'd already been given and failed a polygraph.
And from the lobby, the family could hear investigators yelling at him in an interrogation
room. I'm picturing this pounding, demanding a confession, which by the way he gave, he
confessed because he was told it was the only way he would get to go home.
But the confession was bogus.
Sean's brother had a rock solid alibi that placed him six or seven hours away in San
Francisco the night Sean went missing.
And not with just like a witness, he was on a stage in front of a crowd playing a live
show with his band.
He had a venue full of concert goers to back him up, but the damage was done, and the whole
encounter was so traumatizing for him.
If the relationship between the Betz's and UPD was bad after that, it only got worse
in 1991 when investigators stormed their house at daybreak one morning to conduct a raid.
This was supposedly in response to an anonymous tip saying that Shawn was buried under their
house, but 14 or 15 hours of searching, cadaver dogs and all turned up absolutely nothing.
Once again, the case went cold.
The family was thrilled when the music video featuring Sean and 35 other missing kids came out in 1993, and it brought welcomed attention and focus to Sean's case.
Around this time, his picture also started being placed on milk cartons across the country
as part of the National Child Safety Council's missing children milk carton program.
But if any tips surfaced as a result, they didn't bring Sean home. Tragically, Sean's dad Dennis died in 2009 without ever knowing what happened to his
son.
As the years passed, the FBI eventually disseminated an age-progressed image of Sean to show what
he'd look like at the ages of 32, 38, 42, and 45.
Those have been featured everywhere, from the California Attorney General's missing person
site to sites for advocacy organizations such as the Charlie Project and NamUs.
But the case remained ice cold all the way up until December of 2021.
That's when a man named Stephen Ondick presented Sean's case at an Upland City Council meeting.
And he did this as just like a concerned citizen,
one of us crime junkies.
And as luck would have it,
the current police chief was in attendance
and he ordered his investigators to re-examine Sean's case.
According to reporting by Steve Scasillo
for the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin,
interviews with potential witnesses began that same month.
Upland police Lieutenant Anthony Cabayan was quoted as saying,
we are taking a different approach,
giving a fresh set of eyes to the entire case.
In February of 2022,
Lieutenant Cabayan and Detective Stephen Wainow
met with Barbara and other family members,
seemingly in an effort to repair the long-damage relationship
between the family and UPD.
And it wasn't just a perfunctory meet and greet either.
The meeting lasted two full hours.
But whatever the intent was,
Barbara didn't walk away feeling very reassured
because Steve Scasillo reported,
this time for Mercury News,
that they mostly asked her questions
about Dennis and her sons.
He quotes her in that reporting as saying,
They weren't trying to show us the things they looked into.
I didn't feel any better when I left.
Sean's family has suspicions about what happened that night, and their suspicions mostly revolved
around the pizza joint Sean had been hanging out at.
Following Sean's disappearance, the owner and his family suddenly closed up shop
and left town, which struck the Betzes as suspicious.
And actually they didn't just leave town,
they actually left the country.
But the family's concerns aside,
Lieutenant Kibayan says there's no evidence
suggesting that that family was involved in any way.
And even if their move had something
to do with Sean's disappearance,
which is a hundred percent speculation, I don't think we can assume it was because they were involved, necessarily,
in Sean's disappearance.
I mean, this was the late 80s, and they were a family of immigrants.
And they owned the last place this young white boy was known to be before disappearing.
It's totally possible that they feared becoming scapegoats in his disappearance or
the targets of community vigilantes. While looking into Sean's case, there was
another thing that gave me pause. Another case of a little boy from Upland who met a tragic end.
His name was Jason Matthew Lee, and he was nine years old when he went missing on July 29th of 1989.
Jason lived in Upland with his grandpa Jerry Yeager, who last saw him that evening,
leaving the house to go for a bike ride. But Jason didn't come home that night,
and on August 4th, his battered body was found at the bottom of a cliff in the San Gabriel Mountains.
Witnesses would later report having seen him
at a video arcade and a bowling alley
playing arcade games with some teenagers.
An autopsy determined that he'd consumed alcohol
before his death.
And almost immediately,
suspicion in his case fell on four local teenagers
who were all promptly arrested.
But prosecutors felt like there wasn't sufficient evidence
to charge the boys, and all four
were eventually released.
They were never charged, and like Sean's case, Jason's case remains unsolved to this
day.
Now, as far as I can tell, the cases were never officially linked.
But the similarities, to me, like down to the suspected involvement of teenage boys and
each victim last playing at some kind of arcade, or at least arcade. For me, it's too stinking much to just ignore, but it seems like everyone
else has.
At that city council meeting back in 2021, Sean's mom also spoke, saying, quote,
It's been almost 34 years. I need some closure. His father died not knowing what happened to him. His
grandmother died not knowing what happened to him. I need help from anybody that knows
anything or can assist in finding out what happened to my son. An 11 year old child just
doesn't get up and vanish." So that's where you come in, crime junkies. It was one crime junkie, whether they do it or not, who jumped started an ice cold case.
So maybe it will be one of you who sees it to resolution.
Sean would be 47 years old today.
When he went missing, he was four foot seven inches tall with brown hair and green eyes.
He was last seen wearing a gray shirt, gray pants, and white shoes.
If you have any information about the disappearance of Sean Betts from Upland, California in 1988
or the murder of Jason Matthew Lee, which is still unsolved, please contact the Upland
Police Department at 909-946-7624 or you can contact Crime Stoppers at 800-222-TIPS.
Britt has another case that was featured in the Runaway Train video to tell you about
next, the disappearance of Will de Maye Benoit. I want to preface this short story with a little bit of a disclaimer.
Even though we normally say there's limited information, we usually have at least a couple
solid news stories to work off of.
This is the first one where there is truly next to nothing out there.
One repeatable report and then some Facebook comments.
So I'm going to make it very clear what is reported as fact
and what is being said in comments online and by whom.
The whole point of the series is to cover the cases we normally can't.
And maybe this will get the right people talking again.
I know a lot of reporters listen to the show as well.
So if you're local to Louisiana, there's a lot of room here for a crime
junkie willing to roll at their sleeves and a family who needs a ton of help.
14-year-old Will DeMay was living with her aunt and uncle at their house in Creole, Louisiana
in July of 1992.
So that's naturally where she was taken on July 23rd when she was given the all-clear
from the hospital staff after being treated for a shoulder injury. And FYI, there's not a whole lot of detail out there
about this hospital visit.
A Reddit post on her disappearance says
she'd undergone shoulder surgery,
but most other online forums seem to just reference an injury.
And the one piece of actual reporting we have
doesn't mention a hospital visit at all.
And that feels like a big detail to me because someone who's healing from surgery is going
to be a heck of a lot more vulnerable and a heck of a lot less mobile than someone who
had a few x-rays done, was given some pain meds, and sent on her way.
So already that's a big question mark for me.
Jade Morrill reports for KPLZ TV that Wilde May was last seen by
her uncle that evening in her bedroom at his house. And here again, there is a discrepancy
in what she was last seen wearing. Some less official sources suggest she was still in
the hospital gown, but that reporting by Jade Moro states that she was last seen wearing
quote, black and white shorts with a green long sleeve shirt that had a navy blue design on the bottom of the shirt. Either way, when the uncle woke up
the next morning, Wildemay wasn't there. But that didn't feel like a super big cause
for concern. He just assumed she'd gone to work with his wife, her aunt. And that must
have been the thing she did sometimes because no one seemed to find this explanation questionable
at all.
It wasn't until later in the day, presumably when the aunt came home from work, that anyone
realized that Wildemay was gone and her aunt and uncle reported her missing.
Right away, authorities seemed to assume that she was a runway and their suspicions were
only solidified when some jewelry and clothing were determined to be missing from her bedroom.
But from day one, her mom Brenda Brenda Smith, has pushed back on this assumption.
She says in that same reporting for KPLZ TV that, quote,
They thought she ran away.
And I said she was scared of the dark.
Isn't no way she ran away.
She had to leave with someone because she wasn't going to leave by herself.
And as frustrating as it is to say,
that's about where the official reporting on this case ends,
which isn't to say information
on her disappearance totally dead ends there.
Enter social media, where family members
continue to do what they can to bring attention to her case.
And obviously that means the information we have
isn't coming from news outlets or primary sources
as we normally would use. But I think it provides important context nonetheless,
and with nothing else even out there online or in newspaper archives,
getting anything out about Wildemay seems important. For example, a user on WebSlooth
who identifies herself as Wildemay's cousin, Sarah Benoit, gives us a tiny bit more insight
into why authorities clung so tightly to the runaway theory in the first place.
And brace yourselves, because it is underwhelming.
According to Sarah, it all boiled down to an unnamed friend of Wilda May's mentioning
to someone, possibly authorities at some time, presumably early on, that she may have gone
to Florida.
Why Florida?
Your guess is honestly as good as mine.
I can't find anything suggesting
she had any connections there.
And Sarah says she had no family there to run to.
She does mention Wildemay's quote unquote,
older boyfriend, so maybe Wildemay ran off with him
to Florida or to anywhere really, except there's a catch.
The boyfriend didn't leave town
around the time Will DeMay disappeared.
So he couldn't have run off with her.
Now, that's not the only references boyfriend
that pops up in online forums.
When KPLCTV posted the story I referenced earlier
on their Facebook page,
it sparked a lot of debate in the comment section.
Of particular interest is a back and forth
between one woman named Hope Benoit,
who says she's Wildemay's younger sister, and another woman named Shaila Shari Henderson,
who says she's Wildemay and Hope's cousin, and the daughter of the aunt and uncle Wildemay was
living with when she went missing. And here we get a little peek into just how Wildemay got that
shoulder injury that landed her in the hospital
before her disappearance.
According to Shila, it wasn't just any old shoulder injury. Her claim is that it was
a domestic violence injury at the hands of her boyfriend. What spurred Shila to jump into
the conversation in the first place was a comment left by Hope. Like Shila, Hope hints
at foul play, but she points the finger in a different direction.
I'm just going to read the entire comment here. She says, quote,
Let's clear the air. My aunt was never a suspect. She lives with the fact every day for 30 years
that she did not check on my sister before she left for work that morning. But I'm sorry to say,
my uncle knows more than he's saying. It's time for the truth.
Now, I want wanna be really clear
that this one Facebook comment seems to be the sum total
of any public allegations against Wildemay's uncle.
And Hope doesn't give an explanation
about why her uncle would have wanted to harm Wildemay.
There are also no additional claims
against Wildemay's boyfriend other than Facebook comments,
which could be put
up by anyone if they wanted to create a fake profile, though the profiles being used do seem
to have a long history with documented activity going back at least as far as 2012. When Shilah
chimes in to defend her dad, Hope acknowledges that she's working with limited information. She
says, quote, I was only 10 when she went missing. I only know what was said, but I truly feel like your dad knows more than what was told.
And this leads me to the last theory put forward online, this time by someone claiming to be
a former schoolmate and neighbor.
This person uses the handle AP underscore Troy on webslues, and they point out that
the area Wildermay disappeared from is both rural and potentially perilous.
I mean, we're talking about Southwest Louisiana here after all, and the area is surrounded
by marshland.
According to this user, if Wildemay had wandered outside under the influence of the medications
she was on, it wouldn't be unthinkable that she could have encountered dangerous wildlife
like a coyote or an alligator.
The user goes on to say, quote,
A lot of us who knew her in school still wonder about her and hope she did run away and is
living happy somewhere.
But honestly, the more years that go by, most of us tend to believe she wandered off in
the night while on the pain meds from her surgery and had something bad happen to her.
And I can't help but think that even if she didn't wander outside disoriented
from the meds, if she was lured out there or if she was taken out there by force, I mean,
the predator-rich environment could still explain why she's never been found.
So now I turn it over to you, crime junkies. If you have any information about the disappearance
of Wilde and May Benoit on July 23, 1992, please reach out to the Cameron Parrish
Sheriff's Office at 337-775-5111. And now back to Ashley, who's going to tell you about the
disappearance of Dwayne Fochman next. So I'm going to start out this episode with what we know, which, like I said, isn't much.
Dwayne Foczman was 15 years old when he went missing from Lincoln City, Oregon on July
22, 1986.
The circumstances surrounding his disappearance haven't been reported on, so where he was
going, who he was with, his home life, those are all mysteries to me.
In fact, the first real reporting I can find on his disappearance comes from an article
in People from 2019, 33 years after he vanished.
An article doesn't even focus on him, it is a list of the still missing kids featured
in the Runaway Train music video by Soul Asylum, a list that we used when identifying the stories
that we would talk about across all of our shows and episodes.
If there was any reporting at the time, our research team couldn't find it.
Although I doubt there was really any reporting at the time, because according to a Facebook
post made by 4 The Missing Pacific Northwest, Dwayne is thought to have left home on his
own, at least at first.
But now he's classified as endangered missing by the Doe Network.
No one has seen or heard from him since that day in July of 1986, and from what I can tell,
it looks like foul play is suspected in his disappearance.
And that is literally all we could find, at least from official sources.
So that's when we dove into the comments section and forums to see if we could find, at least from official sources. So that's when we dove into the comment section
and forums to see if we could dredge up anything there. And we did find a few comments from people
claiming to be related to Dwayne in some way, and they added a few more details to his story.
Now listen, there's no way to verify these comments are being truthful. Anyone can say
anything online. So take everything I'm about to say
with several grains of salt.
I hope that one day we can dive deeper into his story
and do our own original reporting,
but true to the format of the original music video,
we wanted to focus on getting the word out
as quick as we could once I learned about these cases.
So if anyone listening knew Dwayne,
or honestly, any of the people we have
or are going to highlight in these short episodes and you want more coverage, please reach out to us.
That being said, the first comment that caught my eye was from someone claiming to be married
to Dwayne's cousin.
In a 2010 comment on a web sluice forum, they said Dwayne was seen getting into a red corvette
on Highway 101.
And this is why police believed he was a runaway at the time.
But the commenter said that never sat right with Dwayne's family, especially his father.
It just didn't make sense.
If Dwayne was a runaway, you'd think he would have picked up his paycheck that day or even
taken some more money that he had at home.
Or at the very least, taken his cigarettes because according to this person, he was a
heavy smoker. But all of these things were left behind.
Again, I can't confirm any of that, but Highway 101 is a major highway that runs along the
West Coast from Washington to California.
So if he really did get into a car on that highway, whoever he was with could have easily
taken him anywhere.
Another commenter on WebSloothes claimed to be Dwayne's third cousin.
And in 2020, they said that Dwayne's father died in 2012,
never knowing what happened to his son.
They also asked for help figuring out
where Dwayne's DNA was uploaded,
because apparently his DNA was uploaded to some database.
This user just didn't know where.
Now, it seems like they ended up finding it
because someone with the same username posted on Reddit
that they had gotten some help and found out
some more information that hadn't previously been published.
Like the fact that Dwayne was an only child,
his mother had passed away when he was young
and his father had a minor criminal history,
although they didn't go into detail.
They theorized it was possible Dwayne
had left to escape an unhappy home life,
but if we are to believe he truly left his paycheck and didn't have a car, that doesn't totally add up.
And that detail about the paycheck is echoed in that same Reddit thread by another person
claiming to be a relative of Dwayne, too.
This person claimed that the authorities never looked for Dwayne in part because he didn't
come from a wealthy family.
And while I can't verify that, we've seen how family's wealth and status can play
a huge role in how seriously their cases
are taken time and time again.
So combine that with the automatic assumption
that some investigators make that all teens are runaways
and it's no wonder Dwayne's disappearance was never solved.
Dwayne would be 52 years old today.
He was 5'5 with brown hair and eyes. His
profile on name states that a finger on his right hand was disabled and one of his ears
may have been pierced. He was last seen wearing blue jeans and a black jacket. And while his
first name is spelled D-U-A-N-E, he may have also spelled it D-W-A-Y-NAYNE. If you have any information about Dwayne's disappearance,
you can contact the Lincoln City Police Department
at 541-994-3636.
Up next, Britt is going to tell you about the disappearance of Martha Dunn.
You can listen to that right now.
right now. By all accounts, in September of 1990, 15-year-old Martha West Dunn was struggling.
When her parents came to pick her up on the 4th from a relative's house in Oklahoma
where she'd been staying, she was visibly upset.
She did not want to go home with them to Dangerfield, Texas.
And she didn't hide it,
but school year was about to start
and she didn't have a choice.
And sure, find me the teenage girl
who hasn't argued with her parents
about something like this.
It's such an easy thing to forget as adults,
just how hard it is to be a teenager.
But it seems like Martha's problems
may be extended beyond the run of the mill teenage angst.
According to reporting by Christa Wood for local outlet KETK,
she was quote-unquote heavily involved with drugs when she went missing.
When they made it back to Texas that day,
everyone was accounted for if not thrilled to be there.
When her parents reported her missing around 5 a.m. two mornings later,
the morning of the 6th,
they said the last time they'd seen her was a little bit before 2.30 the afternoon before. And it's not totally clear how this was known, but ultimately it might not matter.
But Elon Green reports for Mel magazine that she spoke to her boyfriend, 17-year-old Eric
Owens, who also lived in Dangerfield that night around 10.
And we rely heavily on Elon's reporting for this episode, just FYI, it's one of the
limited pieces of reporting out there on this case.
Either way, I don't think it would have been Eric who confirmed that call because
he was missing too.
But investigators do seem confident that the call did occur.
And for once, it seems like the authorities and the family were kind of on the same page
about what likely had happened.
Martha and Eric had probably run away together.
Considering that she'd just been fighting with her parents about coming home to Texas the day
before she was reported missing, it wasn't necessarily a logical conclusion. There were even
a few known places they might have headed. One possibility thrown around was that they went to
Hayworth, Oklahoma, where Eric's aunt lived, or possibly Kansas, where his mom lived. But according
to Chief Deputy Robbie Gray with the
Morris County Sheriff's Office, both those possibilities were looked into and discredited.
And this is where things got weird, at least to me, because just a few weeks later on September 30th,
Martha's dad contacted investigators with some strange information. He said he'd received a
call from a quote unquote friend
in Durant, Oklahoma.
And this friend reported seeing Martha and Eric there.
The friend claimed that they weren't in the best shape,
quote, dirty and hungry are the words
he supposedly used to describe them.
So being a good pal, the friend told Martha's dad
that he'd helped clean them up, gotten them some food.
And that's all, that's where the lead ended.
Chief Deputy Gage said it was looked into, but nothing came of it.
And like, I have all the questions here because what are the odds that a dude
in Durant, Oklahoma recognized these two teenage runaways from 150 miles away
in Dangerfield, Texas, who presumably didn't want to be recognized, right?
And he just so happened to have one of their dads on speed dial? I mean, okay, I'm being a little
bit hyperbolic and sarcastic about the speed dial part, but I mean, really, he at least knew his
number and knew to call him, but he waited until he wasn't with them to phone it in. And I don't
know, maybe I'm over here connecting dots that just shouldn't
be connected. But Martha's dad eventually put forward another bizarre theory that makes
me feel even weirder about this phone call story. Remember how I said that Martha was
heavily into drugs? Well, that was apparently something she shared with Eric, or at least
with Eric, it might have gone deeper than mere use.
It's possible that he was like in the Oklahoma drug trade,
which if true, could have had him crossing paths
with some pretty shady people.
So Martha's dad suggested to investigators
that maybe Martha and Eric had been kidnapped
by drug dealers from two separate locations,
possibly on two separate days, for ransom.
The fact that there was no ransom note must have just been an oversight on the part of the abductors.
In his reporting for Mel magazine, Elon Green asks Chief Deputy Gray if there was
any evidence that Martha and Eric might have met foul play.
And his answer is interesting. He says, quote,
play. And his answer is interesting. He says, quote, No, not really. The reason why is if you knew her parents, they were kind of strange. They were different. I'll put it that way.
When this happened, you would have actually thought, Okay, yeah, she's trying to get out
from underneath them. But if that's true, what about Eric? Not much is known about his home life, so maybe he was okay walking away too.
But what if Martha didn't just walk away?
This is where you enter the online forum territory, but there is someone on the
Unsolved Mysteries subreddit who claims to have been neighbors of the Duns.
And this person has a wild theory about Martha being buried on the family property, and a
story about being shown blood at the house, which turned out to be animal.
But remember, you can claim to be just about anyone and say just about anything online.
I'm not trying to call anyone out as a liar.
I just think it's really important that we be discerning of the information we take
in online.
All these years later, Martha and Eric's whereabouts
remain a mystery, and it's not clear
that Texas even considers Eric a missing person.
Though he's got profiles on both Nick Mac
and the Charlie Project,
he's not included in Texas' missing persons clearinghouse,
which is an official database maintained
by the Texas Department of Public Safety, though Martha is.
Similarly, the website for the Northeast Texas area
Crime Stoppers lists only two missing persons from the area,
Martha and a guy named Clinton Eugene Thompson.
Thankfully, that's not to say no one is looking.
Annette Lawless reports for Cake News,
an outlet in Kansas that at least as of January of 2020,
the Augusta Department of Public Safety in Kansas
was actively trying to locate Eric
based on the fact that that's where his mom lived
at the time.
And that's pretty much where things stand today.
So crime junkies, if you have any information
about the 1990 disappearance of Martha Weston
and Eric Owens, please contact the Morris County Sheriff's
Office at 903-645-2232
or the Augusta Department of Public Safety at 316-775-4500.
Up next is our seventh and final case we're highlighting on crime junkie,
and that is the disappearance of Christopher Kurzi.
Ashley's going to tell you his story right now.
When Alona Cursey got home from work at around 3pm on April 20, 1990, she expected her son to be there.
17-year-old Christopher Cursey, or Chris, had stayed home from school that day with a headache, so she was surprised to find the house empty and the family dodged caravan
missing.
Now, she wasn't too concerned right away, though, because laying on the kitchen table
was a note in Chris's handwriting.
It said, quote,
Mom, something important came up and feeling somewhat better.
Back by six, unless I get lost.
Love, Chris.
He underlined the words get lost, which Alona thought was supposed to be a joke.
Chris was known to get lost outside of their neighborhood because he hadn't been driving
for very long, so she wasn't all that worried, even though she didn't know what could have
come up or where he went.
But there was one thing that struck her as a little odd.
Their dog had been let off its leash.
Now, I don't know if this was an outside dog or an inside dog, but it was normally
leashed during the day.
The dog being unleashed wasn't that big of a deal, though, so she went about the rest
of her day as normal.
But 6pm came and went, and then 7, and then 8, and by 10pm, Alona was worried.
Chris still wasn't home home and he hadn't called
to check in or tell his mom where he was. So that's when Alona called her sister,
who lived nearby to see if she had seen or heard from Chris. But all the sources I've read
imply that she hadn't. With a sense of panic rising in her gut, Alona called her husband,
Jim, who was out of town on a work trip to fill him in on what was going on.
And he got so worried that he drove home right then,
arriving just around midnight.
Now, I can't find anything explaining
why they got so worried immediately.
But in an interview for the pioneer press
slash twincities.com, Jim states that Chris wasn't one
to just go off the grid like this.
He wasn't a kid who played hooky,
he did well in school,
so leaving without telling anyone where he was going
and then just not showing back up was way out of character.
Despite his parents being worried out of their minds,
the police there in Egan, Minnesota, weren't.
Alona called them to report Chris missing
but got the same response we have heard over and over again,
especially in these highlight
episodes. It hadn't been 24 hours, so Chris wasn't considered a missing person.
According to Lisa Rosemore's article for the Grand Rapids Herald Review, he was reported
as a runaway, but that just didn't make any sense. Sure, he had the family's van,
but his clothes and personal belongings were all still at the house, so if he'd been planning to run away, you'd think he would have taken
something with him.
However, either one or two days after he went missing, a letter arrived at the cursey home
from Chris.
It was mailed from Duluth, which is roughly two and a half hours north of Egan.
The full contents of the note
have never been released as far as I can tell,
but I did find a blog post from the Morbid Library
by CJ Lynch that states that in this letter,
Chris admitted to lying about his headaches
so that he would be able to take the family car.
He said he needed to get away
and that he intended to die by suicide,
and he apologized for the hurt that he caused.
Now I can't verify if that's like word for word what the note actually said, but regardless
of the specific wording, it is confirmed in verified reporting that whatever was written
was considered to be a suicide note by authorities. In that same interview for the Pioneer Press slash TwinCities.com,
Jim describes how it felt to read that letter. He said, quote, I tell you, when people talk about
their heart sinking, I used to think that it was some metaphor. It's not. You can be so torn up
that your heart actually feels like it's dropping. It weighs a lot. It's a moment that I hope
never to live through again."
Even though Jim and Alona hadn't noticed anything off about their son's behavior,
they found some evidence that what the note said might have been true. Chris's youngest
brother found that Jim's shotgun wasn't in the house, and when his parents checked Chris's
bank account, they had found that he'd withdrawn $200
after he left their house that day.
Now that being said, it didn't appear
that Chris had taken any ammo with him.
And Jim didn't think that Chris was familiar enough
with the gun to be able to actually use it.
But that wasn't much of a comfort,
especially when two days after he went missing,
the family car was found roughly three and a half hours north near Continental Divide Wayside Rest on Highway 38.
It was left in a wooded area, and inside Chris had left the keys with a note saying that
the van was owned by his parents.
That same day, authorities began a search in the area surrounding where the van was found.
They brought in a dog and a helicopter to help, and the dog actually did pick up a scent
leading to the woods, but then the scent disappeared and it didn't lead them to Chris or his father's
gun or any belongings that he may have had on it.
That wasn't the end of things, because soon after Chris went missing, Jim got a call from
someone who claimed to have picked up a hitchhiker from Highway 38 and taken them to
Duluth. Now, I'm not sure if the caller described the person they picked up and if this person
matched Chris's description or what, but if you remember, Duluth is where Chris's letter was post
marked from. So it could have been him. There was no way to tell, though, and it seems like police
didn't think this lead was very credible because they continued doing searches in the area around where the van was found instead. Now that call from the person claiming
that they picked up a hitchhiker wasn't the only strange call that the Chrissy family received.
Starting that spring and then continuing for about six months after, they would get random calls from
someone who they believed was Chris,
but the caller never said that though.
In fact, the caller never said much of anything.
All they could hear on the other end of the line
was what sounded like a party.
And when they would speak,
whoever was calling would just hang up.
Now I know this doesn't really indicate
who was on the other end,
but Chris's best friend also got these calls, which that's what led them to believe it
really was Chris, one of the only people they felt would know both phone numbers.
The curses tried to work with police to trace where these calls were coming from, but for
whatever reason, they were never able to track them.
And then about six months after they started, the calls just stopped coming in.
The leads dried up after that, until 1993.
Once the Soul Asylum video came out, investigators got a possible lead from someone who claimed
that they hung out with Chris in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, presumably after he went missing.
But that lead fell flat, and then after that, the already chilly case went cold.
Over the following years, Chris's family clung on to hope that he was still out there
somewhere.
But there were no more calls, and no one came forward with any information that might lead
to his discovery.
In 2004, the Egan police got a letter from someone in Seattle saying that Chris was,
quote, a guardian angel, and we should stop looking.
But after looking into that, they found that the letter wasn't a viable lead.
Almost 10 years later, in 2013, Chris's parents moved to another town in Minnesota.
They kept their same phone number just in case Chris wanted to call.
In 2016, interest was renewed in Chris's case with the discovery of Jacob
Wetterling's body. We actually did a precedent episode on Jacob's case back in 2022, but
in case you missed it, Jacob was 11 years old when he was abducted from St. Joseph,
Minnesota in 1989. His remains were discovered in September of 2016 in a field about a half
hour away from where he was abducted. Now, to my knowledge, Jacobs Killer was never considered a suspect in Chris's disappearance.
And to be clear, there's no indication that foul play was even considered at all, before or after this.
But with Jacobs' case finally being solved after 27 years, there was renewed hope that Chris's could be too.
Maybe they could find him or his remains and bring him home.
So authorities in both Egan, where Chris was from, and Itasca County, where the van was found,
encouraged hunters in the area to be on the lookout for anything that might give them a
clue as to what happened. Specifically, they asked them to keep an eye out for the missing shotgun,
or a watch that Chris might have been wearing when he vanished. It was a plastic swatch watch with black and white stripes, kind of like a zebra, but neither
the shotgun nor the watch were ever recovered.
The last update from Chris's case I could find was from May of 2018 when a search was
conducted around Highway 38 where the van was found.
They went armed with metal detectors in hope of finding that gun, but again, it
wasn't found and neither was Chris. But his family is still hoping he'll come home,
or that they'll at least find out what happened to him. If he is still alive today, he would
be 50 years old.
When Chris went missing, he was 5'11 with brown hair and brown eyes. He wore glasses
and contacts and when he was last seen, he was
wearing jeans, brown boat shoes, a black sweatshirt, and an acid-washed blue denim duster. He also may
have been wearing that black and white plastic watch. Police are interested in speaking to anyone
who may have interacted with Chris, or if you happen to find a 1954-1956 Mossberg 20-gauge bolt-action shotgun in the area surrounding
Highway 38, south of Marcel, Minnesota, police would love to hear from you.
You can contact the Egan Police Department at 651-675-5700.
I hope you found these short highlight episodes beneficial.
If you are a law enforcement agency or a family member
of one of the people that we've mentioned in this
or any of the highlight episodes,
and you're looking for more coverage on the case,
please reach out.
We would love to speak with you and see how we can support.
You can email us at crimejunkieataudiochuck.com. That email will be in our show notes.
And don't forget, there are still two more cases that we're highlighting from the 1993
music video for the song Runaway Trained by Soul Asylum. You can listen to the full story
of Andrea Durham over on the deck this Wednesday. It was her case that actually introduced me to all the others that were covering across the network.
And then finally, over on Dark Down East,
Kylie will tell you about the disappearance
of Jonathan Longo on Thursday.
["The Star-Spangled Banner"]
You can find all the source material for these highlight episodes on our blog post on the website, crimejunkiepodcast.com.
You can also follow us on Instagram at CrimeJunkie Podcast, and Britt and I will be back on Monday
with our regularly scheduled Crime-junkie episode. Crime junkie is an audio chuck production.
So what do you think Chuck?
Do you approve?