Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, it's Dana. I am currently writing new episodes
Speaker 1: of Lost Tales for you, but in the meantime I
Speaker 1: wanted to share something really awesome. It's a preview of
Speaker 1: deep Cover, another true crime show from Pushkin and my
Speaker 1: friend Jake Halbern. In deep Cover's new season, Jake tells
Speaker 1: the story of two young women living on opposite sides
Speaker 1: of the country who went missing at almost the exact
Speaker 1: same time. Seven years later, their stories collided when one
Speaker 1: woman resurfaced posing is the other. A small town detective
Speaker 1: became obsessed with the case, convinced that one of them
Speaker 1: was a spy. Okay, here's a sneak peek. I hope
Speaker 1: you enjoyed as much as I did. You can find
Speaker 1: deep Cover wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can
Speaker 1: get all six episodes right now at pushkin, dot FM,
Speaker 1: forward slash plus. This is a story about a young
Speaker 1: woman who ran away from home. At least that's how
Speaker 1: it all started. I think people think that I had
Speaker 1: this master plan and I went out and did it,
Speaker 1: and like, you know, like it's not fun, right. You're
Speaker 1: constantly scared, you have no support, you have no one
Speaker 1: to talk to, which is part of the reason it
Speaker 1: got so carried away, Like if I had just talked
Speaker 1: to somebody, they would have been like, this is crazy.
Speaker 1: Along the way, there were plenty of moments where she
Speaker 1: could have stopped running, but she didn't. Sort of like
Speaker 1: I got on a train track. There was clearly the
Speaker 1: wrong train track, and like, my train is running away,
Speaker 1: and at some point you're not thinking, crap, how do
Speaker 1: we get off this train track? You're just thinking, crap,
Speaker 1: how do I stop this train from like going off
Speaker 1: the rails? You know, I just kept making horrible decision
Speaker 1: after horrible decision after horrible decision, just trying to keep
Speaker 1: the train from crashing and killing me. At that point,
Speaker 1: we're going to come back to this woman and go
Speaker 1: deep into her story so you'll hear more about all that,
Speaker 1: but not just yet, because this is actually a story
Speaker 1: about not one, but two young women who vanished at
Speaker 1: about the same time. The two of them were roughly
Speaker 1: the same age, but in so many other ways they
Speaker 1: could not have been more different. One grew up in
Speaker 1: rural Montana, where she was raised in a sheltered, devoutly
Speaker 1: religious home. She was shy and kind of a nerd.
Speaker 1: The other was a kind hearted free spirit from South Carolina.
Speaker 1: She partied often and sometimes hung out with a rough crowd.
Speaker 1: They both disappeared in nineteen ninety nine. Their families searched
Speaker 1: for them, but didn't find many clues, and then improbably
Speaker 1: their stories collided when a lone investigator got involved and
Speaker 1: quickly became obsessed. I think of a situation as a sweater.
Speaker 1: So sometimes you have a loose thread and you pull
Speaker 1: the thread and you get a naught. And sometimes you
Speaker 1: pull a thread and it just keeps unraveling and you
Speaker 1: just keep falling and falling and bone. This investigator was
Speaker 1: convinced that the fates of these two young women, the
Speaker 1: free Spirit and the nerd, were linked, and that by
Speaker 1: solving one of their cases he might also solve the other.
Speaker 1: Not just that he suspected that one of them was
Speaker 1: a master of deception, a highly trained chameleon who conned
Speaker 1: her way into the ivy leagues. He began an investigation
Speaker 1: that ultimately drew in the Secret Service, the US Marshals,
Speaker 1: and the Justice Department. The media soon got wind of this.
Speaker 1: Allegations of murder, fraud, and espionage swirled. Eventually, a nationwide
Speaker 1: manhunt got underway, all because of this one investigator and
Speaker 1: his hunch. Now, given the giant, gantic scope of all this,
Speaker 1: you might think that our investigator worked for some big
Speaker 1: city police department or a fancy federal agency, or maybe
Speaker 1: even an international outfit like Interpoll. Nope, he was a
Speaker 1: small town cop who'd just become a detective. He didn't
Speaker 1: have a partner, or for a while even a computer.
Speaker 1: But he was doggedly stubborn, almost perversely. So I just
Speaker 1: pulled a thread and it just kept going and going
Speaker 1: and going, to the whole thing unraveled. I get it.
Speaker 1: I love pulling on threads. As a journalist, I've done
Speaker 1: this so many times, pulled and pulled until I have
Speaker 1: lost track of what I was originally looking for or
Speaker 1: whether it was worth it. And sometimes most of the time,
Speaker 1: in fact, it's not. But every once in a while,
Speaker 1: there's a set of facts it's so irresistibly curious that
Speaker 1: I just can't let go. And I suppose it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter whether you're a ernalist or a detective or just
Speaker 1: a nosy neighbor. So many of us believe that great
Speaker 1: mysteries lurk in the periphery of our lives. So when
Speaker 1: we find an especially curious thread, we keep pulling because
Speaker 1: we won't be satisfied until we've unraveled at all. I'm
Speaker 1: Jake Alburn and this is deep Cover Season three, Never
Speaker 1: Seen Again, Episode one, The Dark Corner. The detective that
Speaker 1: I told you about. His name is John Campbell, and
Speaker 1: he's just about the friendliest guy I've ever met. He
Speaker 1: has whispy brown hair and a boyish grin. He wears
Speaker 1: a pair of those wraparound sunglasses that dads always wear
Speaker 1: a little league practice. He's also got this goofy and
Speaker 1: totally lovable laugh that he breaks into all the time.
Speaker 1: So not an old timey lawman. In fact, one of
Speaker 1: the first things that he tells me is that he
Speaker 1: doesn't care for guns. When I retire, I can't wait
Speaker 1: to put this in a drawer. I mean, this is
Speaker 1: a this is the thing I banged my elbow on
Speaker 1: all the time. So it's not about carrying a gun.
Speaker 1: I carried gun because we have to. I'd rather be
Speaker 1: like Andy Griffiths and just be sharing with that a gun.
Speaker 1: I met John Donnan Traveler's Rest, South Carolina, where he lives. This,
Speaker 1: by the way, was also the hometown of the free
Speaker 1: spirited young woman that I told you about, one of
Speaker 1: the two that went missing. Back in the early two thousands,
Speaker 1: when our story really starts. John was the town's loan detective.
Speaker 1: I asked him what this was like. He told me
Speaker 1: that back then, this was truly a sleepy backwater. Travel's
Speaker 1: Rest was almost a dry town. We had one bar
Speaker 1: and one liquor store, and the liquor store closed I
Speaker 1: think at eight or nine o'clock at night. The bar
Speaker 1: closed at midnight, and we rolled up the streets and
Speaker 1: the only problems we ever had was at the bar,
Speaker 1: and so we could shut the bar down two or
Speaker 1: three times, took their license. Outside of town, well that
Speaker 1: was a different story. The thickly wooded slopes quickly rose
Speaker 1: into the peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The land
Speaker 1: was steep and craggy. Some called it the Dark Corner.
Speaker 1: For generations it was known as a place where out
Speaker 1: and folk brewed moonshine and lived by their own rules
Speaker 1: mountain justice. By the nineteen nineties, that had begun to change.
Speaker 1: Newcomers were arriving, retirees and the like, but the Dark
Speaker 1: Corner remained a place where it wasn't wise to venture
Speaker 1: at night or turned down a road you didn't know.
Speaker 1: I talked to one local who told me he once
Speaker 1: found a great big log blocking the road with a
Speaker 1: stack of dog skulls on it, and then he just
Speaker 1: knew better turn around. John says that occasionally the Mountain
Speaker 1: folks would just show up at John's office and hear
Speaker 1: this roar of a truck would come in, and people
Speaker 1: would pile out, and they'd say, we're looking for the law,
Speaker 1: you know, and Mountain justice had failed and they had
Speaker 1: to come to into town to find some law enforcement
Speaker 1: for the police and Traveler's Rest. The key was basically
Speaker 1: to secure the town's perimeter, so I called Traveler's Rest
Speaker 1: of the circle of wagons. So we had seven square
Speaker 1: miles that was like a circle of wagons in our
Speaker 1: little town, and we kept all the crime out of
Speaker 1: our little circle out into the county, bushed it out. Wait,
Speaker 1: so your job was basically just like make sure that
Speaker 1: the criminals stayed out of the circle. Yeah, pretty much.
Speaker 1: Did you ever like like tell guys like not in here,
Speaker 1: you're on the Oh yeah, what you say, this is
Speaker 1: our town? Out take that up the mountains. John says
Speaker 1: this strategy. It worked. Not much happened in the way
Speaker 1: of major crime in Traveler's Rest. But then one day,
Speaker 1: something rather sinister happened in this small town, something that
Speaker 1: broke the humdrum rhythm of daily life. A twenty year
Speaker 1: old girl went missing. Her name was Brooke Henson. She
Speaker 1: vanished from within the town's limits, inside the circle of wagons,
Speaker 1: and her disappearance would ultimately send John Campbell on an
Speaker 1: epic quest. It would become a huge case, a national case,
Speaker 1: and John, the small town detective who hated carrying a gun,
Speaker 1: would be at the center of it all.