Speaker 1: Pushkin. This is a story about a young woman who
Speaker 1: ran away from home. At least that's how it all started.
Speaker 1: I think people think that I had this master plan
Speaker 1: and I went out and did it, and like, you know,
Speaker 1: like it's not fun, right, You're constantly scared. You have
Speaker 1: no support, you have no one to talk to, which
Speaker 1: is part of the reason it got so carried away.
Speaker 1: Like if I had just talked to somebody, they would
Speaker 1: have been like this is crazy. Along the way, there
Speaker 1: were plenty of moments where she could have stopped running,
Speaker 1: but she didn't. Sort of like I got on a
Speaker 1: train track. There was clearly the wrong train track, and
Speaker 1: like my train is running away, and at some point
Speaker 1: you're not thinking crap, how do we get off this
Speaker 1: train track, or just thinking crap, how do I stop
Speaker 1: this train from going off the rails? You know, just
Speaker 1: kept making a horrible decision after horrible decision after horrible decision,
Speaker 1: just trying to keep the train from crashing and killing me.
Speaker 1: At that point, we're going to come back to this
Speaker 1: woman and go deep into her story, so you'll hear
Speaker 1: more about all that, but not just yet, because this
Speaker 1: is actually a story about not one, but two young
Speaker 1: women who vanished at about the same time. The two
Speaker 1: of them were roughly the same age, but in so
Speaker 1: many other ways they could not have been more different.
Speaker 1: One grew up in rural Montana, where she was raised
Speaker 1: in a sheltered, devoutly religious home. She was shy and
Speaker 1: kind of a nerd. The other was a kind hearted
Speaker 1: free spirit from South Carolina. She partied often and sometimes
Speaker 1: hung out with a rough crowd. They both disappeared in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine. Their families searched for them but didn't
Speaker 1: find many clues, and then improbably their stories collided when
Speaker 1: a lone investigator got involved and quickly became obsessed. I
Speaker 1: think of a situation as a sweater. So sometimes you
Speaker 1: have a loose thread and you pull the thread and
Speaker 1: you get a knot. And sometimes you pull a thread
Speaker 1: and it just keeps unraveling and you just keep falling
Speaker 1: invulnent bulling. This investigator was convinced that the fates of
Speaker 1: these two young women, the free spirit and the nerd,
Speaker 1: were linked, and that by solving one of their cases
Speaker 1: he might also solve the other. Not just that he
Speaker 1: suspected that one of them was a master of deception,
Speaker 1: a highly trained chameleon who conned her way into the
Speaker 1: ivy leagues. He began an investigation that ultimately drew in
Speaker 1: the Secret Service, the US Marshals, and the Justice Department.
Speaker 1: The media soon got wind of this, Allegations of murder, fraud,
Speaker 1: and spaje swirled. Eventually, a nationwide manhunt got underway, all
Speaker 1: because of this one investigator and his hunch. Now, given
Speaker 1: the gigantic scope of all this, you might think that
Speaker 1: our investigator worked for some big city police department or
Speaker 1: a fancy federal agency, or maybe even an international outfit
Speaker 1: like Interpoll. Nope, he was a small town cop who'd
Speaker 1: just become a detective. He didn't have a partner, or
Speaker 1: for a while even a computer. But he was doggedly stubborn,
Speaker 1: almost perversely. So I just pulled a thread and it
Speaker 1: just kept going and going and going to the whole
Speaker 1: thing unraveled. I get it. I love pulling on threads.
Speaker 1: As a journalist. I've done this so many times, pulled
Speaker 1: and pulled until I've lost track of what I was
Speaker 1: originally looking for or whether it was worth it. And
Speaker 1: sometimes most of the time, in fact, it's not. But
Speaker 1: every once in a while there's a set of facts.
Speaker 1: It's so irresistibly curious that I just can't let go.
Speaker 1: And I suppose it doesn't matter whether you're a journalist,
Speaker 1: or a detective or just a nosy neighbor. So many
Speaker 1: of us believe that great mysteries lurk in the periphery
Speaker 1: of our lives. So when we find an especially curious thread,
Speaker 1: we keep pulling because we won't be satisfied until we've
Speaker 1: unraveled at all. I'm Jake Albern and this is deep Cover,
Speaker 1: Season three, Never Seen Again, Episode one, The Dark Corner.
Speaker 1: The detective that I told you about. His name is
Speaker 1: John Campbell, and he's just about the friendliest guy I've
Speaker 1: ever met. He has whispy brown hair and a boyish grin.
Speaker 1: He wears a pair of those wraparound sunglasses that dads
Speaker 1: always wear a little league practice. He's also got this
Speaker 1: goofy and totally lovable laugh that he breaks into all
Speaker 1: the time. So not an old timey lawman. In fact,
Speaker 1: one of the first things that he tells me is
Speaker 1: that he doesn't care for guns. When I retire, I
Speaker 1: can't wait to put this in a drawer. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is this is a this is the thing I
Speaker 1: banged my elbow on all the time. So it's not
Speaker 1: about carrying a gun. I carry gun because we have to.
Speaker 1: I'd rather be like Andy Griffith and just be shared
Speaker 1: without a gun. I met John Dunnan Traveler's Rest, South Carolina,
Speaker 1: where he lives. This, by the way, it was also
Speaker 1: the hometown of the free spirited young woman that I
Speaker 1: told you about, one of the two that went missing
Speaker 1: back in the early two thousands, when our story really starts.
Speaker 1: John was the town's loan detective. I asked him what
Speaker 1: this was like. He told me that back then this
Speaker 1: was truly a sleepy backwater. Traveler's Rest was almost a
Speaker 1: dry town. We had one bar and one liquor store,
Speaker 1: and the liquor store closed I think at eight or
Speaker 1: nine o'clock at night. The bar closed at midnight, and
Speaker 1: we rolled up the streets and the only problems we
Speaker 1: ever had was at the bar, and so we shut
Speaker 1: the bar down two or three times, took their license.
Speaker 1: Outside of town, well, that was a different story. The
Speaker 1: thickly wooded slopes quickly rose of the peaks of the
Speaker 1: Blue Ridge Mountains. The land was steep and craggy. Some
Speaker 1: called it the Dark Corner. For generations, it was known
Speaker 1: as a place where Mountain folk brewed moonshine and lived
Speaker 1: by their own rules Mountain Justice. By the nineteen nineties
Speaker 1: that had begun to change. Newcomers were arriving, retirees and
Speaker 1: the like, but the Dark Corner remained a place where
Speaker 1: it wasn't wise to venture at night or turned down
Speaker 1: a road you didn't know. I talked to one local
Speaker 1: who told me he once found a great big log
Speaker 1: blocking the road with a stack of dog skulls on it,
Speaker 1: and then he just knew better turn around. John says
Speaker 1: that occasionally the Mountain folks would just show up at
Speaker 1: John's office. Here, this roar of a truck would come in,
Speaker 1: and people would pile out, and they'd say, we're looking
Speaker 1: for the law, you know, And Mountain Justice had fail
Speaker 1: and they had to come to into town to find
Speaker 1: some law enforcement for the police and Traveler's Rest. The
Speaker 1: key was basically to secure the town's perimeter. So I
Speaker 1: called Traveler's Rest of the circle of wagons. So we
Speaker 1: had seven square miles that was like a circle of
Speaker 1: wagons in our little town, and we kept all the
Speaker 1: crime out of our little circle out into the county
Speaker 1: bushed it out. Wait, so your job was basically just
Speaker 1: like make sure that the criminals stayed out of the circle. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty much. Did you ever like like tell guys like
Speaker 1: not in here your other Oh yeah, what did you say?
Speaker 1: This is our town out? Take that up the mountains.
Speaker 1: John says this strategy it worked. Not much happened in
Speaker 1: the way of major crime in Traveler's Rest. But then
Speaker 1: one day, something rather sinister happened in this small town,
Speaker 1: something that broke the humdrum rhythm of daily life. A
Speaker 1: twenty year old girl went missing. Her name was Brooke Henson.
Speaker 1: She vanished from within the town's limits, inside the circle
Speaker 1: of wagons, and her disappearance would ultimately send John Campbell
Speaker 1: on an epic quest. It would become a huge case,
Speaker 1: a national case, and John, the small town detective who
Speaker 1: hated carrying a gun, would be at the center of
Speaker 1: it all. The day before Brooke Henson went missing, John
Speaker 1: Campbell says he saw her on the street totally by chance.
Speaker 1: It was July of nineteen ninety nine. John wasn't a
Speaker 1: detective at the time, he was still just a patrolman
Speaker 1: making the rounds. He remembers that day crisply, and he
Speaker 1: recounted it to me while we were driving around town
Speaker 1: together in his truck. When I saw Brooke. She was
Speaker 1: walking down this street here, close to her house, and
Speaker 1: she turned around and looked at me right about right here.
Speaker 1: It was where I saw her. And so that's her
Speaker 1: house where that sign is, it's your driveway. The street
Speaker 1: that we're on, where Brooke used to live, is shrouded
Speaker 1: in thick, tangled vegetation. The woods thrum with the buzz
Speaker 1: of cicadas. We pull up to Brook's old house. This
Speaker 1: is the front of the house as you can. You
Speaker 1: can't see it. I mean, it's completely over her own.
Speaker 1: Was it always this overgrown? The front was grown up,
Speaker 1: but it was no You could see the house and everything,
Speaker 1: but you can't even tell there's a house in there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it looks like like Radley's house from To
Speaker 1: Kill a Mockingbird. It's almost abandoned looking now. John didn't
Speaker 1: really know Brooke, but other people who did described her
Speaker 1: to me as easygoing, kind, free spirited. She shopped at
Speaker 1: thrift stores, wore Doc Martins and flannels. She was a
Speaker 1: huge fan of Nirvana. She dropped out of high school
Speaker 1: and in the summer of nineteen ninety nine, she was
Speaker 1: still living at home with her parents. Now I've gone
Speaker 1: through a bunch of accounts of what happened the night
Speaker 1: she went missing, including the original police report, which was
Speaker 1: basically a statement from Brooke's mom, But there's not a
Speaker 1: whole lot that we know for sure. What we do
Speaker 1: know is that she disappeared early on the morning of
Speaker 1: July fourth. There'd been a party at Brooke's house that night.
Speaker 1: Her boyfriend, a guy named Ricky Sewn Shirley, was there,
Speaker 1: and apparently the two of them were fighting. According to
Speaker 1: the police report. At two forty three am, Brooke told
Speaker 1: her mother, quote, I'm getting out of here. Her mom
Speaker 1: told her it was too late to wander about. Brooke replied, quote,
Speaker 1: I'm not going anywhere. I'm just seeing what he'll do.
Speaker 1: I'm messing with Sean. Brooke then left the house. She
Speaker 1: set off into the night. She never came home. In
Speaker 1: the morning, Brook's mother found a note on her bed.
Speaker 1: It was intended for Sean, her boyfriend. It read, I'm
Speaker 1: walking follow me if you care. The million dollar question,
Speaker 1: of course, is this where did she go? And there
Speaker 1: are a lot of theories about this. But the theory
Speaker 1: that I heard most was that she was headed to
Speaker 1: a nearby store. Apparently Brooke went there from time to
Speaker 1: time to get cigarettes. This is the store where she
Speaker 1: was headed, by the way, the store right here behind
Speaker 1: us gas station. Yeah, to get cigarettes. Like, why would
Speaker 1: she go to the store. She would have known the
Speaker 1: store was closed because it was like two thirty in
Speaker 1: the morning, so that store was not open at that time. Well,
Speaker 1: she would have known the store was closed. Also, I
Speaker 1: mean those roads, it's it's dark here that night. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and especially back then, we rolled the streets up at
Speaker 1: nine o'clock and travel's rest. I mean, there was nothing
Speaker 1: going on at night in this town. The whole thing
Speaker 1: was more than a little mystifying. How does a young
Speaker 1: woman vanish off a small town street in the dead
Speaker 1: of night en route to a store that's not even open.
Speaker 1: Even the note that she left was enigmatic. Follow me
Speaker 1: if you care. Brooks's parents are both deceased now, so
Speaker 1: I couldn't talk with them. Instead, I had to rely
Speaker 1: on what few clues I could glean. Brooke's mom did
Speaker 1: file a report with the police the day after she
Speaker 1: went missing, but at first the police didn't do much.
Speaker 1: Seems like no one did. A few missing posters went up,
Speaker 1: that's about it. No one was sounding alarms. I spoke
Speaker 1: with Brooks's cousin, Holly Henson about what she remembers from
Speaker 1: this time. I was staying out a friend's house in Marietta,
Speaker 1: just above Traveler's Drest, and her mom took us to
Speaker 1: the gas station and I saw a missing poster with
Speaker 1: Brooks picture and name on it. So I told my
Speaker 1: dad and brooks family had never told us that she
Speaker 1: was missing, but she had just went missing. Kind of odd, right,
Speaker 1: This is how she learns about her cousin's disappearance, But
Speaker 1: cousin Holly says that her family and Brooks had kind
Speaker 1: of grown apart in the years leading up to her disappearance.
Speaker 1: Holly's mother told me that she disapproved of brooks parents
Speaker 1: of the way that they raised their children, allowing them
Speaker 1: to drink and party and come and go as they pleased,
Speaker 1: like there were no rules. She did not want that
Speaker 1: for her own kids. But when they learned that Brooke
Speaker 1: had gone missing, they rushed over. Everyone went cousin Holly,
Speaker 1: her sister, Patty, their mom. They wanted to show solidarity
Speaker 1: to help if they could. When they showed up, the
Speaker 1: scene at Brooks house was somber. We were just all
Speaker 1: sitting in the livenary and it was just the whole
Speaker 1: thing was just weird. It was quiet, nobody was really
Speaker 1: saying anything. That's Brook's other cousin, Patty. She and Holly
Speaker 1: both remember the silence. Some of Brooks friends were present,
Speaker 1: sitting there mutely. Brooke's mother was on the sofa just crying.
Speaker 1: From the way they described it, it was like a
Speaker 1: vigil for someone who died. The odd part was that
Speaker 1: Brooke had just gone missing. It wasn't all that unusual
Speaker 1: for Brooke to just go off and disappear for a
Speaker 1: few days, visiting friends or whatever. Here's cousin Holly again.
Speaker 1: Brooke was allowed to come and go as she pleased.
Speaker 1: She could be gone for two or three days. And
Speaker 1: you know, there wasn't cell phones back the end, and
Speaker 1: her parents wouldn't really know where she was. But when
Speaker 1: Brooke went missing, her mama was very, very upset, as
Speaker 1: if she knew Brooke wasn't coming home. The whole gathering
Speaker 1: at the Henson House left a chilling impression on Holly
Speaker 1: and Patty's mother mary Anne Henson. She was Brook's aunt.
Speaker 1: It was very eerie. It was something I don't want
Speaker 1: to ever experience again. According to Aunt Mary Anne, the
Speaker 1: only person who seemed to be doing much of anything
Speaker 1: was this one guy that someone had invited. He was
Speaker 1: walking through the house, going through Brooks possessions. Who ever
Speaker 1: got him? I'm not even sure. And I don't think
Speaker 1: he was really an investigator. I mean, they said he was,
Speaker 1: but he was an odd person. He was an older man, creepy,
Speaker 1: but they said he was kind of like a psychic too.
Speaker 1: He would just like pick her things up. I remember
Speaker 1: him picking up the hairbrush, and I mean, it was
Speaker 1: like a bad movie. Becausin. Patty was also confused about
Speaker 1: the whole thing. I feel like, why weren't the police there?
Speaker 1: Are they? I don't understand why the police weren't there.
Speaker 1: It was the whole thing was weird. That night, when
Speaker 1: she got home, she says she had a dream. It
Speaker 1: was one of those dreams that was so vivid and
Speaker 1: life like that it felt like it was really happening.
Speaker 1: I was getting up to go to the bathroom and
Speaker 1: the shower curtain was cracked, and I kind of looked
Speaker 1: and did a second look, and it looked like muddy
Speaker 1: water and the bathtub. And then I got down on
Speaker 1: my knees and Brooke was coming up from the water
Speaker 1: and she was grabbing my arms like she was scratching
Speaker 1: my arms. And then I said, who did this to you?
Speaker 1: And she said, Sean Charlotte his first name and his
Speaker 1: last name, Sean Shirley. That was Brooke's boyfriend, the guy
Speaker 1: who she left the note for. They'd been having a
Speaker 1: fight the night the Brook disappeared, and apparently their relationship
Speaker 1: was a turbulent one. According to cousin Patty, he'd hit
Speaker 1: Brooke on a few occasions, and there are other accounts
Speaker 1: that he was violent. Three days after Brooke went missing,
Speaker 1: Sean was actually arrested on a separate matter. He was
Speaker 1: charged with criminal sexual conduct in the third degree. He
Speaker 1: eventually pled down to lesser charges. The one time that
Speaker 1: the cousins met him, they didn't get a good feeling
Speaker 1: from him, so cousin Patty's dream it felt spot on,
Speaker 1: like it just confirmed her worst fears. In the coming weeks,
Speaker 1: as Brooke remained missing, rumors began to circulate. One of
Speaker 1: them was that on the night of her disappearance. Brooke
Speaker 1: had gone to a party in the mountains in the
Speaker 1: Dark Corner. Aunt mary Anne told me that her husband
Speaker 1: Patrick was determined to have a look checked this place out.
Speaker 1: After all, he was Brooke's uncle and he felt he
Speaker 1: should be doing something. Before going, he visited Brooks parents
Speaker 1: to see if they might help. Apparently they didn't want
Speaker 1: to come. Brooks daddy said, happy hunting. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is my family, and I'm about to cry because that
Speaker 1: that's very odd. Happy honey. And I can't even imagine
Speaker 1: not hunting from my shore friends. I talked with Uncle Patrick.
Speaker 1: He told me that he went up to the Dark
Speaker 1: Corner anyway to have a look. Eventually he found the
Speaker 1: place where the parties supposedly happened, a cabin back in
Speaker 1: the woods. A man answered the door. He was shirtless
Speaker 1: and had nipple pierce. The man said that Brooke was
Speaker 1: at the beach. Uncle Patrick didn't believe it. He kept searching,
Speaker 1: but he didn't find her, not even a trace. It
Speaker 1: would be just one of many dead ends in this case.
Speaker 1: No one could find Brooke, not her family or the
Speaker 1: Traveler's rest police or that creepy psychic investigator. She was gone.
Speaker 1: It was roughly two years later, two years after Brooke
Speaker 1: Henson's disappearance, that John Campbell was promoted from patrolman to detective.
Speaker 1: It was at this point, in two thousand and one,
Speaker 1: that he became the principal investigator in the case. By then,
Speaker 1: the case was cold. John says he reviewed the files,
Speaker 1: but many of the witness statements, which were handwritten, were
Speaker 1: actually illegible. John spoke with people who had partied with
Speaker 1: Brooke the night she went missing, but their stories were
Speaker 1: often convoluted and conflicting. John suspected that Brooke had been murdered,
Speaker 1: but without a body, it was difficult to build a case.
Speaker 1: He surmised that her boyfriend, Sean Shirley played a role
Speaker 1: in all of this. The Travelers Rest police did bring
Speaker 1: Sean in and interview him, but he was never charged.
Speaker 1: There's no detailed records of what was said, but apparently
Speaker 1: Sean offered no useful information. At one point, John thought
Speaker 1: he almost had the evidence to prove Sean's guilt. It
Speaker 1: came from an informant who gave him a tip. One
Speaker 1: guy came to me and said, I saw a confession
Speaker 1: written by Sean Shirley in a box in a wall
Speaker 1: behind a brick. That's right. This guy who knew Sean
Speaker 1: Shirley claimed that he'd been in Sean's house poking around
Speaker 1: when he'd found this note. Here's what the informant told John.
Speaker 1: I was looking for drugs. I knew he kept his
Speaker 1: drugs in the basement. I went down there, I pulled
Speaker 1: the brick out. There was a little box. I opened
Speaker 1: the box. There was a folded up note in there,
Speaker 1: and it was basically a confession saying that he killed Broke.
Speaker 1: Sound far fetched maybe, and John was never able to
Speaker 1: get to the bottom of it. The problem was the
Speaker 1: tip from this informant was cold. The informant had waited
Speaker 1: too long to tell the police about what he'd seen,
Speaker 1: so when John went before a magistrate to ask for
Speaker 1: a search warrant, the judge nixed it, said too much
Speaker 1: time had passed. That's the most frustrating thing in the
Speaker 1: world to think there is a confession in a box
Speaker 1: in behind a brick in the wall, and I can't
Speaker 1: get the legal permission to go in there and get it.
Speaker 1: I mean, as part of you wonder if that's still
Speaker 1: behind that brick, the house in there anymore? So the
Speaker 1: house is burned down, so it's not there anymore. And
Speaker 1: that's kind of how it went with this case. There
Speaker 1: were these missing moments, but they never seemed to pan out.
Speaker 1: There were times when John got these tips that Brooke
Speaker 1: actually was alive. There were sightings, people who claimed they'd
Speaker 1: seen her. After all, Brooke's face was on a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of missing posters. It was always some kind of
Speaker 1: vague sighting that, you know, I saw her at a
Speaker 1: phone booth in at the Outer Banks or something like that.
Speaker 1: You know, how do you follow up on something like that.
Speaker 1: There's nobody there now. But it was just enough to
Speaker 1: give the family a spark of hope, and it would
Speaker 1: give just enough question as to whether or not she
Speaker 1: was actually dead. And then one day, in June of
Speaker 1: two thousand and six, almost seven years after Brooke Henson
Speaker 1: had vanished, John got a big break. It was a
Speaker 1: phone call from a state law enforcement official. He said,
Speaker 1: I think I found your girl, and she's alive. She's
Speaker 1: in New York. And I said, really more on that
Speaker 1: after the break. Okay, so it's two thousand and six.
Speaker 1: John gets his big break, a call saying Brooke Henson
Speaker 1: is alive. And the state law enforcement official, the one
Speaker 1: who called John here's the deal with him. He was
Speaker 1: a point of contact in this case, worked for the
Speaker 1: state of South Carolina, and his name in a phone number.
Speaker 1: It was on one of the Brook Henson missing posters.
Speaker 1: Someone had seen this poster online and called in a lead,
Speaker 1: a very promising lead. The callers said that Brooke Henson
Speaker 1: was now living in New York City in Manhattan, where
Speaker 1: she was a student at Columbia University. The caller provided
Speaker 1: Brooks home address, an apartment on West one hundred and
Speaker 1: eighth Street, and said that the Brook who lived there
Speaker 1: had the same date of birth as the Brook from
Speaker 1: South Carolina, that she also looked like the Brook and
Speaker 1: the missing poster. John couldn't wrap his head around any
Speaker 1: of this. It didn't make sense. Brooke Henson had dropped
Speaker 1: out of high school and vanished in the hills of
Speaker 1: South Carolina seven years ago. How is she now a
Speaker 1: student at Columbia University in Manhattan. The only thing that
Speaker 1: John could think of was that this was some kind
Speaker 1: of elaborate stunt, and that when he tracked down this woman,
Speaker 1: this Columbia student, she'd explain everything. Eventually, John got in
Speaker 1: touch with a cop, and the NYPD who agreed to
Speaker 1: help him out, said he would find this Brooke Henson
Speaker 1: character and see what the deal was. So anyway, the
Speaker 1: NYPD cop figures out who she is, intercepts her between
Speaker 1: classes and asked her who she is, you know, if
Speaker 1: she's really Brooke Henson. She said, I am Brooke. I
Speaker 1: am a victim of domestic violence, and I'm just hiding
Speaker 1: out here and I don't want anybody to know. Don't
Speaker 1: tell my family. So the NYPD caused and he says, yep,
Speaker 1: she's broke. You can clear your case. So much of
Speaker 1: it added up, the name, the date of birth, the
Speaker 1: general likeness of the photo, even the fact that she
Speaker 1: was fleeing domestic violence. It was a little hard to fathom.
Speaker 1: But wasn't it possible that when Brooke Henson walked out
Speaker 1: the door that night, away from Sean Shirley and her
Speaker 1: life in Traveler's Rest, that she just kept on going.
Speaker 1: Did what Americans have done from the very beginning, reinvent themselves,
Speaker 1: defy everyone's expectations, start anew. Sure, says John, that's reasonable enough.
Speaker 1: He sees how another cop might have accepted this and
Speaker 1: let it go at that if it hadn't been me
Speaker 1: who had been with the police appartment since ninety nine
Speaker 1: and knew the case as well as I knew. If
Speaker 1: you've been somebody that just been hired, you know, we
Speaker 1: had a lot of turnover and everything. Someone said, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: we found her case closed, And honestly, this could have
Speaker 1: been the end of the story right here. But in
Speaker 1: a way, John had been waiting his whole life for
Speaker 1: this moment. Let me explain you see. John loves mysteries
Speaker 1: and spy novels too, the weirder the better. He's a
Speaker 1: huge fan of The X Files, the show starring David
Speaker 1: Duchovny that tells us the truth is out there. John
Speaker 1: loves stories about aliens, paranormal activity, and vast government conspiracies,
Speaker 1: and he's looking for them pretty much always. He told me,
Speaker 1: back in the nineteen nineties, everyone was looking for the Unibomber,
Speaker 1: you know, the mysterious madman who wrote a manifesto and
Speaker 1: sent bombs in the mail. John studied the case obsessively,
Speaker 1: and eventually he became convinced that he had found the Unibomber.
Speaker 1: He even called the FBI. They didn't take him seriously,
Speaker 1: and it turns out John was wrong. Then, in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety five, a domestic terrorist blew up a federal office
Speaker 1: building in Oklahoma City. It was huge news. The authorities
Speaker 1: found their suspect, Timothy McVeigh. John claims that he found
Speaker 1: an accomplice tracked him down. Again. He called the FBI,
Speaker 1: but again they didn't take him seriously. And to this day,
Speaker 1: John questions how the FBI handled this, Like, what were
Speaker 1: they hiding? Look? John is the first to acknowledge that
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories are seductive, sometimes dangerously. So I've known people
Speaker 1: who are absolutely consumed by a conspiracy theory and you
Speaker 1: can look at them, I'm like, that guy's nuts, you know, John,
Speaker 1: Some people might think that about you. Yeah, all they do,
Speaker 1: So you get the picture. John was not the type
Speaker 1: of guy who was going to walk away from an
Speaker 1: unsolved mystery. Sure, maybe he'd watched one many episodes of
Speaker 1: The X Files, but something about this Brooke Henson situation
Speaker 1: in New York City just didn't feel right to him.
Speaker 1: So he decided that he wanted to create a test
Speaker 1: to see if this really was Brooke Henson. He consulted
Speaker 1: with someone in the Henson family and came up with
Speaker 1: a set of questions that only Brooke would know. The
Speaker 1: answers too, like what is your late uncle's name and
Speaker 1: what is your brother's best friend's name. He asked the
Speaker 1: NYPD to contact Brooke and pose these questions. They agreed.
Speaker 1: A short while later, John says the detective called back
Speaker 1: and basically said, Yep, she answered most of the questions correctly.
Speaker 1: Seems to be her. So I said, I'm not happy
Speaker 1: with that. I want DNA DNA. I mean, you got
Speaker 1: to hand it to him. That's ballsy. He's a small
Speaker 1: town detective from South Carolina. He's got evidence of plenty
Speaker 1: that this is Brooke Henson, and he's telling the ny NAH,
Speaker 1: I don want DNA. Kind of amazingly, the NYPD agrees.
Speaker 1: I don't fully understand why exactly they did, but they did.
Speaker 1: The NYPD says they'll reach out to her, try to
Speaker 1: make arrangements to get some DNA. The woman Brooke agrees,
Speaker 1: They set a date, and then she simply vanishes. When
Speaker 1: she didn't show up to give DNA, she was in
Speaker 1: the wind. She never went back to the apartment that
Speaker 1: she was living in. She never showed back up to class.
Speaker 1: She was gone, and at that point we had no
Speaker 1: idea who she was, no idea, and that right there
Speaker 1: was the thread dangling like an invitation of sorts. But
Speaker 1: what to do with it? Well, for starters, what was
Speaker 1: this exactly a missing person's case? Or was it two
Speaker 1: missing people? Or was it a case of stolen identity?
Speaker 1: Or was it a murder case with a mysterious spect
Speaker 1: who was now on the run? Impossible to say. As
Speaker 1: a detective, John knew that these categories were important, but
Speaker 1: this case didn't fit neatly into any of them. So
Speaker 1: what was John supposed to do? He didn't work for
Speaker 1: the FBI or the US Marshals. He was just a
Speaker 1: small town detective from the mountains of South Carolina. He
Speaker 1: says he had a travel budget of about a thousand bucks.
Speaker 1: His official jurisdiction was just a few miles in diameter.
Speaker 1: This case was way out of the circle of wagons.
Speaker 1: But that hadn't really stopped him before, had it. I mean,
Speaker 1: he'd gone after the unibomber and the Oklahoma City bomber too,
Speaker 1: but that he'd done on his own, almost as a hobby.
Speaker 1: He had a real claim to this one. This was
Speaker 1: his case, his thread, and damned if he wasn't going
Speaker 1: to pull on it. Coming up this season a deep Cover.
Speaker 1: I said, I'm calling about a girl you might know
Speaker 1: named Brooke Henson, and he said, I wondered when you
Speaker 1: were gonna call. When my son brought her home, I
Speaker 1: knew she was troubled Natalie. I knew her as Natalie.
Speaker 1: She introduced herself as as a professional chess player. There
Speaker 1: are a lot of people stealing names, but something dealing
Speaker 1: with espionage spies, that was a fascinating, fascinating development. We
Speaker 1: were chasing her around the country and you know, we
Speaker 1: would look at each other said, how are we not
Speaker 1: finding this young girl who could grief? Guys, we're the
Speaker 1: federal government here. We gotta be able to do that.
Speaker 1: I think I got a message from Columbia Security saying
Speaker 1: they wanted to talk to me, and I was like,
Speaker 1: oh shit. Deep Cover is produced by Amy Gaines and
Speaker 1: Jacob Smith. It's edited by Karen Shakurgee mastering by Jake Gorski.
Speaker 1: Our show art was designed by Sean Karney. Original scoring
Speaker 1: at our theme was composed by Luis Gara, fact checking
Speaker 1: by Arthur Gompert's Special thanks to Mia Lobell, Greta Cone,
Speaker 1: and Jacob Weissberg. I'm Jake Albern