SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: The Unsolved Indiana Dunes Disappearances

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The Indiana Dunes' disappearance is one of the lesser-known cases in American true crime.

One day in July 1966, three women went for a day at the beach along Lake Michigan in northwest Indiana, not too far from Chicago.

They vanished that day, and no trace of them has turned up since.

It's one of our sadder true crime episodes because not only are the women presumed dead, their families never got even a hint of resolution.

Listen to this one and see what you think happened.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

Hey and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark.

There's Charles W.

Chuck Bryant.

There's Josh T.

guest producing away over there.

And that makes this Stuff You Should Know super duper mysterious mystery.

Edition.

That's right.

This is a super mysterious one.

Super duper, you could say.

This is a good one.

I never heard of it.

I hadn't either.

Maybe we should have a spin-off show

just about mysteries and missing persons.

I've long thought that.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

But then everyone's like, nah, just put them on stuff you should know.

Yeah, every once in a while.

It's a good one.

Pepper it.

We got to spin it out.

Right.

Spin it off.

What did they say?

The Cleveland show?

Oh, man.

I never watched that.

Was it good?

I never watched it either.

You weren't a Family Guy fan, though, were you?

I mean, it's fine, but no, I wasn't a fan.

Yeah.

All right, what about Laverne and Shirley?

What is this?

Laverne and Shirley?

A spin-off from Happy Days, right?

That's right.

Chuck's right.

Ooh, let's do this.

And Mork and Mindy spun off, too.

What is this?

Too Close for Comfort?

Was that a spin-off?

You got this, man.

Too close for comfort.

He wasn't.

No, I don't know.

What was it?

Oh, no.

I'm sorry.

I was about to say, I don't think that's right.

What is this?

The Ropers?

Oh, well, sure.

Freeze Company.

Okay.

What is this?

Aftermatch?

Right.

I thought Too Close for Comfort was a spin-off.

I think it might be.

Well, my first guess was it might have been Ted Knight's character from the Mary Tyler Moore show.

Man, that was such a big thing.

But that's not true because in Too Close for Comfort, he was a cartoonist.

That's right.

Remember?

Yeah.

And the only thing I remember, well, I remember a lot about that show because I loved it.

I was in love with those daughters, man.

I don't remember them.

I mean, that was the whole setup, is that their daughters lived in the same house or next door or something.

Caused trouble?

Yeah, you know, they were just a couple of

hellraising beauties.

And who was the guy that was so great?

I think you're talking about Charles in charge.

No, I'm thinking of too close for comfort.

But he was a cartoonist, and he would wear college sweatshirts

as part of his character.

And he wore a Georgia Bulldog sweatshirt one time, and

I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

It's like, how did they know that that's a thing?

You're like, I'm basically on TV right now.

That's what it feels like.

Oh, man.

All right.

Monroe.

That was him.

The Monroe character.

Jim Jay Bullock.

Ted Knight.

Yeah.

No, Ted Knight was

the lead.

The main guy.

Jim Jay Bullock, man.

What was he?

Hollywood Squares?

Sure, among other things, like Too Close for Comfort.

Does this count as a tangent if we haven't actually gotten started?

No, this is a preamble.

Okay, preamble.

Nicely done, Chuck.

Yeah, this is a good one.

And you put this together.

Where'd you get most of this stuff?

Wrote it myself.

Oh, well.

There's one part that I was like, here, this is just easier if I copy and paste from a Chicago Tribune article from 1987.

I read that one.

It's very good.

That's one of the things about this case is anyone who kind of gets involved in this will see.

There is not a lot of information out there.

Yeah.

And funny enough, one of the biggest mysteries of this whole thing is what kind of boat that was, which we'll get to.

That was my bad.

Well, no, man, I saw in a couple of other articles it called this boat a trimaran, which is

very much a catamaran.

Right.

They made the same, the same thing.

So they were just rolling.

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

Because it was the same thing.

It saw a tri-hold.

I was like, oh, it's a tri-cat, which is a sailboat.

And that's what I thought it was.

No, there's a tri-hold speedboat called the runabout that was kind of big in the 60s.

Well, more more specifically, it's a tri-hold runabout.

A runabout doesn't necessarily mean it has three hulls.

Okay.

Those are my favorite boats in the world, are these 50s and 60s fiberglass runabouts?

This is the

50s and 60s runabout of all time.

Yeah.

With three holes.

Uh-huh.

You thought one was crazy?

Just get ready for three.

So,

yeah.

The boat will come up.

And I had to mark out Tri-Cat in just about 75 places.

I'm very sorry.

That was again my bad.

So, what we're talking about here, finally, now is the disappearance of three young women in suburban Chicago in the mid-1960s at Indiana Dunes State Park on Lake Michigan.

Yeah, now it's Indiana Dunes National Seashore, National Lakes Shore.

National Lakeshore.

But at the time, it was a state park, and this is Saturday, July 2nd, 1966.

That's right.

The three women, there was a 21-year-old named Patricia Blau.

Yeah, I think so.

She went,

she got in her car, which was

an 11-year-old at this point, Buick sedan, 1955 Buick.

Went to pick up her friends, Anne Miller, at her house.

She lived with her folks.

And then to her other friend, Renee Bruhl, who was the only one who was married, went to pick her up at her house.

They were 19 and 20, and they were like...

19 and 21.

I think one of them was 22, at least.

19, 20, and 21.

Oh, is that right?

Okay.

But those are nitpicky details.

Sure.

They were all late teens, early 20s.

Wait a minute.

Did you just call me nitpicky?

No, no, no, no.

I think you did.

No.

Okay.

Did you just call me a liar on national TV?

TV.

I think you just did.

Anne and Patricia were friends.

They were horse riders, and they were friends from these horse stables.

But they were all three buddies, not since grade school, but for the last couple of years, it seems like.

Right, yeah.

And they all lived around Chicago, and that's where they were traveling about 60 miles, 80 miles.

I've seen both to Indiana Dunes State Park to just basically go hang out on the beach that day.

Again, it was Saturday.

It was the July 4th weekend.

Super crowded.

Yeah.

Super crowded.

They were just going to the beach to have some fun, most people think.

They got to the beach by 10 a.m., parked the Buick, hiked over the dunes on the kind of rickety boardwalk over to the beach and set up camp, I think about 100 yards from shore.

That's a pretty substantial beach.

Wow.

Either that or they hiked 100 yards and set up near the beach.

It might be the latter of the two.

That sounds more right.

And on this weekend, again, because it was July 4th weekend, the beach was just absolutely packed.

And this is Lake Michigan, which is a pretty, pretty big lake.

And this beach itself or this park itself, I think, is like 26 miles of shoreline or something like that.

But even still, there's like 9,000 people on the beach that weekend.

Yeah, I saw 9,000 to 10,000 people, 4,000 to 5,000 cars in the parking lots, and 4,000 to 6,000 boats in the water.

Packed.

Just packed.

It's like Jaws or something up in there.

Right.

Amity Island, 4th of July.

So

Renee, Anne, and Patty set up shop, put down their beach blanket,

just kind of close by to this teenage couple

who are like their beach neighbors.

Imagine everyone was pretty close.

Sure.

Kind of.

With that many people.

She elbowed a jowl.

Isn't that what that's called?

Sure.

Okay.

And this teenage couple kind of factor in big time, but just kind of note their presence for now.

That's right.

So about noon, Chuck,

well, actually, the teenage couple factor in now.

They noticed that the three women were wading into the water about noon.

So I guess for about two hours, they were just kind of hanging out in the sun.

They got hot enough to go into the water about noon.

That's right.

And that was the last time that this couple saw them.

Maybe.

Perhaps.

The day went on.

They never came back.

This teenage couple said their stuff's still laying here.

You know, they may be off partying somewhere.

So, you know, they didn't think like these three young ladies are missing and perhaps murdered.

I think they were worried that their stuff might get stolen.

Yeah, I think it was as innocent as that.

Yeah, as a teenage couple, they were about to leave, and they didn't want to just leave it there.

They felt kind of somehow responsible for it, like you will.

Yeah, which is what you did in 1966.

Or today, still, if you're a decent person.

That's right.

So they went to a ranger and they said, hey, these young women were here.

They left their stuff.

The ranger thought the same thing.

He's like, well, let me just take care of the stuff and collect it.

And so it doesn't get stolen.

They're probably off partying.

But that was the last that anyone saw these three young women.

No one to this day knows what happened.

They vanished literally without a trace.

Yeah, there's never been any evidence of what happened to them.

No trace of them.

No, nothing.

Nothing from that point on.

I think we should take an earlier break because of that dumb, long

preamble.

Okay.

And this is a great little spot for a cliffhanger.

Okay.

So we'll be right back.

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Okay, Chuck, so

about 18 hours after that park ranger collected their things at I'd say around dusk, a call came in to Indiana Dunes State Park Ranger Station, and it was from Harold Blaw

or Blau, Patty's father.

And he wanted to know if the Rangers had seen his daughter daughter because she had been reported missing by her family back in Chicago, like, you know, a few hours before.

Yeah.

So they went through her stuff.

The Rangers did.

They found a set of car keys that had a little miniature Illinois license plate that matched a license plate in the parking lot.

Yeah.

Either a great coincidence or you could get those custom-made at some little beach shop, which is probably what happened.

So they find her car.

They found her Buick there in the parking lot.

Indiana State Police say, we're going to take over here because it's pretty clear that this is a missing person's case.

Yeah.

And so they it was obvious that they had they had never left the park, or at least they hadn't left, you know.

In the car.

Right.

And they left their car, they left their stuff.

That's suddenly very highly suspicious.

The idea that they were just off partying is suddenly kind of a tenuous theory, you know?

Yeah, like left all their stuff, like purses and personal stuff.

We should we should talk a little bit about that.

They left, yeah,

money in their wallets.

They left their transistor radio, they left their magazines open, they left their suntan lotion.

It seemed like the way they left their stuff, that they were planning on just getting into the water and then coming back from the water, and then that was that.

Right.

There didn't seem to be any kind of forethought to their stuff.

Right.

And then the fact that their car was still there, and this was a full day after they had last been seen, that was suspicious.

So the like if they were going to party, they would have said at least like, oh, let me grab my purse.

Right.

By now,

a night had come and gone, and the next day it was already, you know, halfway done, and

there was nothing.

That'd be a hell of a party.

Yes.

So

people started to get kind of worried, and they started to search the park, and they couldn't find them anywhere.

And that's when the police became involved, when it was obvious that they were no longer in this park, even though they didn't seem to have left, which means they just kind of vanished.

Yeah, and they had a pretty big search party.

They had soldiers volunteering from a missile base.

They had, obviously, the sheriff had the Civil Air Patrol get involved.

I think Patty's dad was a, is he a pilot?

He was a colonel.

He was a colonel in the Civil Air Patrol.

Coast Guard gets involved.

Dive teams, airplanes, helicopters.

Sheriff's posse on horseback?

Yeah, like they had people combing this area.

They went back to the 19th century to get people to search.

They searched about 250 cabins in the area.

They had a dune buggy trolling the seashore at night, seeing if bodies were washing or the lakeshore seeing if bodies were washing ashore.

Like it was a land, sea, and air search of this area.

And it was a pretty extensive area,

but it was a really extensive search.

The big criticism that's leveled today against the whole thing is that two full days passed before the search was mounted.

This is July 5th.

The first 48.

First 48.

Anyone who's ever seen that show knows those are the most critical moments or the most critical hours in trying to solve a case because it gets colder and colder with every hour that passes.

So that was a big thing.

And

one of the most startling things about this case is that search turned up nothing.

Yeah.

No evidence of what happened to them at all.

Yeah, the first little clue that they found

wasn't something they found while searching, but inside Renee Bruhl's purse that she had left behind, there was a letter that she had written to her husband that was kind of like, I've had it with you.

All you do is work on your hot rods and party with your friends.

And I'm kind of done hinting that she wanted to leave the marriage.

The cop, you know, obviously that's going to be a suspicious kind of thing to find.

So go talk to the husband.

And they interviewed the husband and the family and everyone seemed to agree like, hey, things aren't perfect, but she probably wrote that letter when she was really upset.

She didn't give it to me.

You know, I might work in my hot rods a little too much, but I didn't kill my wife.

And our marriage is fine.

Right.

Overall.

And then the cops believed it.

Well, her family backed that up, too.

They're like,

we don't have marital troubles.

This seems like something Renee would have done.

Right.

And then just forgotten she even had the note.

So the cops cleared her husband of being involved in any wrongdoing.

But it raised a long-standing theory that's still around today that we'll talk about theories later that possibly Renee ran off.

And if Renee ran off to kind of start a new life or whatever, maybe the other women had too.

Maybe.

Maybe.

So another interesting thing they learned: Anne Miller was, by all accounts, about three months pregnant

and had had talked to her friends.

By some accounts, not all.

Yeah.

Like her closest friends had said they're not.

She said she was pregnant.

Yeah.

Right, but I don't think they had like physical evidence of like a pregnancy test, right?

Right.

So

they said that she had, friends said that she had talked about having to go live in a home for unwed mothers.

She was sort of up against the wall with this.

Obviously in the mid-60s, it was not a great thing to be an unwed mother.

And it possibly, we don't know this either for sure, but she was dating a married man.

And it could have been his baby, which would have been problematic as well.

Right.

Another good reason to R-U-N-N-O-F-T.

That's right.

Okay.

So now two of them have a motive to

run off and start a new life.

Yeah.

And we should also mention, too, that Patty was also dating a married man, supposedly.

And

they both were buddies from this horse stable.

And it turns out there was a real scumbag.

I looked into this guy more, Silas Jane.

He was a rapist.

He was linked to the murder of three boys.

He was linked to the murder of two of the Grime sisters.

He was looked into for the disappearance of some heiress in Chicago.

He had a hit put out on his brother.

He had a firebomb planted in this other woman's car.

Like, this is a bad, bad dude.

Yeah.

And he had an affiliation with this horse stable.

Yeah.

He, his brother, I believe, owned the horse stable.

Yeah.

And Cy was like the organized crime boss running the

criminal ring out of the horse stable.

And this was the stable that Ann and Patty rode their horses at.

I think Anne was actually, she had a job as a horse exerciser at these stables.

So they were like really involved in like

just rubbing elbows with these organized crime ring um and so cops were like well wait a minute this is this is kind of huge like you know

there's as far as looking into their backgrounds this was the biggest red flag the cops had turned up for sure that they were they were known not not that they were like criminals themselves but just that they were like

they came in close contact with a really dangerous violent criminal and his gang yeah and one of the later theories was that they witnessed the uh the rigging of the firebomb on this car of this woman.

Yeah.

And, you know, they had to be taken care of.

Yeah.

But we'll get to the theories later.

Sure.

So

as they start.

These were like the leads that the investigation turned up, but the cops also very wisely involved the media pretty early on.

And so other leads started to come in.

And, you know, there's the usual like, oh, I saw them in Pontiac, Michigan getting off of a bus, or they were all in my drugstore alive and well, you know, last week,

even though they've been missing for three weeks, that kind of thing.

But there were some solid leads that came in, and one of the big ones was a call from a couple from Indianapolis who'd been on the beach that day.

And I think this is the problem with this.

There's so little writing about this that you kind of have to piece together.

Yeah.

I'm pretty sure that this is the same teenage couple that were their beach neighbors.

Okay.

I'm pretty sure.

They said that they saw them go into the water at noon and while they were hanging out in the water, a man, probably in his early 20s with dark wavy hair, well tanned, came up in a tri-hold runabout ski boat, which is just stop and look up tri-hole runabout.

1960s, and some will come up.

They're really cool looking.

Like it looks like the boat that Frank Sinatra would drive around on a lake.

Totally.

And it's the kind of lake that you would, if you were like an early 20s guy, pick up like girls at the lake in.

It's just like a fun, cool, zippy boat.

Yes.

And side note, if you are turned on by those boats like I am, you can find these things and buy them for like $1,200.

Yes.

These old fiberglass boats.

And engage in mechophilia.

You can.

You can't buy the old wooden boats.

You can, but not for $1,200.

Oh, okay.

Those are really expensive.

But the fiberglass ones you can get for fairly cheap.

Yeah.

Well, that's what this guy's supposed to do.

And like restore it, and you know.

Sure.

It's pretty cool.

Yeah.

Are you going to, are you saying that this is what you're going to do now?

No, I'm not saying that.

But I'm just, I've looked into it because they're just so like stylish and cool.

They are.

And they had, like, this one was turquoise interior.

They all have those like

60s sort of colors.

Diamond-dusted upholstery.

Yeah, yeah.

They're pretty sweet.

Yeah.

So, yeah, this is a white tri-hole runabout with turquoise interior.

And

that this couple from Indianapolis who called in later said that they saw these the three women get on the boat with this guy and drive off.

Yeah, so that's a big one.

Huge.

They also get another report from witnesses who said

these girls came back at some point, got something to eat and were hanging out on the beach.

And then a third lead that came in and said, they actually got on another boat, this big cabin cruiser.

Right.

And this was about 3 p.m.

with three dudes, and the boat didn't have a name on it that we could discern.

So in that first week, they get some boat wreckage.

It washes ashore, some styrofoam, some seats, an oil can, looked probably like a busted or wrecked boat.

But the police said, listen, we got two boats we're targeting here, and none of the stuff from this wreckage or potential wreckage is from those boats.

Yeah, they didn't they didn't think so at least.

Yeah.

Right.

So, um, but the weird thing about that boat wreckage is that no boat was reported wrecked that weekend on Lake Michigan.

Certainly not in the area around Indiana Dunes State Park.

That's right.

That's a big one.

And then, secondly, like you said, it doesn't seem to match any of the boats that they were looking for.

So if you step back and take these leads altogether, a timeline, a possible timeline emerges where

Patty, Ann, and Renee wade out into the water around noon,

go on like a a little pleasure cruise on the little tri-hole runabout

shortly after, come back to shore, go get something to eat, hang out, and then at three, go out on another boat, a bigger boat, which is possibly also manned by the same guy who was in the tri-hole runabout with a couple of his friends.

And that boat definitely had the name sanded off of it, which was a huge red flag.

Exactly.

It's very fishy.

They found sandpaper

and red paint on the beach

that had been sanded off.

So the cabin cruiser seems to have been largely disincluded from suspicion by the cops because from what I saw, the cops talked to some guys, three guys in a cabin cruiser who were there that day, who said, we

tried to pick up some girls.

And they wouldn't go.

One of them said, I'm married.

I can't go.

And none of them did.

Could have been them.

Maybe.

The other thing that really kind of seemed to have disincluded the cabin cruiser was that someone was actually filming.

This is 1966.

They were filming home movies on the beach that day.

Yeah, that was inevitable, I think.

You think so?

Yeah, sure.

I found it astounding.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

No, man, that's where all those old great color Super 8 films,

I bet there were 10 of those cameras on the beach that day.

Yeah, you're probably right now.

And they were, this guy was, you know, because he was filming the day, he was doing a lot of panning back and forth, which was very fortuitous because it kind of proved out some of this stuff.

They saw, and of course, this is old film and it wasn't like zoomed in or anything, but they did see what looked like

these three women on this little runabout,

just like everyone said.

So that was like a pretty good find.

Yeah.

The cabin cruiser, they're like, it looks like there's three women on there and they could be similar, but maybe they don't think so.

So the cops seem to have zeroed in on

that the

three women waded out into the water around noon.

The guy came up in the tri-hole runabout shortly after.

They got on the tri-hole runabout, and that was the last time anyone saw them.

Yeah, and apparently, too, it wouldn't have been the weirdest thing in 1966, like to go off with a stranger on his boat.

The thing I read said that dudes are always pulling up on their boat and like, hey, ladies, you know, let's take a ride.

That sounds like the 70s.

The 4th of July.

It's fun.

Sounds like the 70s.

Yeah.

Yeah, maybe.

Sure.

Or the 80s.

Right.

What about the 90s?

No, not the 90s.

Not the 90s.

People were not boating in the 90s.

Yeah.

Should we take another break?

Oh, sure.

All right.

Let's take another break.

Okay.

And we'll talk about the further investigations right after this.

Let's talk about something you probably haven't thought about.

Your couch.

Yeah, that thing you nap on, eat on, cry on.

Turns out that most sofas are basically bacteria playgrounds.

It's true.

We looked it up.

It's not good.

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It's washable, like fully washable.

Take the covers off, throw them in the machine, boom, clean.

Also, it's actually affordable, which is surprisingly rare.

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And here's the kicker.

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So, Chuck, one more thing about the boat that we should say is: despite having eyewitnesses, despite having film seemingly show them in this boat, nothing ever came of it.

Yeah, and the cops even put out the word.

They were like, surely someone knows this boat or this boat owner.

It's a tri-hull, turquoise interior.

Not a crazy boat, but not the most common thing in the world.

Right, but they never found it.

It just kind of vanished along with the women.

Yeah.

So,

mystery novels.

That's pretty good.

You think so?

Yeah.

Thanks.

So the weeks and months wore on, and as it did, there are fewer and fewer people actively looking for them.

As it happens.

It just happens that way.

But sadly, Harold Blau

kept this vigil basically for the rest of his life.

Yeah.

He just kept.

That stuff is always just heartbreaking.

Yeah, I don't know if he kept actively searching, but I know he did some traveling even later on in in life to go check out leads that he'd heard about.

He kept in contact with cops and reporters who were working the case.

And even afterward, after other groups stopped searching, he chartered his own plane so that he could fly reconnaissance flights looking for evidence.

All to nothing.

He never found any trace of his daughter or what happened.

And he was convinced that all of them were dead or they were being held against their will.

Right.

He was like, my daughter, you know, he said, we're not overbearing parents.

He's like, she's got all the freedom in the world to do what she wants.

She wouldn't have to run away

because like we're the coolest.

Basically.

There was a psychic that got in touch, and this was pretty interesting.

A psychic said, I visualize a cabin on Lake Michigan, not too far from the beach blanket.

with dark colored sand, a

rickety wooden stairs up from the beach.

The cabin's on a bluff and it has a lawn chair outside with its bottom out.

One of the cops investigated, drove as far as he could drive, then did some hiking and found a cabin that met this exact description right down to the chair with the bottom rotted out.

And this was nine years later.

Yeah, I mean, you hear stuff like that.

You're like, man, you know, I don't believe in psychics calling the cops with clues being super accurate, but it turns out there was no body there because she said to dig.

and they dug for three days and found nothing.

But

unless it was a prank, it was a weirdly, eerily accurate description.

Yeah, yeah.

But I mean, if you have an old abandoned

cottage, is there like a 50-50 chance there's gonna be a lawn chair with the bottom

rusted out?

That's my theory.

Maybe it could be coincidence.

I'm with you, though.

It is pretty interesting at the very least.

So

the case remains open, and again, not a hint, not a trace,

nothing has ever surfaced, metaphorically or literally, that suggests what happened to those three women.

And so theories have been allowed to kind of grow and take different shape and be argued over.

And there's like a handful.

Most of them are fairly sensible, actually.

Some are kind of pedestrian, some are kind of sensational.

But because no evidence has ever come forward,

each one's just about as likely as the other.

Yeah, and well,

I think we should mention before we do that that drowning, Miller and Blau were both really good swimmers.

Yeah, like super good.

Yeah, and I think that's supposed to be 20 to 30 minutes, right?

Surely not miles.

I saw miles.

Really?

Yeah, let me look.

You do some tap dancing.

That's like serious.

Elite athlete endurance swimming.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was miles.

Okay.

I'm looking.

I'm looking.

I don't want to get too nitpicky, but.

Well, if they were swimming 30 miles, then they were international champion athletes.

Okay.

So regardless, they probably did not drown.

It is possible that the boat crashed and they did drown and washed up somewhere because, you know, Lake Michigan is huge, 1,640 miles of shoreline.

It is the deadliest of the Great Lakes.

But

it's possible that they washed up somewhere and didn't, you know weren't ever found yeah because remember that that search didn't start for two full days after they weren't noticed to be missing right so that's one of the more mundane theories it gets a little more sensational when you look at Dick Wiley's theory right Dick Wiley was a crime reporter who

basically

I guess he reported on the case almost from the outset and really stuck with it for years and years and years.

And he developed a theory that Ann Miller being pregnant, it was Ann who was pregnant, right?

Yeah.

That Ann Miller had gone out there with her girlfriends that day because

she planned on getting an illegal underground abortion.

That sounds very not believable to me.

So yeah,

a lot of people don't believe it, but because so little has been written about this case and this guy is one of the kind of authorities on it,

there's there is some credence to it.

Not that she would have gone to get an underground abortion, but that would be performed on a boat.

That's the big, huge, one of the huge flaws in that.

It just seems weird.

It's what I can't imagine a more terrible place to perform a delicate procedure like an abortion on a houseboat.

On 4th of July in Lake Michigan.

Well, that's another thing, too.

Okay, so what Wiley's theory is, is that Anne went out there to get this abortion, and

Patty and Renee went there as moral support.

Right.

And they went out and met this guy who took them to the houseboat for the abortion to be performed.

Well, the abortion was botched, killing Ann, and the abortionists said, Well, we've got to kill you two now as well.

And they got rid of all three bodies, and that's what happened to them.

That'd make a heck of a movie.

A lot of

there are a lot of holes in this theory, including the fact that why would you perform an abortion on a houseboat?

But there is some things that kind of give it a little bit of credence.

In particular, there was a couple named the Largos.

What was it?

I always wanted to call her Wanda, but it wasn't.

Was it Helen?

I don't know.

Yeah, it is Helen, actually.

Frank and Helen Largo, they actually did have an underground abortion clinic in

1966 in Gary, Indiana, which was very close to the state park.

And their nephew Ralph bore a striking resemblance to the description of the man in his early 20s who came up in the tri-hole runabout.

Right.

And I think Ralph is verified as being there that day as well.

So, and he lived with Frank and Helen Largo.

So,

Wiley's theory that this guy came up and got them to take them to go get this procedure done.

Again, why would you do it on a houseboat when your clinic is 20 miles away?

Yeah.

And then, secondly, why would you set up this kind of highly illegal procedure in front of that many witnesses?

And then thirdly, why would they leave their stuff on the beach the way that they did if they knew they were going for this appointment?

Yeah,

this theory is bonkers to me.

So we'll discard Wiley's theory.

Yeah, the other one obviously was the

Silas Jane, the criminal dude from the stables.

People say that they think that they may have witnessed the car bombing of Cheryl Lynn Roode and that he was just getting rid of them and snuffing them out.

There is every reason to believe that this guy would have done that.

Yeah.

Looking at his history, if they did possibly witness this rigging of a car bomb.

He also had an associate who supposedly bore a resemblance to the man in the tri-hole

runabout.

Tan, wavy hair.

Yeah, early 20s.

And

I saw this and I could not verify it elsewhere, but there is a widespread rumor that, or an unsubstantiated claim, that that associate to Cy Jane, Silas Jane,

put in an insurance claim for a boat that had gone down around that time.

Interesting.

Which would definitely account for things.

It would also account for why there was no boat reported missing.

You wouldn't report a boat missing if you used it to cover up a triple homicide.

Yeah, because that's the biggest thing to me is

if there were other people on this boat and it was an accident, someone would have said, hey, my dark-haired, wavy-haired son is missing and he has this boat.

And there were no missing persons in Portsmouth aside from those three.

Yeah.

And what's more, even if that guy was just a total owner who had no friends or family, somebody would say a boat like that probably would have been towed by car and trailer.

And that car and trailer would have just been left there over time.

And somebody would have noticed that there's this abandoned car and trailer hanging out in the parking lot at the the state park nothing like that ever turned up yeah the other theory was in regards to silas jane is that these young women did witness this car bombing and knew that they needed to disappear right before they were disappeared right on purpose so this is and they like faked their own disappearance and that's patty blow's brother's theory oh yeah yeah he showed up on a forum called web sleuths and apparently he's verified he's like yes i'm her brother yeah and uh he said that he thinks that they did go to stage this disappearance but that the guy who was going to help them was actually in the employee of silas jane and this helping them disappear actually turned into this triple murder and that their bodies were disposed of that's what her her brother thinks and that the one um who

wasn't one of the stable uh people

yeah that she was just there to help them disappear i don't know got caught up in this i don't know because like why would she have gone out i i don't know i mean bad marriage.

Who knows?

Maybe.

It's a little thin, but I think it makes sense for his sister.

The other two, it doesn't necessarily make as much sense for.

Maybe for Anne if she saw, if she was in danger as well.

I don't know.

I think the most likely thing is it's like the Peter.

Is it Peter Principal?

No.

The Occam's Roll.

Occam's Razor.

Is it the trolley problem?

Occam's Razor is that they drowned.

I mean, that's possible.

And didn't wash ashore.

But here's the thing.

Like,

and Lake Michigan's the deadliest great lake of all of them, all five.

I think it accounts for, out of all five, it accounts for half of the deaths on any given year.

But most bodies do turn up.

Most bodies are recovered.

So if three of them or four or however many people were on that boat, that boat went down,

you'd think some trace of at least one of them would have eventually turned up.

You would think so.

You know?

Yeah.

It's a true mystery.

It's also possible that they were taken away by somebody.

They weren't planning on disappearing.

They weren't planning on leaving.

They just went on a pleasure cruise with the wrong person

who murdered them.

Right.

If a guy got three women out on a boat and got it out into the middle of nowhere on this enormous lake and then pulled a gun on them,

like you can, you could, one person could conceivably stay in control of three under a situation like that.

And that's, that's a, sadly enough, that's a real possibility that that was their fate.

They just went with the wrong person.

That seems unlikely to me, too, that a serial killer just picked up three women.

Here's the thing: there's one serial killer in particular that some people really like for this.

His name's Richard Speck.

Oh, yeah.

So, Richard Speck is actually not a serial killer.

He's a mass murderer because he killed eight women at a nursing college in one night.

Yeah.

Which makes him a mass murderer, not a serial killer.

He did that on July 13th, 1966, in Chicago.

On July 2nd, 1966, he was dropped off at a dock about 20 miles away from Indiana Dunes State Park.

He was not tan with dark wavy hair, though.

That is very true.

He was a real creep, though.

He was a super big creep.

Had a terrible personality, not a charmer, not good looking.

So the idea that he could get three like women into a boat of his is kind of unlikely.

Yeah.

Also, he was well known as a a very sloppy, opportunistic killer, and that this, if they were killed by somebody, this seems to have been planned.

The fact that their bodies never turned up suggests that if they were killed by somebody, they would have had to have planned to have killed them because they would have had to have brought along all the weights needed and all that stuff.

Whatever it is, like any one of those theories is just as likely as the others.

Good stuff.

Sad, tragic, but I love a good mystery.

Yep.

Well, if you want to know more about the disappearance of Patricia Blau, Ann Miller, and Renee Bruhl, you can go read the Chicago Tribune article on it, the Northwest Indiana Times article, Web Sleuths, and the Charlie Project.

All those are great resources on this case.

And since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

Hey guys, I'm writing to say thank you.

You see, I recently divorced.

And I spent about half the time I used to spend with my three young kids.

She goes, stay with me.

I'm not going anywhere depressing.

She said the divorce was the right move, and we're co-parenting quite amicably, and it's all good.

I've got a full life in meaningful relationships, and lots to do 99% of the time.

But the quiet of my day at times, when it is a kid-free house, is something that's gotten some getting used to.

I realize without even thinking about it that I've taken to playing old episodes like bizarre ways to die.

That's an oldie.

That's a a real oldie.

She's like, just because they make me feel in a totally well-adjusted and not insane way like I'm in the company of pals.

I've been a listener for about five years.

Only recently have I come to appreciate that I am always cheered up and made to feel less lonely by hearing you guys talk to each other and to all of us in podcast listener land.

So thanks for what you do.

Thanks to the team who helps you, like Jerry.

You do a good thing for a lot of people and I appreciate it.

Big hugs from Catherine in Chicago.

Chicago.

Chicago, how appropriate.

Thanks a lot, Catherine.

We really appreciate that.

It's good to hear.

Keep on keeping on.

Keep on trucking.

If you want to get in touch with us like Catherine did to let us know how you're doing, we want to hear that.

You can go on to stuffyushodnow.com, check out our social links, and you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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