11 | Who Do You Think They Were?

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Speaker 2 It's one of Britain's most notorious crimes. The killing of a wealthy family at Whitehouse Farm.
But I got a tip that the story of this famous case might be all wrong.

Speaker 5 I know there's going to be a twist, willn't they? A massive twist.

Speaker 6 At every level of the criminal justice system, there's been a cover-up in this case.

Speaker 2 I'm Heidi Blake. Blood Relatives is a new series from In the Dark and the New Yorker.
Find it now in the In the Dark podcast feed.

Speaker 2 Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun is released every Thursday and brought to you absolutely free.

Speaker 2 But for ad-free listening and exclusive bonuses, subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus at tenderfootplus.com or on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 2 Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun is intended for mature audiences and may include topics that can be upsetting, such as emotional, physical, and sexual violence, rape, and murder.

Speaker 2 The names of survivors have been changed for anonymity purposes. Testimony shared by guests of the show is their own and does not reflect the views of Tenderfoot TV or Odyssey.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 8 He was a cab driver for Checker Cab.

Speaker 9 He dropped everybody else off but her. And he says, you know what, I could have killed you, and nobody would have known about it.

Speaker 2 He pulled out a knife.

Speaker 2 This guy, John. His name starts with Jay.

Speaker 4 What was the name that you knew her by?

Speaker 10 Oregon John.

Speaker 11 I was the last person seen her alive, besides the guy that killed her.

Speaker 6 The more you look into it, the more unanswered questions and red flags there were.

Speaker 6 Everybody was pretty consistent about what they said about Joseph. You're dealing with a successful professional person who just vanishes.

Speaker 6 The state's conclusion he had been attacked by a bear and they just didn't find the body.

Speaker 5 There's going to be parts and pieces that the bear is not interested in. Yeah, they're not to leave half of a carcass.
Either he doesn't want to be found or someone doesn't want him to be found.

Speaker 5 So you guys were never boyfriend, girlfriend then?

Speaker 10 No, we were just friends. Him and I, just friends, better off friends.

Speaker 5 Do you still have the texts that you can

Speaker 5 refer to?

Speaker 10 Everything I had on my phone was gone.

Speaker 6 The roommate lied about his whereabouts on Saturday night.

Speaker 6 There was also an issue with apparently texting your friends to try and get them to create an alibi.

Speaker 6 I was just trying to save my skin from my friend.

Speaker 5 Save your skin from what, though? It's not like you were doing anything wrong.

Speaker 12 If you come to Nome, you're not going to go very far.

Speaker 12 You can go about 90 miles that way, and 90 miles that way, and about 75 that way, and that's it.

Speaker 4 When I first touched down in Nome, about two years ago now, the first person I met was this guy. Literally on the plane there.

Speaker 4 And within the first hour of me being there, he was talking to me on record.

Speaker 12 They haven't found the body. They haven't found anything.
The evidence is gone.

Speaker 1 You sure about that?

Speaker 13 What does that tell you?

Speaker 12 She's not there.

Speaker 12 There's a lot of people that come up to hide. Because you can disappear up here if you wanted to.

Speaker 12 I've been in Nome mound for 25 years.

Speaker 12 There's a lot of people that show up here. All of them are chasing the yellow guard.

Speaker 12 I mean, you can go out here in this driveway here and dig a bunch of dirt up. You'll find gold, huh?

Speaker 4 He's a gold miner who's been there for two decades. And he seemed to hear a lot of talk in the town about Florence Ocpialik's disappearance.

Speaker 12 West Beach.

Speaker 14 There was a lot of people out there looking for her.

Speaker 12 All the way up through that country.

Speaker 12 i don't know the parameters of who she was with or what you know but i do know that she was supposedly last seen with this guy they found her things in his tent

Speaker 6 do you know who that guy may have been no

Speaker 12 i don't know the guy's name i don't even i'm just an old man yeah and i and i think logically i'm a logical thinker

Speaker 12 she could have wandered into the wrong tent

Speaker 12 some people don't like that.

Speaker 12 Drive down the damn beach and you just see somebody walking along, you jump out and kill them. That don't make any sense either.
You must have had some interaction with her.

Speaker 12 And the people on that beach is the ones that had interaction with her.

Speaker 12 Where the guy went, I don't know.

Speaker 5 But he's not here. No.

Speaker 12 He's not known.

Speaker 12 I don't know where he went, but I do know that if I was an investigator, I'd be on his ass like stink on shit.

Speaker 4 From Tenderfoot TV in Atlanta, this is Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun, Chapter 2. I'm your host, Payne Lindsay.

Speaker 12 Where the guy went, I don't know.

Speaker 4 Kind of hard to forget this guy. An old town miner in Gnome who seems to have heard all the chatter.
But he's not here.

Speaker 12 No, he's not in Gnome.

Speaker 12 I don't know where he went but i do know that if i was an investigator

Speaker 12 i'd be on his ass like stink on

Speaker 4 i love that line and he was right he was not in gnome he was in ketchukan alaska and he goes by the name of oregon john i was going money that's what i was doing in gnome for four years

Speaker 4 i was driving a taxicab up in gnome you've been to gnome yes let's revisit my interview with john for a second

Speaker 4 Why'd you want to get out of there eventually?

Speaker 16 I had legal issues, remember?

Speaker 11 A girl came and hung out in my tent one night, and she walked off somewhere and somebody kidnapped her and looted her.

Speaker 11 And yeah, yeah, she passed out and in the morning I woke up and she was gone, but I left her shoes in her phone.

Speaker 11 Well, there was no trace of her.

Speaker 13 Why did they fucking think you did it, Betty?

Speaker 11 Because I was the last person known to have seen her alive.

Speaker 4 She just vanished.

Speaker 15 And they thought I did it, so I bounced.

Speaker 11 I was the last person seen her alive. Besides the guy that killed her.

Speaker 4 Besides the guy who killed her. We'd go on all day about the things that John said that don't sit well with me.
But going back and listening again, something did stand out to me.

Speaker 11 Noam is corrupt. You have no idea.
Three times in the last 12 years, the law enforcement department has been shut down and taken over by the Pegas. They are so corrupt up there, dude.
It's crazy.

Speaker 11 We know about the judge that disappeared, right?

Speaker 4 No. Yeah, yeah, they fed him to the bears.
He's talking about Joseph.

Speaker 16 Weirdos moved to Alaska, to be weird.

Speaker 17 Look, 80% of the people they killed us through, nobody finds out.

Speaker 4 In unsolved murder cases, the inevitable always happens. The conspiracy theories.
The cops did it. They're in on it.
This person's a suspect. That person's a suspect.

Speaker 4 But rarely are any of those things actually true.

Speaker 4 On that first day in Nome, I talked to Ray for about two hours. And he was very well aware of Joseph Balderis' disappearance, too.

Speaker 12 If a bear's going to eat you,

Speaker 12 What I think happened to him

Speaker 12 is he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Speaker 12 The guy was just in the wrong place, I think. Maybe he walked in on drug deals going on or something like that, and they just.

Speaker 12 That happens.

Speaker 12 Do I think they'll ever find him?

Speaker 12 No.

Speaker 12 People hunt, they fish here. Somebody will come across something if it was there.

Speaker 12 I don't think he's there.

Speaker 12 I think he's renewing somewhere.

Speaker 12 There's all kinds of things that can happen to you here.

Speaker 12 We can go right back to Adam and Eve.

Speaker 12 Cain and Abel. The human species is the only species that will kill for no reason.

Speaker 12 We're not kind people.

Speaker 12 I just see it. I see it.

Speaker 4 Death don't mean anything.

Speaker 5 Why is that?

Speaker 12 Because it's on TV.

Speaker 12 You watch a crime story or a detective story.

Speaker 12 There's always somebody getting killed.

Speaker 12 But you never see the end result of that.

Speaker 4 The family.

Speaker 12 The people that's affected by that guy's death. Death to these people don't mean anything.

Speaker 12 He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Speaker 13 You're referring to Joseph's case. Yeah.

Speaker 12 I've never heard of him being involved in drugs. What I hear, he never was that way.

Speaker 4 But his roommate was.

Speaker 12 Why in the hell would you drive out there? I mean, I sure in the hell ain't gonna drive clear out there. I can see everything I want to see from the road.
That's suspect to me.

Speaker 12 I don't think he's there.

Speaker 12 His car's there.

Speaker 12 If I did the guy in, I guess I'd drive his car out there and make it look like he got lost.

Speaker 12 When he disappeared, there was lots of people looking for him. If he'd been eating bad bear, they would have found something.

Speaker 12 And I think his car was driven out there.

Speaker 4 Joseph dropping out of communication with his fiancé early in the morning on Saturday, June 25th, then his truck surfacing 40 plus miles outside the city, parked in a strange spot.

Speaker 4 It's just a flat out confusing set of circumstances. But with no body in this case, Joseph's truck remains a central piece of evidence.

Speaker 5 I don't know, it seems awful suspicious.

Speaker 5 Without a piece of anything to go on.

Speaker 5 other than his truck.

Speaker 4 This is Jim West, a known local who was helping spearhead the search back in the day. The first private investigator interviewed Jim a few weeks after Joseph disappeared.

Speaker 5 We've been taught at search and rescues that the last person was going to be seen within about a mile or a half a mile of his truck. And we covered all that area, big time.

Speaker 5 You towed it, correct? I towed it, yes. Yes.
Did you notice anything suspicious about the truck? There was flowers on the windshield. There was no evidence of a foul play or anything like that.

Speaker 4 there were several sightings of joseph's truck that weekend some of which don't seem to really align but the thing is sometimes eyewitnesses can just be wrong but not everybody

Speaker 4 not much of evidentiary value was ever found in joseph's vehicle but his cell phone is missing along with him and it's not the only important thing missing In March of 2016, about two months before Joseph went missing, he went to a local outdoor store in Nome and purchased a handgun, a Taurus PT-111 G2 subcompact 9mm.

Speaker 4 But according to Joseph's friends and family, he wasn't really that into guns. So was it for protection? Just to fire off rounds in the wilderness? We don't really know.

Speaker 4 What we do know is that it's missing. along with its traveling case.
Where did it go?

Speaker 4 According to the Alaska State Troopers Report, upon their first visit inside Joseph's home, they noted: quote, no signs of foul play, no blood, broken objects, bleach, freshly cleaned areas, etc.

Speaker 4 But they did notice a full box of American Eagle 9mm ammo in Joseph's room in exactly one round was missing from the ammo box.

Speaker 4 But the state troopers didn't seem to find this interesting at all.

Speaker 6 Both the gun and the case are missing.

Speaker 6 Not only was his gun missing, this new handgun that he had purchased, but the case for the handgun was missing.

Speaker 6 I think that's a very significant fact.

Speaker 6 The troopers didn't even enter that handgun into the computer system, missing or stolen. Why would they do that? You know, they weren't interested in it.
I mean, this is just my impression.

Speaker 6 The case was done, they had moved on, and they didn't want to reopen it and do more work on it.

Speaker 6 It's just been completely overlooked.

Speaker 6 The missing gun and the case that went with it is really significant, I think.

Speaker 6 I mean, they just completely ignored the whole issue.

Speaker 6 These are big leads to follow up on in a missing person's case.

Speaker 5 What does that tell you?

Speaker 7 That somebody stole the gun.

Speaker 6 He's missing and somebody stole the gun.

Speaker 6 Something happened to him and his gun and the case disappeared.

Speaker 4 So what kind of scenario do those fill for you in your head?

Speaker 6 That he was murdered.

Speaker 4 Let's go back to Christine for a second and the whole frustrating story about her cell phone.

Speaker 4 In one version, Christine says that her brother punched in her password and then somehow disabled her phone.

Speaker 10 My brother had picked up my phone because I was in one of the races.

Speaker 10 He was wanting to record it so he flipped up and took a picture or recorded it or something and then my brother is a jackass who likes to fuck with things and so he punched in my password and disabled my phone and so I had to restore it as a new phone.

Speaker 4 I have an iPhone like a lot of us do and here's how this actually works. After you punch in the wrong passcode six times the phone will lock you out for one minute.
On the seventh, five minutes.

Speaker 4 Eighth, fifteen minutes. Ninth, one hour.
And finally, if you put the wrong passcode in 10 times in a row, it will permanently lock you out. Her brother must have been a pretty fast typer.

Speaker 4 What's interesting is that at the time, Christine had an iPhone 6S, one of the last iPhones that you could unlock with a thumbprint.

Speaker 4 So, Her brother disables it because he doesn't know her pin code, but then all of a sudden, she couldn't remember her pin code either. I'm confused.
Who exactly disabled the phone?

Speaker 10 He disabled it, and I couldn't remember my pin code because on, you know, on the iPhones, I could use my thumb. And so that's what I was using.
And so he disabled it.

Speaker 10 So every pin code I thought I thought it would be, I used, and it wasn't. So it ended up disabling it.

Speaker 4 When it comes to Christine restoring her iPhone, we could split hairs on this all day. The bottom line is, it's fucking weird.

Speaker 4 So her phone is erased immediately after Joseph disappears. Her entire phone is erased.
That is

Speaker 4 a little bit concerning.

Speaker 4 Maybe it's odd timing, or maybe not. But if you start looking around at other places, people like Joseph's roommate Jake start to feel like a bigger part of this story.

Speaker 6 The roommate was interviewed right away, told the troopers he was gone Saturday night with friends,

Speaker 6 but that he saw Joseph the next morning walking down the hallway in the house. Sunday morning, after Joseph had stopped responding to anyone.

Speaker 6 He's the only person who claims to have seen Joseph on Sunday.

Speaker 4 So if his roommate Jake is telling the truth, he's the last person to see Joseph alive.

Speaker 4 Here's Joseph's sister, Selena.

Speaker 8 Everything doesn't add up. All the inconsistencies.
He saw him mourning with the backpack whenever somebody else witnessed the truck already planted out there on mile 44.

Speaker 8 But all the other sightings from different people who aren't related, they don't connect. They're all different timings.

Speaker 4 His roommate Jake has stuck with his story of seeing Joseph on Sunday, 24 hours after anyone else had heard from him.

Speaker 4 The private investigator Andy asked Christine about this.

Speaker 6 Do you know of anyone who saw Joseph or the truck back in Nome after after Saturday afternoon?

Speaker 10 Not that I know of. I mean, Jake had just moved in to my grandma's house, my cousin.

Speaker 10 And I don't know, and I've never talked to Jake about what he saw or what he thought.

Speaker 4 Why not?

Speaker 10 Joseph and Jake, I don't know if they really talk. It was just like a cordial, oh, hey, roommate, you know, type of thing, but I don't know.

Speaker 4 Andy Klamser interviewed one of Joseph's coworkers who had some more insight on Jake and Joseph's relationship.

Speaker 6 Had Joseph said anything to you about his roommate, Jake Stenton-Benz?

Speaker 9 He said, Camille, he's awfully quiet. We don't talk.
I don't know what to do with him. I said, have you tried? He said, yeah, he just comes and goes.

Speaker 9 He has a dog that's messy into the garbage all the time. He was messy and had a dog and was very

Speaker 9 strange to him.

Speaker 9 He said, said, but other than that, we're ships in the night.

Speaker 4 Jake was a lot younger than Joseph and seemed to throw parties a lot at the house. And according to friends and family, Joseph didn't really like this.

Speaker 4 Not to mention, he wasn't paying his bills either.

Speaker 4 Joseph mentioned to a co-worker on Friday, June 24th, that he was really upset about Jake using up all the internet and not paying for it. And this comment seemed out of character for him.

Speaker 4 However you slice it, there was clearly some tension there.

Speaker 4 Aside from Joseph's handgun, which is currently still missing, when the police originally searched his house, they took photos and notes of what they saw.

Speaker 4 But when they came back about a week later, they noticed something that wasn't there beforehand. A rifle.

Speaker 5 There was a weapon involved. When a trooper went into the room, he didn't see anything.
And then all of a sudden, when he goes back into the room, there was a rifle.

Speaker 18 Inside Joseph's room?

Speaker 18 Are you solid on that? Solid on.

Speaker 4 And when they asked his roommate Jake about it, he claimed he didn't know whose it was.

Speaker 4 What do you mean?

Speaker 18 They found a rifle in his room.

Speaker 5 Jake's uncle put it there. Kevin.
Kevin would be his uncle. What's the uncle's name? Kevin Bescoya.

Speaker 4 It was eventually learned that Jake's uncle Kevin had just mysteriously put it there, unbeknownst to Jake himself.

Speaker 4 Who just sets guns in people's houses and not tell them?

Speaker 18 Kevin Bescoya is a former officer that was fired. Why would he place a gun in somebody else's room after the guy went missing?

Speaker 4 Andy Clamser briefly talked to Jake when he was in Gnome. and asked about this rifle.

Speaker 21 So when the rifle got dropped off here, was it in the case?

Speaker 21 So have you ever shot it?

Speaker 22 Yeah I shot it in the summer after I got it back from the station bruce

Speaker 22 with my uncle Barba for bear hunting. Kevin or? Yeah.

Speaker 22 Yeah it's a nice rifle.

Speaker 21 It's too bad that your uncle didn't just tell you he was dropping it off.

Speaker 4 This became a topic of interest on their conference calls too.

Speaker 4 Here's Selena.

Speaker 5 Did anyone ever follow up on that second firearm? Did Joseph have two firearms? I mean we know about the nine millimeter with their second that's unaccounted for.

Speaker 20 Said that we found a rifle in his house. We showed up and there was no rifle.
We showed up again and there was a rifle.

Speaker 4 So there's this disappearing and reappearing rifle that Jake at first claims wasn't his, only to find out later it actually was his.

Speaker 4 But he just didn't know how it got there.

Speaker 4 What?

Speaker 4 Andy asked asked the state trooper Sergeant Cross about this.

Speaker 21 The family and the attorneys were confused about the issues surrounding the 308 rifle that Kevin Pescoya put in the storage area after Joseph disappeared.

Speaker 21 It seemed odd to them that Jake wouldn't recognize the rifle, which had been given to him as a gift by his father.

Speaker 21 A 20-year-old who was given a nice rifle by his dad as a gift the year before, why would he not recognize it?

Speaker 22 Do you recall anything about that?

Speaker 1 I don't know

Speaker 6 A lot of people wouldn't recognize it in English because it's supposed to be market.

Speaker 6 Okay.

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Speaker 6 Pretty much right away after he went missing, the family went out to Gnome.

Speaker 6 One of the family members talked to the roommate.

Speaker 4 Here's Joseph's sister Selena recalling her first visit to Nome.

Speaker 8 We went to the search, the first search. We were sitting with his mother

Speaker 8 and Christine's parents, and this boy comes in and talks to Bonnie.

Speaker 4 She's referring to Jake, Joseph's roommate, but at the time, she didn't know that.

Speaker 8 I didn't know that was her son. Bonnie is his mother.

Speaker 4 Here's Joseph's mom, Nelda.

Speaker 5 It was the room full of people. I just shook his hand,

Speaker 5 looked up and saw him.

Speaker 8 He had scratches all over his face.

Speaker 8 It looked like somebody grabbed your face and scratched you.

Speaker 6 You would follow up on that. You'd talk to the people who were with him.
Did something happen? Did his face get scratched?

Speaker 4 I mean, this is police work 101.

Speaker 18 Could have just been something that happened innocently.

Speaker 6 Or it could have meant that he was in a fight.

Speaker 6 Something happened between him and Joseph, and Joseph fought back. It could explain the scratches.

Speaker 5 I asked him to take pictures of his face.

Speaker 4 You're his mother. What's your motherly instinct about what may have happened?

Speaker 5 Somebody did harm to him. It wasn't a fair.
He didn't get lost. Somebody did harm to him.

Speaker 4 The scratches on Jake's face seemed fresh. And at the time, they didn't even know he was his roommate.
As they started putting two and two together, this became much more concerning.

Speaker 8 When we realized that was his roommate, everything's starting to look shady now.

Speaker 8 I told Cross, you need to interview him, you need to go see.

Speaker 8 It feels like everybody's connected, everybody's scared.

Speaker 8 You live in this small city, you can't get out of this small town, and many of the people that I have talked to that have told me things are very scared.

Speaker 4 When we first met Joseph's sister Selena and his mother Nelda, we were at their home in Lubbock, Texas. For years, they had their own tip line and Selena would answer every single call.

Speaker 4 One call in particular really stood out to her.

Speaker 26 Finny, here's the hotline.

Speaker 27 Yeah, hi. I was calling to, I guess, report some

Speaker 5 news.

Speaker 26 Okay, what would you like to report?

Speaker 27 Okay, um, I was at Nome

Speaker 27 in August.

Speaker 27 Talked to everybody that I could talk to about it.

Speaker 27 Nobody thought he got taken by a bear.

Speaker 27 Nobody feels like he went out into the wilderness.

Speaker 27 I know he had also had a relationship with Christine Pascoia.

Speaker 26 Her relationship with Joseph was it friendly? Was it intimate?

Speaker 27 Her sister had said that they were like boyfriend, girlfriend.

Speaker 27 And I know the family was kind of putting a squeeze on him to kind of hook up with her.

Speaker 27 He went to their house for dinner and family dinners, and they treated him kind of like family.

Speaker 27 I talked to

Speaker 27 she works at the native village of Council

Speaker 27 and Jake Fentonbenz works there. She told me that she let him know he could go help in the search.

Speaker 27 And he said no.

Speaker 27 she asked him again a day later and he said no

Speaker 27 just so you know i don't even know the guy

Speaker 26 i know they were roommates do you feel like there's a reason why he didn't go help

Speaker 27 well i don't know it was his roommate so

Speaker 27 and then he made a point to say that he didn't know him So I don't know if anybody's asked him if he didn't go help because he had to work

Speaker 27 because his supervisor told him he could go help twice.

Speaker 27 And then he said, no, and just so you know, I don't even know him.

Speaker 27 I've also talked to Jake

Speaker 27 and I said, do you know what happened? And he said, well, we were out earlier that night. And he said, we got separated about nine, but I can tell you that he was out till 3 a.m.

Speaker 27 and Jake had a party that night at his house.

Speaker 27 Because he went missing.

Speaker 26 Do you know if there was anybody else living at that house? Or to your knowledge, it was just Jake and Joseph?

Speaker 27 No, and Kevin Pesquia.

Speaker 4 Jake's uncle.

Speaker 4 Was there a third roommate in the house, too?

Speaker 4 This would change things.

Speaker 27 And I've been really nervous to call, but I just kind of felt really strongly about

Speaker 27 the weird feeling I got from, you know, Carol Presquoya, and Bonnie.

Speaker 4 She's referring to Jake and Christine's family. From her impression, their behavior just seemed a little off.

Speaker 27 They were really catty, and typically they're the kind of people that are really kind of standoffish. And

Speaker 27 just the more I kind of started asking around, it became clear that there was something

Speaker 27 like they're covering up for each other or something. I can't explain it.

Speaker 27 The parents of Christine

Speaker 27 who suddenly kind of gravitated towards being more friendly with the old mayor of Gnome, and

Speaker 27 I mean, being overly social, I guess, in a way,

Speaker 27 trying to establish some sort of credibility or something.

Speaker 4 There's a lot of things that need to be cleared up in this case. Why is it that so many details are just inconclusive?

Speaker 4 I'm holding back as much as I can to not fall down all these rabbit holes, but some of them seem actually worth exploring.

Speaker 4 It's time to dig a little deeper and push for our own tips. About a year ago, we made our own tip line for Florence Akpiallik and Joseph Valdez,

Speaker 4 And we put up a $50,000 award for information leading to an arrest.

Speaker 4 We did not put this number out publicly, but it's very easy to find if you live in Nome.

Speaker 4 For months and months, we got nothing. Not a single call.
But then seemingly out of the blue, I started receiving very cryptic anonymous messages.

Speaker 1 Payne, I want to stay anonymous, but I have a lot to tell you. I knew Kevin Peskoya,

Speaker 1 and I don't know why nothing came out about his dark past.

Speaker 1 He was crazy.

Speaker 1 One time Kevin told me something weird. He said,

Speaker 1 I know how to make people disappear. I used to be a cop.

Speaker 1 He was always anxious, always angry.

Speaker 1 On Saturday, June 25th,

Speaker 1 I was driving out. It was around 3 or 4 p.m.

Speaker 1 And that's when we saw Joseph's truck.

Speaker 1 It was off the road, down the hill.

Speaker 1 And there were two men standing next to the vehicle.

Speaker 1 One was tall, and the other was shorter.

Speaker 1 One had a black jacket, the other, a blue one.

Speaker 1 Both doors of the truck were open, and they had their backs to us, and hoods covering their faces.

Speaker 1 They clearly didn't want us to see them.

Speaker 1 I never told the police this.

Speaker 1 Who do you think they were, Payne?

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Speaker 2 They've become my go-to for holiday gatherings, errands, and everything in between. The layered look is the best.

Speaker 2 Step into the holiday season with layers made to feel good, look polished, and last from Quince. Perfect for gifting or keeping for yourself.

Speaker 2 Go to quince.com slash vanishedweekly for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too.

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Speaker 25 Cold mornings, holiday to-dos, and all the hustle.

Speaker 24 I just want my wardrobe to be simple.

Speaker 25 Pieces that look sharp, feel amazing, and that I'll actually reach for every day. That's why I turn to Quince.
And the bonus, their pieces make gifting completely effortless.

Speaker 25 This season, Quince keeps it smart and simple.

Speaker 24 $50 Mongolian cashmere sweaters that feel like a little everyday luxury and wool coats that are both stylish and durable.

Speaker 25 Their denim fits perfectly and is insanely comfortable. and all without the high-end price.

Speaker 25 By working with ethical factories and top artisans, Quince delivers premium quality while cutting out the middlemen.

Speaker 24 So you get luxury pieces without the luxury markup.

Speaker 25 I'll be honest, I've been living in their cashmere sweaters.

Speaker 4 They're so soft, they look good, they hold up beautifully, even through all the holiday chaos.

Speaker 25 Quince also has amazing options for home, bath, kitchen, and travel. If you're looking for a great one-stop shop for gifting, I'm telling you, Quince is where it's at.

Speaker 25 Give and get timeless holiday staples that last this season with Quince. Go to quince.com slash upandvanished for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too.

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Quince.com slash upandvanished.

Speaker 2 The holidays are here and wow, they're busy. It's easy for your wellness goals to slip.
That's why I rely on broons to stay on track.

Speaker 2 They're a daily snack pack of gummies that's more than a multivitamin, a greens gummy, or prebiotic. It's all of that at a fraction of the price.
And the best part, they taste amazing.

Speaker 2 Each snack pack has six grams of prebiotic fiber, three times the fiber of leading greens powders, and more than two cups of broccoli.

Speaker 2 Plus 20 plus vitamins and minerals, vegan, nut-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, no artificial colors or flavors. Groon's ingredients are backed by over 35,000 research publications.

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Speaker 2 Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun is a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with Odyssey. Your host is Payne Lindsay.

Speaker 2 The show is written by Payne Lindsay with additional assistance from Mike Rooney. Executive producers are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsey.

Speaker 2 Lead producer is Mike Rooney, along with producers Dylan Harrington and Cooper Skinner. Editing by Mike Rooney and Cooper Skinner with additional editing by Dylan Harrington.

Speaker 2 Supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan. Additional production by Victoria McKenzie, Alice Kanik Glenn, and Eric Quintana.
Artwork by Rob Sheridan. Original music by Makeup and Vanity Set.

Speaker 2 Mixed and mastered by Cooper Skinner. Thank you to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA, Beck Media and Marketing, and the Nord Group.

Speaker 2 Special thanks to all of the families and community members that spoke to the team. Additional information and resources can be found in our show notes.

Speaker 2 For more podcasts like Up and Vanished, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app or visit us at tenderfoot.tv. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 4 If you want to be a bigger part of the discussion here, go join the Up and Vanished Discord. We put a link to it in the episode description.

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Speaker 13 Every story has layers, and sometimes the truth hides in plain sight. I'm Josh Dean, host of Chameleon, the podcast about people who transform, deceive, and survive.

Speaker 13 From con artists to unbelievable yet true occurrences, we dive into stories where nothing is ever quite as it seems. Because to understand the world, you sometimes have to change the way you see it.

Speaker 4 Listen to Chameleon wherever you get your podcasts.