Small Town, Big Secrets — Talina Zar E2

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Little towns have their skeleton.

I mean, they're not without.

Greg Thompson is 53 years old and has lived within a 45-minute drive of Wagner, Oklahoma, his entire life.

Wagner is a small town.

I don't even remember what the population is here, right offhand.

I want to say 3,000 to 5,000 people or something, but that could be totally off.

I looked it up.

It's about double that, 8,000.

Still small.

A place where everyone kind of knows everyone and neighbors act neighborly.

When Greg meets Talina, she's a recent transplant to the area.

Outsiders don't normally take interest

in what here.

With Talina not being from the area, that made her even more special in my opinion.

Greg became friends with Talina because he's the guy you call when you've got odd jobs that need doing.

She hired me for like candyman stuff like mowing and weed eating and hanging TVs and just all kinds of handyman type stuff.

In early 2020, before COVID shuts the world down, Talina is on the hunt for the perfect mattress to help her troubled sleep.

This turns out to be a tedious task for the 53-year-old who buys and returns multiple mattresses in the process.

But luckily, she has Greg to help her with the heavy lifting.

Talina wanted to change the mattress out in her bedroom, and she got a new mattress and needed somebody to unpack it and put it on and then haul the old one off.

And so I did all that.

Well, a couple weeks later, she said that she didn't care for the mattress and wanted it to return.

She's got another one coming.

Finally, Talina finds a mattress that checks all the boxes.

But now she has an extra mattress on her hands.

Luckily, she knows a family in need.

She was going to gift that bed.

To us, our son is like six foot one now, so like big beds are worth that for him.

This is Eris Howell, another one of Talina's local friends.

Eris had just closed on her very first house.

Talina had guided guided her through the process, emotionally and sometimes even financially.

In fact, the bed was just one of many things Talina offered to help make Eris' new house a home.

She was a part of the reason why we were able to get utilities turned on, new lock, new light.

She had been saving up a nashtag for us ever since I told her that we were starting a process to buy a house.

I can't even put a name to all the kitchen appliances and trinkets and items that she's put in our house and added to our lives the way she did.

As COVID hits Oklahoma, Eris doesn't get to see her friend very often.

Talina has rheumatoid arthritis and other health issues that make contracting the virus a real concern.

She was immunocompromised, so she was taking it very, very seriously.

But Talina still wants to hand off the mattress, as she promised.

And so on Friday, March 27th, Talina texts Eris to organize a pickup.

She was checking to see if we were coming to get to bed this weekend.

That next morning, the 28th, I got a message to sent.

Abort mission.

I've got a terrible migraine.

I've been staying in bed today.

I said, okay.

Ouch.

A few days go by.

Having not heard from her friend, Eris checks in.

On the third, I messaged her that I hope you're feeling better.

I was wanting to know if I could drop my gifts and

the porch and making the dogs bark because I'm sleeping a lot.

I said, that's okay, maybe another time.

This is her last exchange with Tolina before she goes missing.

From iHeart Podcasts, I'm Melissa Joltson, and this is what happened to Talina Czar.

Hey everyone, I'm on day nine of this virus, and I am pretty sure it has reached my lungs.

For her to just leave people with no way of contacting her and knowing if she was alive or dead was strange to me.

There were a lot of secrets that were very hard to find, and no one wanted to talk about anything.

I'm a really nosy person, so that's how I got caught up in all this.

I was like, this is this is crazy.

Episode two:

Small Town, Big Secrets.

She wanted to help anybody and everybody.

This is Greg, the local handyman in Wagner.

She helped us volunteer picking up trash a few times.

I'd heard of her giving food to people that needed it or giving them little jobs to do like me.

You know, she

knew that I needed something to do, so she'd give me jobs and she had other people that would, you know, do little odd jobs for her or somebody to move through the area from bigger towns and just take in the interest in what's going on here and

trying to help people that live here that made impression on me.

When Talina moved to Wagner, Oklahoma in late 2016, she did it with her partner Tom.

They left their longtime home in Indianapolis and purchased a brown ranch house in Whitehorn Cove, a lake community near the border of Arkansas.

From the outside, the home is rustic-looking, cozy, private, set back from the road and nestled among the tall trees.

It's not easy to move to a totally new place when you're in your 50s and beyond, but the couple had their reasons for choosing Wagner of all places.

One being they had a group of friends who were already established there, like Eris Howe.

She could be exactly the person that she was here,

and

was a little weird, a lot silly, a little queer.

Oklahoma had all the people who brought out the best of those aspects in her.

The two women were several decades apart.

And Eris looked up to Talina like a big sister.

He always left you kind of enraptured by what she was saying because she had a unique way of telling stories.

She had a very dry wit.

And it helped that they shared the same offbeat sense of humor.

Eris told me about one time Tolina was giving her some spices from her pantry that she no longer needed.

I grabbed a bottle of dillweed and I said, oh, look, it's a bottle of my husband, the dillweed.

And we laughed really hard about it.

And then she snatched the bottle away from me and landed to the other room.

She had a label maker.

She typed in that label, said a bottle of Jason.

and I flapped it on the bottle of dillweed and handed it back.

The look of absolute joy and mischief in her face when she handed me that bottle, it was like sharing the best secret.

And we both fell apart in laughter.

To her friends, Talina was not only kind, generous, and hilarious, she was also super smart.

Here's Greg again.

She was a self-proclaimed computer nerd.

I called her my own little hacker.

Talina was a techie and a good one.

She worked on Microsoft products, fixing code errors that no one else could solve.

My wife was going to school at the time for her bachelor's and didn't know anything about PowerPoint presentations and, you know, Microsoft Office and all these things.

And Talina had worked for Microsoft and she'd wrote some of these programs.

So she saw another opportunity to help my wife.

And she started helping her with these presentations and showed her how to do it herself and things like that.

If she felt like like she could help you out of the hole you're in, she was, here's all in.

Talina was helpful to her community and also devoted to her partner, Tom.

The two had been together for more than a decade.

They had one of those bonds that, you know, everybody could aspire to.

You could see, you could just look at them in a glance the way they looked at each other.

They were young fool anytime they looked at each other.

But Talina wasn't a homebody.

She traveled a lot for work, often swinging through Indiana where she and Tom used to live and some of her extended family remained.

And then

while she was on one of those routine trips, the unthinkable happened.

They both moved here and then like

not even, I don't even think it was a year later, Tom had a stroke while she was away on work.

And when she came back from work,

you know, they had found him on the floor.

He was still alive.

He had hung on long enough for her to say goodbye.

Tom was only 59.

In his obituary, he was described as a 22-year veteran of the Army and an avid gun enthusiast.

The family asked that in lieu of flowers, well-wishers could donate to his favorite charity.

for love of dogs.

I remember after Tom and Taft and we went over to her house for the memorial.

It was an intimate gathering with probably about 20 of us.

And we all kind of said a word for Tom.

And you could see around the house where she left sticket that they do not move, do not touch.

The general assumption was those were the last items that he had cut,

and she wasn't ready for those to move.

Talina was shattered by the loss.

They were deeply connected and while she was

able to regain

her joy and find life again, it wasn't the same if she couldn't share it with him.

Tom's death unmoored Talina and for a long while afterwards, she battled with a stubborn depression.

Her and I actually spent a lot of phone calls together afterwards because Whenever you spend an amount of your life with somebody bouncing decisions off of of them or, you know, looking for validation for a decision, you get kind of lost.

And there were a lot of times where she would call me and ask me, hey, what do you think about this?

That happened a lot more after Tom had passed.

I had her come afterwards and I was a little nervous.

This is Kim, a hairdresser in Wagner who cut Talina's hair.

She remembered Talina's first appointment after Tom passed.

I had my mom, who is a widow as well, come sit and be with us so that I'd have like some backup in case it got too

sad.

I don't like to handle that stuff and I'm not good at saying the right words.

But we got through it.

There was just a few, you know, tears that were shed.

Talina, she had even asked if my mom would maybe be her roommate for a while after, you know, because my dad had passed and she was living alone too.

And she had been talking about finding a roommate to share in the bills and stuff.

Talina didn't like living alone in the house she'd shared with Tom.

Nicole, her friend in Tennessee, remembered how Talina navigated her new role as a relatively young widow.

Of course she missed him greatly and missed their life together.

She was dealing with it with grace and moving on with her life the best she could.

She had told me that she had taken in a roommate and

that was mostly more for having someone around than necessity.

It was in 2019 that Talina invited Corey Bomali, a 58-year-old woman she knew through friends, to move in with her.

Corey was also in a transitional period in the middle of a divorce.

I couldn't get Corey to speak to me, but from what I've learned, the two had a lot in common.

They were both adjusting to life without without a partner.

They were both enthusiastic pet owners, sharing a singular love for animals.

And they both dabbled in pagan culture and attended local Renaissance fairs for fun.

After they had moved in together, every time I cut Tolina's hair, the first thing I would say was,

how's your roommate going?

And she always answered, the best I've ever had.

It didn't take long for Talina and Corey's lives to become intertwined.

Soon enough, Corey was over at Kim's getting her own haircut.

While Talina was adventurous with her hair, dyeing it different colors and even doing a perm, Corey preferred a look some might call a mullet.

We'd go short on the, you know, straight across top of the ears and a little bit longer in the back.

It wasn't anything that I wanted to do to her, but that's what she wanted.

Corey quickly fell in with Talina's social circle too.

Here's Greg again.

We'd had Talina and Corey over for dinner and a couple of times went out with them.

You would have thought they were best friends had hadn't known each other for a long time.

Greg found a kindred spirit in Corey.

She too was a handyman of sorts.

Strong, industrious.

From the time that I met Corey Bromley, she was somebody that you know, I could relate to.

And, you know, at the time I was going through things that, you know, I could talk to her about.

Corey also found unique ways to make money, like buying people's old stuff and selling it on eBay.

And Greg thought maybe he could do that too.

I like, you know, pilfering through stuff.

I had done some other work elsewhere and accumulated a bunch of things and she was helping me, you know, kind of take inventory and possibly help me sell some of it.

Talina seemed to really enjoy having a friend around too.

It lifted her spirits.

Here's Eris again.

Having Corey there improved her quality of life.

She would go out in the yard and play with the dogs.

They would go on car rides together and just take the dogs out to the lake.

While Corey's presence was a comfort, there were clues that Talina was still struggling with Tom's loss.

In November of 2019, a few months before COVID hit, Talina wrote a note to her friends on Facebook entitled, Grief Etiquette.

Here's a reenactment of some of that post.

Over the last two years, many people have said they don't know how to interact with me RE Tom's death.

The anniversary of Tom's death is approaching.

I'm already struggling with that combined with lonely holidays.

What I do not need right now are unsolicited videos and pics of Tom.

At At this point, it's difficult for me to concentrate on work or have pockets of happiness.

If I see an unsolicited pic or video during those times, I feel like I ran flat out into a wall.

It's painful.

If you ask first, I can respond when I'm emotionally and physically available to reminisce.

If you post on your own feed, I can choose whether or not to surf that content.

If you send me or tag me in unsolicited reminiscence, I will block you to save my sanity.

Please don't slap me in the face with my grief.

Thanks for hearing me.

Talina was never one to let anything stew.

She would face it head on and address it because, you know, sitting in silence is uncomfortable.

Let's figure out what went wrong and how we can avoid it in the future.

Aris described Telina as assertive and good at setting boundaries.

And so in April 2020, when Talina posts on Facebook, I made the decision at the onset that if it got bad enough, I would not go to the hospital.

Please respect my privacy and give me my alone time.

Eris does.

There were a lot of parts of her life that she kept private and we respected that.

Like we love the person that she

gave us

every time we got to see her

it did seem out of character but considering the fact that she had lost her husband not so long ago

people can be consumed with grease at different times it would make sense to me quick note You've heard most of Talina's cryptic Facebook post already, but there's a few lines I withheld that mention Tom.

Now that you know who he is, this will make more sense.

In and out of fever and chills, with Tom just out of reach,

I'm going to either beat this virus or be with Tom.

I see it as a win-win situation.

Please respect my privacy and give me my alone time on the lake

with Tom.

And this part of the post, it resonates with those who knew Talina in real life, who had witnessed her debilitating depression after Tom's death.

Here again is Nicole, who saw Talina just a few weeks before she went missing.

I didn't take it as her being suicidal.

I just took it to mean that if she passed away from COVID, she was at peace with it because she would be with Tom.

Not that she was actively licking doorknobs and trying to get COVID so that she could pass away.

I took it that she was good either way.

And

I feel like that was true Telena fashion.

You know, well, if I die, I die.

There's not much I can do about it.

And if I live, I'll hug you again.

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A week before Talina disappeared, she posted about her illness on Facebook.

I called my doctor and was told to stay in bed and stay hydrated and self-medicate and call back or go to the ER if my temp reaches 102.

I think Oklahoma's medical system is stretched thin right now.

I am thankful and grateful that I do have someone watching out for me and running the household.

Back to bed.

I'm exhausted.

I love you all.

Talina is talking about Corey, her roommate, running the household and watching out for her.

Corey had been the last person to see Talina before she disappeared.

On the day Talina posted her mysterious message, Corey said she'd been out running errands and came home to an empty house.

The next day, Corey posted to her own Facebook page, alerting everyone to her missing roommate and asking for help.

Here's a recreation of parts of the post.

I called every taxi service I could think of last Eve, and drivers don't keep records.

I also called our phone carrier to try and trace or track Talina's phone and was told of an app that could do this if the phone was turned on with location services activated.

As of this morning, she hasn't called home and her phone still appears to be turned off.

Anyone else hears from her?

Please update me.

A day later, Corey posts again, this time sharing insight into what Talina's experience with COVID had been like.

So this is my COVID-19 rant and the state of affairs here in rural Oklahoma.

Feel free to bypass this post.

I just need to rant or I will scream.

Maybe I need to do that anyway.

When Talina first got a fever of 100.5, we packed up and went to the ER.

We expected to be able to get her a test.

A tech met us outside, questioned all of her symptoms, and sent us home without even allowing us to check in.

We determined that the healthcare system, at least here in Oklahoma, was not equipped to take care of everyone with viral symptoms and would only do so if you got bad enough to probably be admitted.

In looking back,

I think her attitude changed on that car ride home from the ER.

A few days go by.

Talina's friends hear nothing and start to worry she's died of COVID alone in a remote cabin.

But they also start imagining other worst-case scenarios, like Greg, who speculates that maybe Talina was abducted.

When she came up missing and put this big Facebook post on there saying, I'm going to the woods to die.

It didn't sound like like her.

We didn't, I mean, me and my wife, we talked about it.

We live on Highway 69 and Highway 69 goes from the heart of Texas all the way into Kansas.

At the time, you know, there was a lot of abductions and stuff from even Walmarts, you know, over here

in our area.

There was ladies picked up from Walmart for suspected sex trade type things.

Me and my wife watch a lot of crime shows.

We're armchair investigators over here.

I mean, we get a little lead and we follow it and it, you know, we're not trained investigators is what I'm saying.

And so we just didn't know something like that could have happened to Talina.

Her friends think, hope, maybe Talina will emerge over the weekend.

But as Saturday and Sunday come and go, their polite respect for her privacy curdles into concern and dread.

And there's consensus that the police now need to be involved.

On Monday, April 13th, Corey goes to the sheriff's department, but she's told that an adult woman leaving on her own is not considered a missing person, at least not yet.

Four more days pass.

By Friday, Talina has still not returned, so Corey tries again.

This time, time, she's able to file a missing person's report.

That same day, two deputies drive out to Talina and Corey's house.

Because of COVID, they play it safe and don't go inside.

Instead, they talk to Corey in the driveway.

They get the basic facts, like what Talina looks like and Talina's cell phone number, which they immediately try to locate.

Surveying the property, the deputies note a gray shed in front of the house and several vehicles parked in the driveway, two cars and a red truck with a trailer attached.

And then they turn the case over to Detective Joel Weber, who will lead the search.

A few days later, he asks Corey to come back to the station to provide more details.

All right.

Just got cold in here.

Yeah, I'm glad I wore a sweatshirt.

I'm gonna turn this up.

Okay.

Now, two weeks after Talina's Facebook post, Corey arrives at the station wearing a COVID mask and gloves.

We don't have a recording of the conversation, but we do have a transcript, parts of which we've recreated.

Let me just get some background information from you.

Sure.

And then

we'll kind of go from there.

And I don't want you to think that you're in any trouble because you're here.

Okay, yeah.

Yeah.

And that's pretty standard.

It's just normally I would have come to the house, but given the situation and all that.

Detective Weber asks Corey how they met and came to live together.

I've known Talina about 15 years.

Okay.

But we've really just become close in the last couple years since her husband died.

How did you originally meet up with her?

There was a festival here in Wagner, Oklahoma.

Okay.

that we both attended 15 years ago and my husband and I went and met her and her husband then.

She had just gotten together with him and it was actually a big weekend party.

So that's how we all got to know each other first.

Okay.

That's interesting.

Corey explains that she moved in less than a year ago in May 2019.

And the two of you get together, is it because of her husband dying that you rekindle or become closer?

Yeah, I think so.

I was starting to have problems with my husband and initiated a divorce and she had lost her husband and really lost an interest in living.

And then we were getting to know each other better and better and it just got to the point where she asked me if I would stay with her because she couldn't be alone.

Sure.

And then she was having

I don't think she's ever been diagnosed as bipolar, but she had really up periods and really down periods.

And she didn't wanna be alone during the very down periods.

Okay.

So she needed a roommate.

Corey tells the detective that when she moved in, she took on a lot of responsibilities for Talina, who had been struggling with her health.

Corey ran errands for her, handled the household duties.

They got close fast.

They considered each other their emergency contacts.

Talina even listed Corey as the executor of her estate in her will.

And so when Talina got COVID, Corey went into full caregiver mode.

The first thing that happened, she gets bad migraines.

Okay.

And she finished work on a Friday, went to bed early, woke up Saturday morning with a really bad migraine that ended up lasting two days.

She pretty much stayed in bed for two days with a migraine.

Okay.

Monday, she's due back at work, and Monday morning, she asked me to come in and take her temperature, which I did.

And she was running a 100.5.

And so she stayed in bed with her temperature.

I can't remember if we went that day or the next day, but she pretty much kept her temperature at

100.5.

So we said we better go down to the hospital.

We didn't know what this is.

And so we went to the ER at Wagner here.

And a tech came out and asked, you know, what symptoms she was having.

And we told her that she had a migraine all weekend and now she was spiking the temperature.

Sure.

And they said, go home and self-medicate and look for these signs.

And he said, if your temperature goes about 101 or you start developing other problems, to call back in or come back in.

So we went home and she was kind of, at that point,

disheartened or kind of disgusted with things that she couldn't get any help or diagnosis or couldn't even check in.

By this point, there are over 2.6 million confirmed cases of COVID globally.

The U.S.

leads the world and New York is the epicenter with over 250,000 cases, thousands of deaths, and hospitals beyond capacity.

Oklahoma was preparing for the worst, predicting a surge in COVID cases any day now.

She developed a really barking cough, and sometimes she'd start coughing and couldn't stop coughing.

She was starting to wheeze a little bit.

And I said, you know, we do not want you catching pneumonia.

So I asked her the night before, I said, let's take you back to the emergency room.

I think you're bad enough now that they will admit you.

Right.

And she said no.

She just wanted to spend the night in her bed with one of the pups.

On the morning of April 7th, Corey says she asks again if she can take Tolina to the hospital.

And Talina again says no.

She asked me to go out and do a few things and give her some more time to snuggle with.

She's got a little Yorkie that she likes to stay in bed with.

And she just wanted to,

I don't know what she just wanted to do.

Did she ask you to do something specific or just leave for a while?

Yeah, she just wanted me to leave her alone for a while.

I wish I had never gone and run errands that day.

When Corey gets home sometime in the afternoon, she goes into Tolina's room to check on her and Talina's gone.

Corey can't tell if Talina has taken clothes or an overnight bag, but her phone is missing, along with some medication

and Tolina's guns.

She always kept a 45 magnetized to the bottom of her bed.

Okay.

That was gone.

And she always kept a 9mm in the car.

Okay.

And it was gone.

She really,

she gets into these places where she just

wants to expire.

And so she doesn't really care.

She always says, you know, I've got my DNR orders.

I'm not going to let anybody, you know, intubate me or whatever.

Right.

And

she said,

she said, it's a win-win.

I get to see Tom sooner.

And she talked like that a lot.

She'd have good days where she'd be really excited about her job and we'd be planning a trip.

And I think, this is great.

She's got a reason to live.

It's all good.

And then she'd say, yeah, and the first chance I get, I'm gonna check out.

So she'd go really high on her job or a trip and then she'd get really down and depressed and just not want to be around.

Has she ever attempted suicide that you know of?

She has not.

She has not ever attempted it with me and I would know.

Has she talked about how she would do it if she did?

Constantly.

Well what what is the what's her general conversation on that?

Her general conversation with me

that I would know when she had done it

that she had a favorite little spot that she was gonna go to

and I think she was going to use a gun.

Corey explains that Talina was very matter-of-fact about death.

Talina had already organized her own funeral and made plans for her estate.

Talina's always had an end-of-life game plan ever since Tom died.

She prepaid her funeral.

She planned her own music and the order of songs she was going to do.

She told not just me, but I think all of her friends that you would talk to that sooner or later she was gonna go join Tom

on her own time.

Still, Corey says she's holding out hope that Talina is alive and offers to help Detective Weber in any way she can.

He asks her to watch the mail for credit card statements and phone bills that may offer clues to her whereabouts.

What's tough about the situation that we're in is that we don't...

there's no

there's no clear evidence that a crime was committed.

So because she...

Everything points to her intentionally leaving.

In other words, people are free to leave on their own accord anytime they want.

And just because they're missing doesn't mean anything was nefarious.

There's still part of me thinking that maybe someone will just call and say she's sick somewhere.

Most of me is saying that when I get that phone call, it's going to be because someone found her.

I'm supposed to identify her.

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While the cops are talking to Corey, the online sleuths have their own sprawling investigation.

It was super intense.

I mean, we'd stay up for hours late at night.

During the day, I was always on my phone.

We were always Googling something, looking up people online, reaching out to people.

Everybody had their roles.

Brittany, as an Arkansas native, was trying to piece together Tolina's movements and timing.

Jess was the instigator, reaching out to new contacts.

I probably spent 12, 14 hours on my phone or computer talking to people a day, cold calling strangers.

We tried several times to break into her email.

We asked her friend, Jim, who works in IT with Tolina, if he knew her passwords and he sent them to us, passwords that he knew that didn't end up working.

We talked to the neighbors.

The guy across the street, i called him because he had a ring camera and we thought maybe like he's seen telina leave he said it was facing the wrong direction he didn't see anything jess and some of the other girls felt more comfortable calling and talking to people than i did i was not the person that called i was sort of the fact checker this is rosie the small business owner in ohio So if people were telling me things, I would, you know, look things up and figure things out and try to see if these stories made sense.

It got really fast, really intensely fast.

Talina's real life friend, Nicole, starts taking advice from Jess and the sleuths.

They were like, well, why isn't there a missing poster?

And I thought, well, why isn't there?

And so we put together a missing poster immediately, you know, after that and a post that we could share.

Being in marketing, I kicked it up.

You know, I contacted a friend who has a friend that's a producer of Dateline.

We started missing videos.

We put together all kinds of things.

We put together a team in Wagner to do a vigil.

We never let them forget the name of Talina.

Meanwhile, membership of the Find Talena Czar Facebook group grows rapidly to almost 400 participants.

And with the growth, some growing pains.

There were some people at good intentions and some people who

I question their intentions.

There was a a lot of trolls.

Somebody had posted that they saw Telene at a truck stop in Wyoming, just out of nowhere.

Oh, we, she's working at a truck stop in Wyoming at this diner.

And so I think probably 40 people reached out to this woman and she's like, hey, I'm joking.

It was, that's what I would do if I was going to disappear.

And it was like, why would you post something like that?

The group starts off public, but obviously that's a mistake.

So they change it to private.

Jess and some of the other original members do admin duty, vetting new requests, approving comments, keeping things civil.

Some of these people are jerks.

Tempers were high.

I think a lot of that came with being stuck inside, too.

Jess is a true believer in the power of the crowdsource.

I watched Don't Fuck With Cats on Netflix, and those people literally stopped a serial killer.

They did.

The internet came together and was like, look at this room, let's draw out a map.

And the investigation into Talina's disappearance was, she admits, kind of fun.

I really enjoy the picking apart why and the gathering information and the talking to people and sometimes being the person that knows more than the other guy.

Scheming with a bunch of strangers, laughing, brainstorming together, it also makes Jess feel connected.

I think the whole world did that, didn't they?

I mean, I think everybody reached out to anybody they could because we all felt so isolated.

Any kind of connection you could make with somebody you kind of held on tight to it because you couldn't see most of the people in your life unless they lived with you.

It's a new community, united by a common goal, find Tolina Czar.

But it's hard to know just how trustworthy everyone is.

And there's a name that keeps popping up in Jess's conversations.

Has she talked to Tolina's close friend, Marty?

Jess gets a hold of his number.

I was sitting on the side porch.

I smoked at the time.

I smoked cigarettes, so I didn't smoke in my house.

I have children.

So I stepped outside to smoke and I just called him.

Did you feel nervous about doing that?

No.

So I think most people would not cold call someone random whose friend just disappeared.

I'm very, um, I hate to say impulsive because that's not necessarily my entire personality, but a lot of stuff, if I want to do it, I just do it.

I don't know.

I'm very direct.

It doesn't help me make friends.

Nicole had told him that I was going to call.

And so when I called, he said, oh, hey, darling, how are you?

He had a very grandfatherly, southern drawl, just very approachable.

And I was like, oh, this guy's not scary.

He sounds like anybody's grandpa.

And I just said, tell me what's going on.

And that's, he just started talking.

Connecting with Marty is like hitting gold for Jess and the online sleuths because he's on the ground in Wagner looking for Talina too.

And he's also been talking to the sheriff's department.

For whatever reason, He's willing to share everything he has with them.

He's not skeptical of a bunch of strangers doing their own investigation into Tolina's disappearance.

In fact, he welcomes it.

The first big clue Marty gives them has to do with Tolina's cell phone.

The detectives tell him that her phone was last used on April 7th, the same day as the Facebook post.

He had told us that the phone pinged in Arkansas by Lake Mammel, and it could have pinged within a 30-mile radius.

Please respect my privacy and give me my alone time on the lake.

Lake Mommel is a three and a half hour drive from Wagner.

Brittany, who happens to be in Arkansas, starts putting together a map.

We had looked up the phone towers and stuff and I went and like screenshotted the map of the lake and then put a radius over it.

So we started like going on maps and finding out what could be within a 30 mile radius of where her phone pinged and

just trying to figure out where she could be, what cabins were for rent, where she could stay, what lake is over there, what tiny lake, even if it's not the big lake my mouth, there's something else, a pond, or whatever.

At one of my favorite hideaways at one of my favorite lakes, and I've booked it for the remainder of this week.

We had come to the conclusion that there might not have been very many Airbnbs available at the time because of COVID, because of the time of the year,

and because that area that her phone had teamed in is not really like an area that people go to for vacation.

Like Mom Mill is just like a business town.

Like that's where people work and go to school and stuff.

It's not like a vacation town.

Didn't feel up to driving, so I hired a ride.

We called all the Uber and Lyft hubs that we could to see if their drivers kept track.

of who they would pick up because she said she hired a ride.

Pretty quickly, Marty becomes their main source, a person who seems to know a lot, who's just as committed as they are to finding Talina.

He goes around town passing out the missing poster, helps organize the vigil, even talks to the local press.

I saw her on my birthday, which is March 26th,

and then I spoke to her on the phone on the 27th.

During this time, Marty and Jess are in constant communication.

I mean, mean, my text messages 2.27 p.m., 3.15 p.m., same days, just bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, throwing ideas at each other.

It was obsessive.

It's a mutually beneficial relationship.

Marty likes to talk.

Jess likes to listen.

He would talk and talk and talk.

So he'd give us information.

He'd give us names.

He would give us phone numbers.

In the beginning, Jess doesn't know if she should trust Marty.

And that's just her baseline.

She doesn't trust anyone before they prove themselves to her.

So she's kind of pretending with Marty to get him to open up to her.

She'll say whatever to make him comfortable, to get the information she wants.

So all of us wear masks, right?

At first it was almost like copying the way he'd talked to me.

I'd talk back to him that way to try to make it so it's easier for us to communicate.

And then we'd go off on little talks.

Even though she's acting friendly on the phone, Jess is double-checking everything Marty says.

On Facebook, she can see that Telina and Marty seem to be good friends, like he said.

They're tagged in each other's posts a lot, including in a photo taken at the Oklahoma Renaissance Fair in April 2018.

It's Telena, Marty, and his wife, Lorianne.

It's a warm day.

They're dressed in shorts and t-shirts, all smiling widely.

But in the caption, Marty refers to both women as his quote wives, which is confusing.

And so is Telina's name, or more accurately, names.

When Jess runs a basic background check, the kind you can pay for online, nothing comes up for Telina's are.

Turns out, her legal name is actually Telina Galloway.

But even that name hadn't been her name for very long.

Before Talina Galloway, she was Jana Lovic, and before that, that, Jana Dillman.

Jess doesn't know what to make of all this.

With additional research, Jess learns that Talina Czar is more of her online nickname.

I'd done some internet digging, you know, basic Google stuff, and I'd Googled Telina Czar.

And then that popped up with the John Norman Gorian novels.

And I was like,

literally, not very polite of me.

What the hell are you people into?

What is going on here?

Gore was a world of slaves and beautiful women, of human domination by the alien secret priest kings.

And it was also the world

of Talina Talina.

That's next week on What Happened to Talina Czar.

What happened to Talina Czar is a production of iHeart podcasts.

It's written, reported, and hosted by me, Melissa Jeltson, with writing and story editing by Lauren Hansen, our executive producer is Ryan Murdoch.

For iHeart podcasts, executive producers are Jason English and Carl Cadel.

Fact-checking by Savannah Hughley.

Zoe Denkla is our associate producer.

Jeremy Thal is our editor.

Original music by Aaron Kaufman with additional music by Jeremy Thal.

Episodes are mixed and mastered by Carl Cadel.

Voice acting by Lizzie Gore, Chris Ferry, Stephanie Frame, Pete Monica, and Molly Maslin.

Our logo is designed by Ido Moore.

Thanks so much for listening.

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Where do you see the business actually heading?

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The only constant in Hollywood is change.

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