Ep.7: Closing In

Picture yourself alone in the middle of nowhere and there's somebody following you.

He went on his way, always so thought, and then we went on ours.

But in reality, he really followed us up there.

On Deadly Nightmares, the true crime podcast from ID, listen to real stories of ordinary people stalked by serial killers and attackers.

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we're not going to die.

Listen to Deadly Nightmares on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Previously, on Who Took Misty Copsy.

She got along with everybody.

Super friendly, kind, gentle soul.

Does he go to pick her up?

It's just not clear.

And we just don't know.

Could he have abducted and killed her?

Absolutely.

From ID and Arc Media, I'm Sarah Kalin, and this is Who Took Misty Copsey.

After everything I've learned about Ruben Schmidt, the 18-year-old friend who Misty called for a ride home the night she went missing, I truly cannot understand why police haven't gone after him harder as a suspect, especially the original Puallet Police Department detectives.

Those investigators knew that Ruben made incriminating statements to his boss, things like how far off they were in their searches.

They had Ruben's roommate, James Tinsley, telling them that the night of the fair, Misty called looking for a ride home, and shortly thereafter, Ruben left the house without explanation.

And when Diana spoke to Tinsley the day after Misty disappeared, he explicitly stated that Ruben left to go get Misty.

What's more, Rubin openly admitted to those officers that he went to his grandmother's remote farm the day after Misty disappeared, but said he blacked out and couldn't remember why he drove there.

He added that he'd been having blackouts since he was five years old.

The farm just so happens to be about 15 miles from the fairgrounds, on the way down 410 in the direction of Misty's jeans.

I drove by what was once the Schmidt family farm.

It would indeed be a perfect place to dispose of a body.

It's not a big open field where someone would easily be spotted, where a pile of fresh dirt might be obvious.

It's more of a homestead, a secluded spot in the woods framed by a winding creek and massive evergreens.

Driving from Tacoma, where I stayed while in Washington, it's about a half hour down a major highway, then another 10 minutes along a slightly smaller highway lined with strip malls.

I passed a Lowe's and a 7-Eleven up on a hill, a Mexican restaurant and a gas station just before a four-way stop.

The bustling businesses gave way to farms and a small local pub for a few minutes, and then I nearly missed a right turn onto a densely wooded road.

There's not much reason to turn on this road short of visiting one of the few houses along it.

All of that has my antenna way up when it comes to Ruben, who is now in his early 50s and still living in the area.

On top of all this, my producer and I just found a Facebook post by a user named Haleem Khan, claiming to be Ruben's nephew, asserting that his mother, Ruben's sister Julie, helped Ruben pass the lie detector test.

In general, I have to be super careful with Facebook posts like this.

The author could totally be some wacko who's obsessed with the case, just trying to stir up trouble.

There hasn't exactly been a shortage of this variety in Misty's case.

Still, I definitely want to track this person down to vet their story for myself.

Unfortunately, Haleem is a ghost.

Based on ancestry records, I've figured out that Ruben did have a sister named Julie, but there's no Haleem Khan.

It seems to to be a fake name.

The Facebook post was from 2014, the profile long since deleted.

I try internet data scraping tools, website archives, public records, nothing.

That makes me even less sure about the credibility of the claims.

I decide to text Misty's brother Colton to see if he's aware of this post or knows anything about it.

He doesn't, but he tells me that he has exchanged messages with with someone on Facebook with a similar story.

A woman claiming to have info about Misty's case that Pualip police might be interested in.

He shares the contact info.

I send her a text and she writes back.

To protect her identity, I'm going to call her Jane.

We have some back and forth over text.

Jane explains her connection to the Schmidt family.

Again, to protect her identity, I'm not including all the details.

The thing to know is that starting in the mid-90s, she spent a lot of time around the Schmidt family.

I vetted her background.

Her connection to the Schmidt is entirely credible.

Jane agrees to meet after work that same day at a diner in Seattle.

We sit down at a booth in a quiet corner of the restaurant.

I know when you texted me, I was reading it.

And I was reading it and I was like, I don't even know how to respond because there's so much that I just have never been able to

say, you know, because who do I say it to except for on posts, you know, and nobody listens to that.

So, yeah.

Jane says that even though she's nervous to speak about this, she feels like she can't sit by and do nothing.

This family needs closure.

That's not fair to them, that they have no closure and that her mom died without knowing what happened to her baby.

Like, that's so fucked up.

I can't even imagine.

I can't.

And, you know, like, i don't know misty i never knew misty but like i'm invested and i feel for them and i want their closure you know it's not fair and that's just where i'm at

you know especially when i i know i believe to my core that reuben did it okay

i can think of plenty of reasons why someone might think that but What does Jane know that makes her so sure?

She says it all started with a conversation with a member of Ruben's family who she knows well.

A conversation she estimates to have taken place in the early to mid-2000s.

She mentioned it to me about, you know, Ruben was the one who had something to do with that girl that was missing.

And I was like, what girl that was missing?

I didn't know anything about it, really.

And then she told me, yeah, he had showed up at her grandma's house in the middle of the night and was acting all sketch and weird.

And she was like, why are you here?

And I don't remember what she said his reasoning was, but I swear she said he was all dirty.

He was like covered in dirt and it was late and then he went to sleep or something.

And so she's like, I think that girl's here on the property somewhere.

Significantly, based on her own interactions with him, Jane was not surprised to hear that Ruben might have been involved in something like this.

There have always been rumors of dark secrets in the Schmidt family, she tells me.

And in her opinion, it trickled down from Ruben's mother, a woman named Olia Gunderson.

She's the ringleader, dude.

She is bad news.

She was.

She encouraged them.

She taught them the life of crime and how to

trick the system and how to get away with stuff.

And she will lie and steal.

And yeah.

Olia is no longer alive.

And while I always want to be mindful of casting aspersions on those who can no longer speak for themselves, the ancestry information, published articles, and court records, I'll back up everything I'm saying.

Olia had at least 13 kids, creating a sprawling family tree of Schmidt's, Garrisons, and Gundersons.

And the public records collectively paint a sordid picture.

The very idea of having 13 children kind of boggles my mind.

I wonder aloud how Olia ended ended up in such a position, but Jane says this was no accident.

Because the more kids you have, the more welfare you got.

She knew how to work the system.

I know, but then that's just more people you have to feed.

I have never seen them.

No, they just go out and steal.

I guess that many mouths isn't so many to feed if she didn't bother feeding them.

And Jane says the kids often went hungry.

No matter what I might think of someone individually, there is a generational tragedy bound up in this.

It's easy to see Olia as a villain, but I remind myself of the importance of asking, what happened to Olia to turn her into this person?

And then her kids like Reuben.

I'm not excusing any of his potential behavior or that of anyone else in the family.

But it is heartbreaking to think of any little kid living like this.

Jane describes Olia's kids running around lying and stealing to feed themselves and their siblings like a band of brats in a Dickens story.

It's no surprise that some would turn out pretty messed up.

It's hard not to have empathy for those young children, whatever kind of adults they became.

And these traumatic experiences seem to have bonded them for life.

Jane says that when she knew them, the Schmidt family moved like a pack, always getting into trouble together, always intertwined in each other's business, with Olia's house as the central hub.

The kids were always there.

Every time I went to her house, Mark was there and Eric was there.

Like everybody was always over there.

Yeah, they're all up in each other's shoes.

Yeah, yeah,

always.

I asked what her interactions with Ruben were like.

Ugh.

He was creepy.

Very sketch.

I never felt comfortable with him.

He was very creepy.

She says Ruben would make lewd comments.

He even put the moves on her a few times when he had a girlfriend in the next room.

And it was obvious to her where he learned this behavior, from his older half-brothers, the Garrisons.

There was Clint Garrison, the one who, I've learned, is serving a 106-year sentence for a string of home invasion rapes in the 90s.

He was incarcerated when Misty went missing.

It doesn't exactly take an expert to have started this investigation by checking that dude's whereabouts at the time.

Then there was Mark Garrison.

Mark hadn't gotten into quite as much trouble as Clint, but he was far from angelic.

His own criminal record includes convictions for felony burglaries in 1977 and 2004, assault and malicious mischief in 1990, and two misdemeanor violations of domestic violence orders in 2004.

This record landed him squarely in my sights.

He's trash.

He was crude.

He was just rude and crude and gross.

And he just was always just

nasty, just a piece of work.

The stories go on and on.

My researcher found records showing that the garrison's grandfather pled guilty to two counts of, quote, indecent liberties with his eight-year-old daughter.

In my various searches, I find records of members of the Schmidt, Garrison, Gunderson families in and out of prison, trouble with drugs, domestic violence, and restraining orders.

I can barely keep track of the collective rap sheet.

It was enough to make them infamous in the area.

Schmidt, Garrison, Gundersons, all three of them, the police all knew about them back in the day.

I don't know how it is now, but I always felt that they had something on the police, and the police didn't pursue it say more that's just my feeling i don't know anymore it was just why wouldn't they knowing their reputation why wouldn't they pursue it unless there was some kind of leverage or something

it's just my brain you know i watch a lot of true crime so i don't know

to be clear Neither Jane nor I have proof of this.

That is to say, proof that Ruben's family might have held some sway over local law enforcement.

But I don't think this is a far-fetched notion.

Ruben's story has always been super suspicious, and he came from a notorious family that the cops would have to have known about at the time.

I can't help but ask the same question Jane's asking.

Could the Schmidt, Garrison, Gundersons have had something over on the cops?

Some source of leverage which explains why the cops basically never pursued him?

That feels like a question we may never get an answer to.

But I think that Jane may be able to shed some light on some of my other questions.

Questions about members of the family, Ruben's uncles, and the so-called Haleem Khan.

Picture yourself alone in the middle of nowhere, and there's somebody following you.

He went on his way, we so thought, and then we went on ours.

But in reality, he really followed us up there.

On Deadly Nightmares, the true crime podcast from ID, listen to real stories of ordinary people stalked by serial killers and attackers.

Listen to Deadly Nightmares on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There's a key element of Ruben's involvement that I'm wondering if Jane might be able to help me clear up.

The friend Ruben was staying with at the time, James Tinsley, told Diana that Ruben and his uncle went to pick up Misty that night.

Remember, Ruben told Diana that Misty called, but he did not go pick her up because he didn't have enough gas.

But Ruben's roommate told Diana that Ruben and Ruben's uncle went to pick up Misty.

I ask Jane if she has any idea who this uncle may have been.

She says no.

As we know, there were a bunch of uncles in the mix.

I bring up my hunch that because of the big age gap, perhaps Ruben might have referred to his older half-brothers, the Garrisons, as uncles.

But she doesn't remember anyone calling the Garrison brothers uncles.

Still, I can't help thinking that Mark Garrison's criminal record and conduct could line up with someone who may have been involved with a violent sexual assault, so I don't want to rule him out entirely.

And then there's that uncle Don with the orange truck that I've heard about.

But for now, at least, the identity of this uncle who may have been with Ruben that night remains an open question.

Jane says it has never occurred to her until now that another member of the family might have played a hand in Misty's disappearance with Reuben.

I figured that he did something and then I need help.

I did something.

You know, and they come running because that's how they were.

If one brother went and, you know, well, just like when Clint was accidentally released from the Pierce County jail.

Oh, yeah.

So when he was in jail, Pierce County jail, he was

going to court for something.

And I guess those charges got dismissed.

And then I don't know how it works when they bring him back in to put him back into jail.

Something got missed up.

They saw that it was dismissed and they let him go.

And then it was manhunt, Pierce County, blah, blah, blah.

Jane recalls that members of Clint's family were hiding him.

A 1999 newspaper article says Clint was found hiding at a friend's house in a nearby town.

Regardless.

This is like a freaking soap opera with this family.

This culture that Jane describes of the family protecting each other at all costs, perhaps a product of the bonds that were formed so tightly during their impoverished, traumatic upbringing.

It makes it all the more believable to me that an uncle might help Reuben commit or cover up a crime.

That many members of the family might create a code of silence.

a pact to lie if anyone ever asked questions.

This reminds me of the Halim Khan post, how the post read that the author's mother, Julie, helped Ruben cover up Misty's death by passing a lie detector test.

I mentioned the post to Jane.

There's just this one, like kind of a blog post almost from years ago with this name Halim Khan, who claimed to be, you know, I explained that I think this is a fake name, but that the person claimed Ruben's sister Julie was his or her mother.

I asked if Julie ever had kids.

She had two boys, Derek and Clayton.

Jane says that a while ago on Facebook, she saw a long, scathing letter that Derek wrote to his mother.

Addressed to Julie.

And it was this whole letter about what a horrible person she was and just like this whole thing all out there.

And I was like, wow, I didn't know all that.

Jane pulls up the post.

Oh, yeah, it's a lot.

There's a lot.

Like, dear Julie, and then it just goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on.

This is Derek.

What's Derek's last name?

I don't know.

Hearing this read, the style of writing, the word choices, the details laid out.

If I was a betting person, I'd bet serious money that Haleem Khan and Ruben's nephew Derek are one and the same.

It's been several hours.

The sun has long gone down outside.

Jane seems relieved to have gotten this off her chest.

I hope that she is relieved anyway.

This is one of those things where it's like, I don't know if you know how valuable what you know is, you know?

I never thought it was.

I'm like, it's just hearsay.

But I fully believe that you killed somebody and you're living your life.

And

this family's constant 30 years wondering what happened to their kid, you know, and their family member.

And it's not right.

So

if anything I say can help bring them closure somehow, then let's rock it because

they deserve it.

It's not fair.

Jane has helped me develop a significantly better understanding of the tangled web that is Ruben Schmidt's family.

I'm grateful.

And as we say goodbye, I know my next stop.

I want to speak with Derek and try to find the family member who Jane mentioned.

This is a delicate business.

It can freak people out and scare off sources if I come in too hot, especially so many years later.

So this approach will take some finesse and some time.

Time I don't really have, at least not in this first trip to Washington.

Of course, I can and will come back as needed, but there's one thing I'm desperate to do before I leave.

I really want to get myself onto the old Schmidt family farm.

And as luck would have it, I hear back from the new owners of the property, a couple named Aaron and Lindsay.

They're happy to talk and say they can make time the following afternoon.

The next day, as I'm pulling up the directions to the former Schmidt family farm, heading down Highway 410 for the third time in as many days, my producer Tessa gets to googling.

This is interesting.

A blog by Aaron and Lindsay.

Oh,

it's a website that Aaron and Lindsay published about their purchase of this old farm.

A blog about their work renovating the property and farmhouse and some unusual activity.

We've had some pretty stressful events unfold at the farm.

Looks like they've had a lot of break-ins.

That sound is me literally spinning around in my seat.

Break-ins?

On the property where Misty may have been buried?

Excuse me?

We can't get there fast enough.

Aaron and Lindsay's blog turns out to be a gold mine.

There are pages and pages of posts, including several posts about a series of mysterious break-ins.

As we drive out to their house, Tessa keeps reading.

Okay, March 19th, 2017.

There's a photo of a door that's been busted in.

Oh, yeah.

We drove out to the farm this morning to check on things and knew something was wrong as soon as we saw the gate to the driveway open.

Someone cut the chain and lock with bolt cutters and kicked open the tool shed in the barn.

Luckily, they didn't seem to get into the house.

We didn't actually see anything missing.

There's so much junk there right now.

Nothing much of value to take.

It was strange that they likely drove in.

Why else break the gate?

You can slip around it on the sides, but didn't take anything that could have had some value, like the crane sink or the barbecue or the riding lawnmower.

Maybe because this someone wasn't looking for something of monetary value.

What if this was Ruben Schmidt or an uncle looking for something that ties them to a crime that had been committed or a body disposed on this property.

I'm hoping this visit to the farm will help me answer this question.

Will something in the barn look obvious?

What are the chances something is still there?

Or that seeing the property will help me think through this in new ways?

An hour or so later, we've made our way off the highway, past the strip malls, and onto the densely wooded road leading to Aaron and Lindsay's house.

In the daylight this time, it's actually pretty stunning.

Huge, moss-covered pines arch over the winding road with vines snaking down their trunks.

Mist and sunlight seep through the dense trees.

It's like something out of fern gully.

We make a sharp right onto their steep driveway.

Everyone calls it the farm, but the way Aaron and Lindsay's property is nestled in the hills and trees here, it certainly feels like more of a homestead.

We park in their gravel driveway and I step onto the front porch.

Before I even knock, Aaron opens the door and shows us inside.

If he and Lindsay are at all apprehensive about a homicide investigator sending them cryptic messages and asking to come to their home, they're not showing it.

Aaron and Lindsay are warm and inviting.

We take a seat on their comfy couches.

There's a fire warming the living space.

It's all so cozy and lovely.

And suddenly I realize I have no idea how to even begin to explain to them why I'm here.

Um, okay.

What do you have any guess as to like why or what case it was that brought your address to our attention?

Absolutely not.

Long, deep sigh.

I start at the beginning.

I tell them the story of Misty's case, starting with the night of the fair.

Misty and her best friend getting ready to head home and starting to call their friends for a ride.

Somewhere in those flurry of phone calls before they left the fair, she said she was going to get a ride with a guy named Ruben Schmidt.

Oh, interesting.

Do you know that name?

Just the Schmidt name,

but not Ruben.

I don't think Ruben in particular.

When they bought the property in 2016, they learned that the previous owners were a couple named Fred and Vera Schmidt, who had died years prior.

The younger generations had apparently taken a few years to figure out what to do with the property and finally decided to sell it.

I get back to Misty's case.

How she was never found.

How clothing believed to be hers was found about 11 miles from here down Highway 410.

How Ruben Schmidt admitted to driving to this farm within hours of her disappearance.

Which leads me to the reason I'm here on their property talking to them today.

They did further searches for Misty's remains after those clothes were found there off 410.

And

Ruben told several people they're looking for Misty six and a half miles away from where they should be looking for her.

Oh, interesting.

So it's real hard to say to somebody, there may or may not be remains on your property.

Oh, wow.

But

that's kind of where we are.

It's an awkward moment.

I'm worried Lindsay and Aaron might be super freaked out.

Frankly, I wouldn't blame them one bit if they politely said, nuh, get out of our house now, please, and thank you.

But they're totally understanding.

Disturbed, sure, but calmly taking this all in.

You know, there's this funny...

Tell them about what Caitlin said.

So the first blog article that we did about the break-in, where we said there was nothing of value taken, there was a red shed that was broken into.

The door panel was broken.

Inside...

That

the only thing that was kind of rummaged through was an old toolbox,

like wooden truck bed toolbox.

That was not yours.

That was not ours.

We had not sorted anything out of that shed.

It was all still stuff originally from the property.

The property as is.

There was an old car on here.

There was just tons of junk and stuff piled up everywhere.

They just left it as is.

And I knew that this had been gotten into because it was kind of originally sitting up in the rafters.

i was kind of wondering what um what was in this and it had been taken down and opened up and was completely empty that as far as we know was the only thing that was taken on that first break-in

shortly after that

we were walking around the property and two of our neighbors came onto the property and they said, oh, we saw somebody walking around the property.

We wanted to come and check on it.

And we said, oh, thank you.

We just had a break-in.

Their exact words were, oh, have you checked Linda's brother?

I don't remember them saying the name Ruben, and I know that the family is larger, but their first instinct was that this break-in was related to somebody in the family.

I mentally check my family tree.

Linda is Ruben's aunt.

She has three brothers.

Ruben's dad, who is deceased, and Ruben's uncles, Don and Tom.

Of course, I have no proof that the Schmidt were involved in the break-in, and there was no evidence collected after the break-in.

But Aaron reiterates that they hadn't even started renovating yet.

To any outsider, it was just the old Schmidt house, sitting as it had been for years.

The only difference was that on paper, it had recently been sold to new owners, as is, with all the Schmidt family junk on it.

A A difference that only someone in the Schmidt family would be likely to know.

I want to be crystal clear.

This is purely speculation, but it is speculation based on years of experience.

I would be a fool to ignore the fact that these thieves acted upon the sale of the property, and it failed to result in anything of value vanishing from the property.

but instead amounted to some rummaging in a hard-to-reach toolbox stored high on a a shelf in a ramshackle barn there aren't very many people who might have had an interest in stuff like that did you have stuff that was theoretically of value that you would have

okay most of it in the house but we had stuff just sitting out in the under the there was a carport here we had stuff sitting out under the carport

and as far as we know none of that was touched.

So had somebody wanted to do the break-in just to make money, they would have had other ways of doing that rather than rummaging through one very specific box.

How big?

Is it one of these ones that would have filled up the full bed of the truck?

The like the ones that sit at the top of, yeah, like now they're you know, like the steel ones that you know sit so it's like five feet across, maybe.

Okay,

the wheels in my head are turning.

Is it possible this toolbox could have held evidence related to Misty's disappearance?

A sweater or shoes, jewelry, weapons, a murder

Again, pure speculation.

This particular incident, which took place in March of 2017, was the first of several break-ins that Aaron and Lindsay had over the next few years.

And just to be clear here, Puyallup PD never investigated these break-ins and may have known nothing about them because this isn't their jurisdiction.

This is Pierce County, nowhere close to Puyallup.

Eventually, after a couple break-ins, Aaron and Lindsay decided it would be wise to install security cameras.

And soon after, they got another clue.

We had somebody walk onto the property.

We have a camera out towards the gate.

He looked up at the camera, waved, and then walked off.

Less than a minute after that, a truck pulled in, loaded up a bunch of stuff, and left.

Do you remember if the truck was like a newer or like an old beat-up truck?

It was kind of an old beat up truck.

Do you remember what color it was by any chance?

I think a reddish orange color.

A reddish orange truck.

I've been told that Uncle Don drove an orange pickup.

Could it have been a reddish orange pickup?

If Don still had this truck, it would mean he had had it for more than 20 years.

And while that at first sounds outrageous, it's completely possible.

Cars apparently last a long time on the west coast, where winters are not as harsh as other areas, and road crews don't use as much salt.

Throughout my time in Washington, I've seen tons of seemingly ancient pickup trucks driving on side roads and highways.

Lindsay and Aaron say these break-ins were not typical of the area.

Not like their neighbors were having tons of break-ins too.

The break-ins seem to be targeted at Lindsay and Aaron, or at this property.

And you're here on this little kind of spot here where you can't really see anybody.

You know, you don't see your neighbors up above.

You don't see your neighbors down below.

So you really are kind of in this isolated little plot here.

I wish that I would have known sooner about this because it would have been great, like right after we purchased it to have somebody come through and look through things.

I mean, because we tore down the original house that was here.

So much here.

Got rid of, you know, mountains of garbage, including boxes of family pictures.

There were boxes of receipts, business records.

Had we known that this was like even on anybody's radar,

I think all of that just went to the dump, unfortunately.

That groan in the background is me reacting with physical pain, thinking about all the evidence that may have been lost.

Of course, no fault of Aaron and Lindsay's.

They had no way of knowing.

But it still kills me to think of what might have been lost.

There was so much junk here.

Dump loads.

Dump truck loads.

We'll never know what was in those dump truck loads of Schmidt family stuff that got tossed, or if a member of the Schmidt family returned to grab something of evidentiary value.

But Aaron does share something else.

One thing I don't know if you are aware of, the property across the road from us technically has the same address because it was originally owned by the Schmidts.

And at one time, this was all part of the same farm.

Aaron tells me that he and Lindsay only own about six acres, but that at one time the Schmidt owned another 40 acres, which they sold separately.

In my meeting with Jason Visna from Puyallup PD, he said that his team searched about 40 to 45-ish acres in 2010 and 2011.

So that kind of lines up.

Though property records that I've found suggest the Schmidts owned more like 55 acres in the early 90s.

And in his interviews with the police, Rubin described it as a 100-acre farm.

Suffice to say, the numbers are a little murky.

But they leave me with one clear question.

Could there have been more land the Schmidts owned in 1992, or at least land they had unfettered access to that was never searched, or not searched thoroughly enough for my liking?

Which leads me to another slightly uncomfortable question.

If my investigation continues to lead me down the path it's been leading me, would Aaron and Lindsay be open to my coming back to search more of the property?

To my immense relief, they say yes.

I feel really sad for this family that has been grieving.

I think that's a particular, I'm a therapist, so I cry about everything,

but I think that's a particular kind of grief when people don't get closure and they just continue to wonder year after year.

And I just, I hope that this family gets some closure.

I hope that they get some answers.

Everybody deserves that.

We obviously feel for the family.

And I mean, if we could help in any way, I mean, that would be great.

Lindsay isn't the only one in the room who cries about everything.

I'm definitely tearing up at their kind words and how deeply they mean them.

People often remark about how hard my work must be because I encounter the worst of humanity every day.

And that is true.

It can be a heavy lift emotionally.

But the fact is, I also encounter encounter this.

Pure empathy and generosity of spirit with no agenda.

It is truly what gives me the hope I need to keep doing this.

We say our goodbyes.

Now I'm really out of time here in Washington.

Early the next morning, I get on a plane and fly home.

I've got my hands full, people to track down and contact, leads to follow up on.

I'm beyond thrilled to have Aaron and Lindsay's permission to search the land, but where?

After seeing the property, it's overwhelming.

Where do I even begin?

I'm back home in Philadelphia, trying to make sense of all this new info.

I start making gentle outreach to people in the Schmidt family orbit, and I I find myself up late at night, staring at Google Earth views of the farm, searching old property records, but I have no clue how to identify a potential dump site from 30 plus years ago on a 55 acre, heavily wooded property.

I mean, I've investigated all kinds of cases, but my area of expertise is serial killer psychology.

Speaking of which, there's a nagging question at the back of my mind.

All signs are pointing me to Ruben Schmidt, no doubt.

But the second most prolific serial killer in American history was operating in the Pacific Northwest at the time of Misty's disappearance, the Green River Killer, who was known to dump bodies a stone's throw from where Misty's genes were found.

I can't help but feel like I haven't fully eliminated the possibility that this was the work of the Green River killer or of one of the numerous other serial predators operating in the area at the time Misty disappeared.

I decide to phone a friend, a friend who just so happens to be, perhaps, the best person on earth to help with this question.

My mentor, Dr.

Ann Burgess.

Dr.

Burgess is the real mind behind the so-called mind hunter work at the FBI, the one who developed the science that makes up the foundation of modern violent criminal psychology.

She is the reason I began this work nearly 30 years ago.

And since reaching out to her for her help with the 1993 murder of Renee Bergeron in Alabama, she has become not just my mentor, but a colleague and dare I say, friend.

Dr.

Burgess was involved in dozens of cases like Misty's, including no-body homicide investigations in the 80s and 90s.

And as I tell her what I know so far about the original investigation, she's not surprised.

This is not well done.

I don't think that's any profound statement, but they did not investigate this.

They chalked this one up to runaway.

She's 14.

She was out doing other things, you know.

Did you see that a lot at that time with this kind of like tween teen?

Oh, yeah, the the runaway remember we did a whole pamphlet on juveniles because so many were just dismissing them as runaways and not taking the cases seriously they still were missing and murdered you know

this is what i like it's it's a 14 year old child even if she ran away she's in danger i know i mean it's just unbelievable how the bias and that gets carried through unfortunately in the law enforcement plus dr burgess says there was a serious lack of understanding about how to handle no-body homicides among police departments back in the day.

My memory is that you don't have many investigators that really know about this.

They're just used to getting a body and answering it.

The training of how to investigate a case without a body, how many places do it?

I don't think that's on anybody's curriculum in terms of law enforcement.

Certainly not back in 92.

A lack of understanding about no-body homicides a culture of dismissing runaways and a third element that created the perfect storm well the green river certainly green river captured so much attention naturally dr burgess is a walking encyclopedia about gary ridgway she doesn't need me to tell her about his legacy in western washington i mean that was a lot of cases there 49 confirmed and proven and he's claimed to have killed at least 85.

Though it's actually impossible to be exact because Ridgway is believed to be responsible for many more murders than he ever admitted.

Even once the police did start treating Misty as more than a runaway, maybe they kind of wrote her off as just another Green River victim.

But Dr.

Burgess says she doesn't think a serial killer like Green River makes sense in Misty's case.

For one simple reason that hadn't occurred to me before.

If you profile that this was someone that knew her,

otherwise, if it was just a serial killer picked up, they would have just dumped the body.

What's the sense of going to such detail to hide it?

I mean, I think that's what's important about this: is that normally it would have been just discarded.

That's what I would say, that it's a known relationship.

This is why she is the best and I am still learning at her knee.

For someone with no connection to the victim, no way to be traced back to them, it's simply a matter of disposing of the victim's remains somewhere that gives them long enough to get away physically.

But if you know the victim, if people might suspect you, then you have to work a lot harder to make sure it's as difficult as possible to link you to the victim's death.

The fact that Misty's body has never been found suggests the killer went to great lengths to hide it, unlike killers like Gary Ridgway, who tend to dump bodies where they are eventually found, less concerned about hiding evidence, especially back before DNA started to be reliably used in criminal investigations.

I'm relieved to hear that Dr.

Burgess thinks I'm on the right track looking at people who knew Misty, like Ruben.

Of course, that brings me back to my other big question.

Where to begin with trying to find Misty's remains?

Well, you've got a case where you don't have the body and you need to find the body.

You know you're going to find bones because it's been so long.

And so who do you look for?

And I don't know anyone better than an anthropologist.

It's like a switch is flipped in my brain.

An anthropologist, specifically a forensic anthropologist.

It makes perfect sense.

Forensic anthropologists are experts on bones, analyzing bones, and some of them even specialize in finding bones.

They are using anthropologists in this way.

I just think that it's a very useful new area, forensic anthropology.

I actually joked recently that of all the amazing experts I know in forensics, the anthropologists were the one group I didn't need to talk to, because without skeletal remains, there was nothing to ask them.

But as Dr.

Burgess explains, they're also experts in this niche world of locating and excavating clandestine graves, sometimes decades or even centuries old.

This is exactly what we need for Misty.

Someone to help me find her, so that we can then determine who put her there.

So, where do I go next?

A forensic anthropologist.

And I just happen to have one on speed dial.

Another member of the group Dr.

Burgess and I founded together, Marion Davidson, a professor at Loyola University, a forensic anthropologist, and a forensic archaeologist.

I call and ask how she'd feel about taking a trip to Washington.

Her answer?

Hell yes.

Coming up on who took Misty Copsy.

So I had that same dilemma that my mom had of which one is it?

Who is it?

Yeah.

So if we're going to get closer to a more definitive answer, I think that's the biggest puzzle piece that's not there.

She tried so hard and nobody would listen to her.

He found this from 1932.

These are the mines.

And this is not a road.

He thinks this is like the tunnel.

When I was looking at it the other day, just

disturbing it briefly, there was these little tiny red flecks of paint that chipped off into my hand.

I knew about the Garrison family.

I had been stuck on the Clint Garrison idea.

We're just going to keep pushing, keep pushing, keep pushing.

And then it's like the idea of it came to me the other day.

It's like the first time I've ever really thought about like, what if we like find her and like this is like over?

Who Took Misty Copsy is produced by Arc Media for ID.

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