Ep.3: Evidence?

Previously, on who took Misty Copsey.

Detectives never found Misty's remains and they have not been able to tie those jeans or any evidence to any suspect.

This whole thing about finding the clothes out by the Mud Mountain Dam, what are the odds?

I don't believe she was wearing those clothes.

I think it's so hard to try to even make sense of looking at a lot of the unsolved cases because there are so many predators to choose from.

A reporter for the Tacoma News Tribune newspaper made a public disclosure request to the Prior Police Department for the case file about Misty Copsy.

They released the entire case file.

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

I've been on the ground in Washington for about four days, and already the mysteries surrounding Misty Copsy Copsey seem to be morphing and evolving.

It's one thing to start a case trying to figure out what happened.

It's another to arrive on the scene and learn that the only known evidence may not actually be related to the case.

A week ago, I thought I knew one thing for certain: that the only physical evidence ever discovered in Misty's case was a pair of baggy, stone-washed jeans with a pair of socks and underwear in one leg, found in a ditch ditch along the side of Highway 410 about five months after she disappeared.

But now, the person who first told me about this case, former detective Cloyd Steiger, has told me he doesn't think those were Misty's jeans.

I need to get to the root of this.

It's crucial for me to move forward.

That's why I'm heading to meet with local journalist Sean Robinson.

In 2009, Sean published an investigative series on Misty's case with unprecedented access to the Puyallup Police Department's entire case file.

Cloyd was shocked that the city gave Sean that access.

He feels like putting so much info into the public eye compromised any future investigative efforts into the case.

On the other hand, the case was 17 years old when Sean published his story.

And while the police repeatedly said it was an open investigation, they had done shockingly little to advance it in all those years.

So, personally, I'm on Sean's side here.

And I cannot wait to find out what he knows.

My producer, Tessa, and I hop in the car and head south to meet Sean at a local university in the Tacoma area where he teaches journalism.

I'm starting to get pretty familiar with the network of highways that connects Tacoma, where I'm staying, with the surrounding areas.

Hi, I'm Sarah.

Nice to meet you.

Thanks so much for doing this.

Sean greets us outside, wearing a baseball cap and a bulky fishing vest with dozens of pockets, though apparently he's not much of a fisherman.

I hung out with photographers for a long time, and they would always wear these, and I'm like, well, this is good, and it's because I can

put my chucket here and walk the dog and do that.

I have extra pockets.

Just handy.

Yeah, my wife hates it.

As a devoted dog mom myself, I appreciate this commitment.

In addition to teaching, Sean still works at the News Tribune in Tacoma.

He's been there about 25 years.

He spent 20 of those as an investigative reporter.

Nowadays, he's an editor.

In all those years, Sean tells me, the longest thing he ever published was The Stolen Child, a three-part series diving into the case of Misty Copsy.

a case that had gained almost mythical status at the Tribune offices.

It was kind of newsroom lore.

Other reporters, other colleagues of mine, had worked on it from time to time because it was this lingering missing persons case that had never been solved.

In 2007, Sean decides to take a swing at it.

He makes a public records request for the Puyallip PD's case file and manages to make a virtually unprecedented deal.

So they basically allowed me brief access to the entire investigative file.

And they were willing to do it in part because they just had gotten nowhere.

The case is 15 years old at this point.

At first, Puyallup denies Sean's request, claiming that Misty's case is an active investigation.

But Sean keeps pushing, and finally, city officials veto the police department's denial.

They grant Sean exactly eight hours to sit in a room and look through the entire Puyallup PD case file and pick which documents he wants copies of.

Then Sean gets to work.

In May of 2009, he publishes his explosive series.

The story I wrote was not meant to

say, here's the killer.

That's not what I was doing.

What I was doing was saying,

what happened?

and why couldn't they solve it?

And here are some things that these these files reveal about what they did at the time

and the decisions they made, which in hindsight, at times they look bad.

They look bad.

They made some bad assumptions.

They waited too long and a lot of information that could have been gathered was lost because they didn't believe it.

Didn't believe that Misty was anything more than a runaway.

Sean's story details some major failures in the original investigation, which we'll come back to soon.

But Sean says the story was about a lot more than that.

Part of the problem of that story was habeas corpus, right?

There's no body.

They have never found her.

And so it's a story without an ending.

Even with

hints about

possibilities, you still do not have the body, so you cannot be sure.

Instead, Sean focused on the part of the story he was sure of.

Misty's mother, Diana.

This is what this is about.

It's not about you, cops.

It's not about serial killers.

It's about

this person and this person's grief that will not stop.

Sean developed a close working relationship with Diana.

I talked with her for a year.

Almost every day we would talk.

And I drove around with Diana, talked to her on the phone.

I went to all these kinds of places with her, all the key spots.

I went to the place where the jeans were.

On one of these many trips, he and Diana stopped for a coffee.

And we're sitting there in the parking lot and I looked to her and I said, do you ever drink until you cry?

And she nodded.

And that was my lead sentence.

Sometimes Diana Smith drinks until she cries.

And then she calls up the Puyala Police Department and tells them what she thinks of them, which she did.

But that was where I wanted to locate that story at the center of her.

This grieving mom whose daughter is gone and who latches on to anything she can find and, in the process of

desperation, latches onto someone who is both energetic, but toxic.

That person was Corey Bober.

As Sean explains, Corey plays a critical and complicated role in Misty's case, specifically a huge role in why and how those genes were found in the first place.

So, understanding Corey Bober himself is the first step to determining the validity of that evidence.

Sean spoke with Corey Bober at at length.

Over and over and over and over and over again, lots and lots and lots of times.

In the early 90s, Corey Bober is sort of an OG armchair detective, a guy in his mid-20s, a contract subscription salesman for the News Tribune, living with his mother in Puyollop.

He had a few run-ins with the law for drug charges, even spent a bit of time in jail.

He's an analog web sleuth, a true crime junkie before that was really a thing.

He once told Sean that he had, quote, a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder, not full-blown, but there, end quote.

Something that was apparently noted in some of his drug charges.

He'd fixate on stories in the local news, especially about crime.

As of 1992, the thing in the local news that he is deeply obsessed with is the Green River Killer, a faceless serial killer active and at large in western Washington.

Corey had a long-standing theory that he would propound over and over and over again to anyone who would listen from reporters to public officials all the way up to state officials about who he thought the killer was.

Corey thought the Green River killer was a guy named Randy Oxiger.

Randy was apparently an acquaintance of Corey, and when Corey decided Randy was the Green River killer, he not let it go.

He gave mountains of what he claimed was evidence to the Green River Task Force, and they listened.

They looked at Randy Oxiger pretty intensely, but in the end eliminated him from the suspect pool.

Corey still wouldn't let it go.

Even fast forwarding to 2001, when the Green River killer is definitively identified as a man named Gary Ridgway, Corey continues to insist they got the wrong guy.

He is obsessive like that, like a dog with a bone once he gets an idea in his head.

And a lot of the time, there is really no merit to his obsessions.

Still, no one can completely dismiss Corey and his theories.

Corey, in spite of his erroneous thing about who the Green River killer was, was just

really good at ferreting information out of people.

He did things that were just,

you couldn't believe it.

And the reason you would keep listening to him on the phone and taking him seriously was because he'd get something right.

He wasn't always right, but sometimes you're like, God, he's right about that.

I can't, you know, damn, he's right about that.

As a quick example, Sean tells me that one time, through his uncanny ability to, quote, ferret information out of people, Corey uncovered a shocking scandal involving an elephant at the local zoo.

He discovered that the zoo people had inadvertently sent the remains of Cindy the elephant to the landfill.

And they had to apologize and it was an embarrassment and Corey found it.

Corey was right.

So he would have little triumphs like that where you're like, okay, I can't not listen to you because

damn.

To be clear, Corey had no investigative background, no law enforcement experience whatsoever.

And as far as I know, no connection to the zoo.

He just had a knack for digging up weird, hidden nuggets of information, sometimes important ones.

Question is: Does Corey have legitimate detective skills?

Or is this the kind of thing where even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while?

Maybe the distinction doesn't really matter because, either way, sometimes Corey gets onto something and sometimes he's just right.

Again, in 1992, the thing he's fixated on is the Green River killer.

Specifically, two Puwallop girls who Corey is convinced are among the Green River killer's victims.

There's two sets of remains in the area where Misty's genes were discovered on Highway 410.

DeLang and Chibetnoy.

15-year-old Kim DeLange and 14-year-old Anna Chibetnoy.

Both young women, both killed, both found very near each other in an area off of Highway 410.

Highway 410 is this long, straight strip, and you come to these different areas that are owned by a timber company.

Some of those areas, even now, are blocked off by these kind of metal gates.

And

410, in addition to DeLang and Chibetnoy, was a place where there were other confirmed Green River victims dumped.

Corey believes that the Green River killer must be responsible for Kim and Anna's deaths.

He points out that both girls disappeared from the High Ho shopping center in Puywallop, both found about 24 miles away in the same clearing off Highway 410.

Then Corey notices something about the timing of their cases.

Kim disappeared in July of 1988, Anna in August of 1990, two years and one month apart.

Based on this, Corey predicts that another girl will go missing from Puyollop in September of 1992.

Corey wrote about this in his journal in November 1992.

Sean included several journal entries in his reporting.

One says, I was looking at and comparing the victims, checking where they were last seen, when they were last seen, where they were found, when they were found.

I thought, oh my God, I'm sure he's going to kill soon.

He killed in July 88 and in August 1990, and both girls came out of Puyallop.

It was time, September 92.

Another girl will disappear from Puallop, and maybe he'll put her too on the same highway, 410, near the other two girls as a clue in forming a three-person pattern.

He wrote this entry two months after Misty disappeared, but Corey claims he had called in a tip as soon as he made the connection.

He says he warned authorities that a girl might go missing, and then Misty did.

So he had that theory in his mind before Misty disappeared.

And then when she disappears, he's like, ah,

you know, I have it.

Proof.

Aha, Eureka.

And then he he tells Misty's mom

while the Puywallop cops are dismissing her and saying, nah, she's just a runaway.

She's just a runaway.

She's just a runaway.

And they were wrong.

That's how Corey meets Diana as he calls her up and says, I think I know what happened to your daughter.

Unfortunately, serial predation is not this straightforward.

Serial killers operate in cycles, but their cycles of violence and cool down don't move this way.

And And I've never heard of someone killing on a strict schedule dictated only by the calendar.

Even if someone did, no one can really draw a pattern from two points.

I know this after years of studying serial predators.

But for Misty's mother, Diana, who hasn't studied serial predation, someone who is desperate for any help in finding her missing daughter, I can see why she took Corey's theory seriously.

According to Sean, Diana was initially skeptical of Corey.

Sean writes that Diana ultimately formed a, quote, uneasy alliance with Corey.

He would call her and spout his theories for hours.

And she would fall asleep talking to him on the phone, and she'd just be like,

Phone on her chest, cardless phone on her chest, and he's just still going and going and going.

Corey journaled about the moment he heard about Misty.

On October 4th, about two and a half weeks after Misty disappeared, Corey's mom told him she'd seen a flyer in the window of a downtown Puywallop 711.

He reached out to Diana and from there, he just didn't quit.

With the police ignoring her, it's hard to blame Diana for turning to the only person who seemed to take her seriously.

To be clear, Corey had no previous connection to Misty or Diana.

There have been rumors over the years about Corey and Diana having a romantic relationship, but she denied that, and there seems to be no basis for it, other than his obsession with her daughter's case.

The only connection is Corey's theory, that because of the timing, two years and one month apart, Misty must have been killed by the same person who abducted and killed Kim DeLang and Anna Chibetnoy.

And that leads him to believe that Misty's remains must also be near where Kim and Anna's remains were found, out on Highway 410, about 25 miles from the fairgrounds in Puyala.

And so he was leading Diana,

who again was getting no traction from the cops at this time.

I'm going to help you find your daughter, or I'm going to help you find your daughter's remains.

He took, you know, the killer took her out here to 410.

Let's go.

Let's take a group to this particular gate by this particular dirt road along Highway 410.

In November of 1992, Corey organizes two search parties along the north side of Highway 410.

The search parties don't find anything.

Afterwards, Corey realizes Kim and Anna's bodies were found on the south side of the highway.

So he plans another search, this time on the south side.

In February of 1993, five months after Misty's disappearance, Corey, Diana, her sister, and about a dozen volunteers gather at a spot along Highway 410, just about a half mile from where Kim and Anna's remains were found, at the intersection with a dirt road around mile marker 30.

One of the searchers starts poking around in a ditch along the side of the road, and suddenly

everything changes.

Diana later describes the moment in a series of news segments.

This kid, a Boy Scout, was digging through the ditch with a stick and he caught hold of something and he flipped it up on the road and I looked at it and it was her jeans.

I totally didn't expect to find anything, you know.

What did you find?

Her pants, you know, her socks and her underpants.

I held out hope until we found her jeans up on Highway 14.

Diana says she is sure these clothes belong to Misty.

This discovery of a pair of jeans, underwear, and a pair of navy blue socks marks a massive turning point in the case.

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I load my SUVI kitchen robot up in the morning.

I use the app to schedule what time I'm going to want to eat and I come home to a delicious hot meal at night.

I open the door to the apartment and

oh, what does that smell?

I feel like I'm living in the Jetsons.

I don't have to shop or prep or I don't even really need to clean up.

It's so easy and convenient and I can choose from over 50 complete meals.

Suvi adds new options every week, so I can't possibly get tired of eating the same thing.

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Misty's mother, Diana, seems to recognize the significance of the genes found crumpled in a ditch right by the side of Highway 410.

King County comes out.

The Sheriff's Office, Green River Task Force, the key Green River detective Jim Doyne comes out.

And that's really when

the true,

more substantive investigation begins.

It is this discovery that finally pushes investigators to look into Misty's disappearance as anything but a runaway case.

This clothing, the jeans, socks, and underwear is, to date, the only physical evidence that has ever been found in Misty's case.

This is why these jeans are so key to everything we know about Misty's disappearance.

Unless, of course, they are not Misty's jeans at all.

Retired detective Cloyd Steiger says the pants were the wrong size, that he believes Misty was a size 4 and the jeans found were a size 16.

He may have been rounding, but either way, he felt the size discrepancy was significant.

I disagree.

For starters, I don't believe he has any idea what size Misty was.

Not because he's ignoring anything, but because in my experience, the average man wouldn't know how the sizing of women's clothing works and likely could not guess a girl or woman's accurate size.

I don't mean it as an insult, but women's sizing is wild and it can fluctuate drastically between brands.

Even we can barely make sense of it a lot of the time.

Besides the size discrepancy, Cloyd also questioned why the killer would toss them on the side of the road.

Why not put them in a dumpster or bury them with the body?

I can see some scenarios that might explain this, but Sean Robinson raises an even more troubling idea.

There's some not unwarranted speculation.

You know, oh, Corey planted the genes to try to get people to react.

Corey Bober easily could have known what Misty wore to the fair, based on his many conversations with Diana.

So I have to consider the possibility that Corey might have planted this evidence.

An act of a man desperate for people to take seriously his theory that Misty was taken by the same person who killed Kim DeLang and Anna Chibetnoy.

There is also speculation that Corey was actually involved in Misty's disappearance.

Even Diana was suspicious of Corey, as Sean described in his investigative series.

Well, Sean says that the police did briefly consider Corey a suspect, but ruled him out.

No one seems to think Corey is a physically dangerous person, and for his part, Sean doesn't think there's any chance Corey was involved.

I do not.

I have spoken with him so many times, and I know

a lot about how he thinks and works.

I don't think Corey is a killer.

I don't think Corey ever killed anybody.

And I always thought that was sort of ridiculous.

Here's this

obsessive guy who has an idea, who has the wrong idea,

but his

energy and his indefatigability and stubbornness keeps this thing alive when it would not have been.

And in that sense, he did a good thing.

But as Sean's story made all too clear, Corey's contributions were not all good.

I called that thing the stolen child as a reference to an old poem by William Butler Yeats, actually.

Come away, O human child, to the waters and the wild, for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

And in

stealing the case and stealing it from the mom, he made Misty his case instead of hers and stole it from her, which I always thought was pretty sad.

And she just wanted

someone to care.

I've spent a lot of time trying to decide what to make of Corey and more importantly,

what to make of the clothes that were found on a search that Corey organized.

Sean spent a lot of time with Corey.

I trust his judgment and his belief that Corey is not a killer.

Based on what I've read and heard about him, I don't think he is either.

I can't disagree with Cloyd Steiger's skepticism that Corey would be the one to stumble upon the only piece of evidence ever found in Misty's case.

As Cloyd said, what are the odds?

It all brings me back to the same questions.

Is that evidence legit?

Are those Misty's jeans?

The genes are like a metaphorical crossroads.

If they're hers,

then it's something.

If they're not,

you know, what is it?

If the genes are not Misty's, then all we know is that Misty was last seen by a Puallet bus driver around 9.20 p.m.

From there, she vanished into thin air.

But if they are Misty's, then I've got questions.

Like, is Misty's case connected to those of Kim DeLang and Anna Chibetnoy?

Also, who would know this network of roads well enough to know that this remote stretch of Highway 410 is a good place to dump some evidence?

Throw a rock from the Puallp Fairgrounds and you'll most likely hit dense forest land of some kind.

Who would have a reason to be all the way out in that particular direction?

And another question:

Why the jeans, underwear, and socks?

Why nothing else?

What happened that night that led to these items being separated from any other evidence?

I need to get out there and see for myself.

My producer, Tessa and I get in the car and plug in the pinpoint on the map where the genes were found.

Sean gave us a handy Google Maps tour of the area before we departed.

It's about an hour away.

As we drive, we discuss the cases of Kim DeLange and Anna Chibetnoy.

Their remains were found almost practically on top of each other.

Which does make you think it's like two women who go missing from the same place, but it's a mall, so that could be a coincidence.

Two bodies who get disposed of in the same place, but it's in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Northwest.

That could be a coincidence.

But both

that feels like a pattern.

And I mean, dumping bodies almost on top of each other when there's so much remote.

When there's so much, yes,

what are the odds?

And

we also know that

cereals love a dumping ground.

Cereal killers love a dumping ground, for lack of a more delicate way to state it.

A huge part of the pathology in serial predation involves a significant aspect of fantasy.

There is a lot of fantasizing about the sadistic desires and plans before an act is committed, and also revisiting what they have done in fantasy after a killing.

through the memories of it.

This is why we see so many serial killers collect souvenirs.

The souvenirs are a way for them to relive the experience more viscerally, with something they can see and touch.

For some, it means actually going back to the bodies to heighten that visceral experience.

And for some, like the Green River killer, that includes acts of necrophilia.

Spending time with remains like this is critical to many of them.

So having a safe place where they know they can go back again, sometimes over and over, without being detected, makes it simply logical to use the same location repeatedly.

Tessa brings up something we noticed on Sean's map.

The fact that these girls and Misty's jeans were found on 410, where when you look at a map of Ridgeway victims, it's like right there.

Yeah, there are

a good handful

of confirmed

and presumed

victims of Ridgeway

on 410, like in the woods off of 410 south of Enumclaw.

I mean the exact same area.

Looking at the map, the spot where the genes were found is almost due east of the fairgrounds, ever so slightly south on Highway 410.

When I compare this to a map of the Green River victims, Four points land along the 410 route.

These points are east and west of the genes.

Two of them are in the woods, directly north of the jeans.

Yeah, I mean, feels like you can't count him out as a suspect.

No, no, I don't think you can.

With my understanding of the significance of dumping grounds, and knowing that a number of proven Green River killer victims were found nearby in the 1980s, I am not willing to exclude him until I have something more concrete than simply, uh, she doesn't seem like one of his victims.

About 20 miles east of Puyallup, where the fairgrounds are, we pass through a string of small towns.

Buckley, then Enumclaw.

Are we still on 410?

Yeah, I see a new one.

Yeah, we are.

Past Enumclaw, the landscape starts to change.

The road narrows to a two-lane highway, and small towns give way to dense, dark woods.

Yeah, it's pretty

thick woods out here.

I mean, this is far.

It is far.

It feels like we're way out now.

Way out in the opposite direction of Misty's house in Spanaway.

Which makes me realize something.

If Misty did catch a ride from someone who offered to take her home, it would be very clear clear they're going in the wrong direction.

Like, you wouldn't have to go very far out of Pialup to know, like, wait, we're not going near Spanaway, we're going the other way.

So I feel like

you could not drive with her, like, fighting this whole way.

And so, whatever happened, it feels like she's either unconscious or already dead

when they're coming down 410.

It's unpleasant to talk about or even think about, but it helps me paint a picture of what might have been happening in the hours after Misty's last known interaction.

28, okay.

Two more miles, okay.

Finally, we hit mile marker 30 and the intersection with the dirt road where the genes were found.

We pull over and get out of the car.

Guys, so these are timber roads?

Is that what he was saying?

If you look at it on a map, Highway 410 cuts a narrow trench into the woods with many gravel access roads branching off it.

In the early 90s, these access roads and much of the land around them were owned by the Weyerhauser Logging Company.

They allowed the company's trucks to transport massive tree trunks out of the woods.

Anyone who lives around here would know about these access roads.

They'd know that 410 itself is too busy a road to discreetly dump a body, but no one pays much mind to these cutouts.

They fly right past, going wherever they're going.

In this particular cutout, set back a little further from the road is a locked gate.

I haven't been able to confirm if the roads were gated in the early 1990s.

Regardless, when I first researched this case, I saw posts online suggesting that someone connected to Weyerhauser might have killed Kim and Anna.

This theory was based on the idea that only Weyerhauser employees had keys to the gates on these access roads.

How else would their killer or killers have accessed the roads?

But again, I have not confirmed that there were gates in the early 1990s.

Plus, some recreational permit holders have access.

So a connection to a Weyerhauser employee seems far-fetched.

Still, it's on on my mind as we drive down the access road where the jeans were found.

We park the car.

There's not a lot of distance between us and the cars rushing past when we get out, but we want to look closer at the ditch we've heard so much about.

So yeah, it's just like right off this road.

Like really feels like you could just throw something out of a car.

Exactly.

I mean, clearly people have found some garbage out here.

There are some food bags and crumpled cans littered in the ditch.

Seeing this in person, I feel even more sure the clothes were hastily chucked out a passing car window.

Sean had photos of the jeans from when they were found before police collected them.

The jeans were kind of balled up, like they'd been taken off in a hurry.

One of the legs is pulled half inside out, and the socks and underwear are caught up in a pant leg.

There's like something about it that's bugging me like

the way it was like one leg pulled inside out, the underwear is in there.

There's a sock.

I mean, this is, this

feels like jeans at the scene of a sexual assault.

The way it's all pulled, like, just kind of stuffed in there and stuff.

And that you would just throw the whole thing out and it would stay exactly like that.

Stuffed is probably not the best word.

The socks aren't in the pants.

They're just kind of caught up with them.

Like they were definitely all together, not just two separate incidents of random clothes dropped in this spot.

When it comes to the question of whether the genes may have been planted, I really don't think so.

It's unlikely someone like Corey Bober would have had the foresight to plant them looking just like that.

It's too specific.

You would never think that way.

Right.

So then it's like they're either hers or they're another section.

They're somebody else's.

But I don't think they're somebody else's.

Yeah, I think they were hers.

Unfortunately, despite Misty's mom, Diana, identifying the jeans as belonging to her, the investigators didn't reach the same conclusion.

Shortly after the jeans were found, authorities decided they were most likely not Misty's.

Puyoa PD detective Herm Carver was asked about the discovery of the jeans, socks, and underwear on a news segment.

He said, quote, it was not helpful, end quote.

Authorities solidified this position in the wake of Sean's reporting.

Even today, they maintain that they can't prove that the genes were hers because they could never

find any

verifiable traces.

They could never establish conclusively that the genes were on Misty's body.

In 2009, after Sean published the stolen child, Puywallet PD ran ran DNA tests on hairs found on the genes.

The results showed that the hairs were not a match with either Misty or Diana.

And as of 2011, according to local newspaper reports, there were no matches within DNA databases.

Cloyd told me he recommended mvacing the genes, the latest and greatest in DNA technology.

It allows investigators to pull the smallest quantity touch DNA samples off old evidence.

MVACing the genes might reveal a suspect DNA profile or determine if the genes are actually Misty's.

This would tell us more than testing hairs.

Did the Pualip PD follow Cloyd's recommendation?

I don't know.

They have never discussed it publicly.

If they didn't,

it's a major failure.

Without conclusive testing for touch DNA on all three items, of course, I can't 100% say they are Misty's.

But despite what Cloyd Steiger and the Puallip PD may think, I feel strongly that these jeans were the ones Misty wore to the fair that night.

I came out here in the hopes that seeing this part of 410, where the clothing was found, would help me determine the likelihood that they were Misty's.

And it has.

I think these are Misty's jeans, socks, and underwear.

Is there any chance Diana wanted answers badly enough to misidentify the jeans?

Not intentionally, but out of desperation?

Yes.

But I don't think Diana misidentified them.

Diana was able to say where and when she purchased the jeans.

She said she bought them the summer before Misty disappeared at a store on Pearl Street in Tacoma, a busy thoroughfare running north from the heart of Tacoma directly into Point Defiance Park.

The police cataloged the jeans.

The catalog lists a brand called Ethics.

According to what I found, at least one store in the area sold Ethics jeans in the early 1990s.

It's called JC Jeans, and back then, it was on Pearl Street in Tacoma.

This makes me further inclined to believe Diana.

So why were investigators so quick to dismiss Diana, who was saying this from day one?

It has to be about more than the DNA.

Now that I've seen a photo and the location of the jeans for myself, I'm much more certain the jeans were the ones Misty wore to the fair.

I believe Misty's mother, Diana, who told police those were her jeans, which Misty borrowed, and Misty's socks and underwear, which Diana had purchased for her 14-year-old daughter.

So why do the Puyallup cops think otherwise?

Why did they question Diana's identification of the jeans?

Sean said something in our conversation that could help explain this.

It came up when he was telling me about preparing to release his 2009 series on Misty's case.

Before we published that series, we brought them in, meaning the Puyallup cops, to let them read it pre-publication.

And if there are any factual errors here, we'll fix them.

If there's things you question here, we'll fix them.

And basically, for the most part, they kind of sat there looking grim because we had it.

We had everything in there.

And some of it did make them look bad because some of the things they did were

not good.

That's how that went.

Some of them were deeply fucked up.

Do you want me to go there?

Yeah.

Part of the problem was, I'm going to say, class-based

in the sense that they looked at Diana and they said, okay, well, you're...

a trailer park mom and you're not a good parent and your kid probably ran ran away because that's what happens most of the time.

We're just going to wait for her to turn up and blah, blah, blah.

That was the first mistake.

At a time, contextually in this region, when we had scores of missing young women.

Now, Misty was not a sex worker.

She went to the fair, missed the bus, and never came home.

That's what happened.

She didn't run away.

That was not the case.

And they didn't look and they didn't check.

And they made some assumptions about mom that were

just bogus and they didn't go down the really obvious roads that they should have gone down right away and lost access to potential evidence permanently at the beginning that could have been the answer.

I'm not saying it was the answer, but they lost it.

It is infuriating to hear what the Puallet police did, or more accurately, did not do in the days, weeks, and months following Misty's disappearance.

And it's gut-wrenching to imagine what that time must have been like for Diana.

Broad, sweeping failures to act by the only people who could have acted, that could mean those missing answers are lost to time.

The first 48 is a giant cliché, but Sometimes clichés are based in reality.

The steam you can gather at the very beginning is now lost forever.

The police did not try to speak to a single witness for almost six months.

Not one person.

Not until the jeans were found in February of 1993.

Only then do they interview Misty's best friend, Trina, with whom she had gone to the fair.

When police finally talked to Trina, Trina says that Misty called her friend Ruben Schmidt for a ride.

She says Misty started calling him around 8 p.m.

and called about five times.

She calls him from this phone booth.

Trina was there and heard her make the call.

And Ruben says he can't come because he doesn't have enough gas, because he never had enough gas in his shitty car.

There's a back and forth.

Misty tries to convince him.

And according to Trina, Misty even tells Ruben how to break into her house to get some money from her piggy bank to pay for gas.

Diane always had a problem with this and she would get mad when I would raise this point that Misty gave Ruben directions to her house to go get the money from her piggy bank money stash or whatever so he could buy gas for his car.

And Diane was like, no, Misty wouldn't do that.

Misty was perfect and purist.

Like, no, I think she did do this.

because she was desperate.

Here are the directions to my house to get my money.

Trina says that even this information didn't change Ruben's mind.

He insisted that no, he couldn't come pick them up.

Trina offered to have her

boyfriend

come and pick them both up.

And that was Michael Reiner.

Trina was 15 years old.

Her so-called boyfriend is 22-year-old Michael Reiner.

Hanging out with 14-year-olds.

Now, Trina tells the cops she and Michael were just friends, that they were not involved.

Sean has a different impression.

Whatever the nature of their relationship, a 22-year-old man hanging around with 15-year-old Trina is a giant red flag for me.

But according to Trina's statement to the police, when she calls Michael to ask him to pick her up, Her call gets disconnected.

Misty and Trina then walk to the bus stop.

Misty calls Diana from a payphone.

Misty says they've missed the bus.

Diana is upset, so Misty says she'll figure it out.

She'll either get a ride from her friend Ruben or take the bus later.

This is all tricky.

What Trina says to police is slightly different than what Diana told Sean Robinson.

Diana said the girls planned to get the 8.40 p.m.

bus.

Knowing how I was as a teenager, I'm inclined to think Trina knew more details.

It sounds like they might have had a plan that they never shared with Diana, and when it fell through, they fell back on the bus story.

Either way, according to Trina's statement, when Misty calls Diana, Misty doesn't seem to mention the earlier calls to Ruben.

She says she'll call Ruben, and if Ruben can't pick her up, she'll take a bus.

Diana gets upset, but says, okay, as long as as Misty gets home.

In reality Misty and Trina are stranded.

Misty lives about 11 miles southwest in Spanaway, much too far to walk.

Trina lives closer, though not close, about three miles east.

With darkness descending, the two girls sit on a bench and come up with a plan.

Trina tells the police, quote, at that time I made my decision of walking home and she said she would take the bus.

The last words that I said to her were, be careful.

And she turned around and told me the same and we walked off in different directions.

Trina's statement raises so many questions for me.

What if Misty tried Ruben again and he changed his mind?

What if Michael Reiner got Trina's calls and came to get them after all?

In a later statement, Trina adds more details.

She says that when she called Michael, Misty didn't approve.

So Misty's like, I don't like Michael.

I know what you and Michael are going to do.

In that second statement, Trina also tells police that she left Michael an angry message and that as she was walking home, Michael showed up and gave her a ride.

So if she left those details out the first time, I have to wonder, what if Trina isn't telling the whole truth?

I tried many times in many ways to reach Trina.

You know, I didn't stalk her, hound her, or anything.

I tried to reach out via standard forms of contact, and she did not want to do it.

And I understand because I think she feels enormous guilt.

and enormous sadness and probably

unfairly blames herself for something someone else did.

And I understand that, and I don't think it's her fault.

As he says this, Sean leans in towards the microphone, almost as if he's trying to speak directly to Trina.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure I'll ever be able to ask Trina my litany of questions.

Trina has never spoken to anyone in the media.

including Sean.

Trying to talk to her seems like a long shot, but one I absolutely have to take.

She is one of the first people I tried to find when I started working on this case, but I can't seem to track her down, like anywhere.

She's kind of vanished.

While I'm in Washington, I decide to ask Misty's brother Colton if he has had any contact with Trina.

He has not, but he's willing to help us try to find her and we set a time to meet.

We'll discuss the case and we'll try to find Trina.

Because ultimately, we all have the same question.

What does Trina know?

Coming up on who took Misty Copsy.

Trina eventually made it home from school, called my mom.

My mom asked her, where is my daughter?

Do you know where my daughter is?

And she says, I don't know.

We debunked some things that were documented in 1993 that were just not true.

Did not happen the way they were said to have happened.

That my mom would say from time to time she knows more than what she's telling us i know she knows more than what she's saying

i think she just drove by us are you kidding me

who took misty copsy is produced by arc media for id

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