School of Humans.
Helen Got Murder Line actively investigates cold case murders in an effort to raise public awareness invite witnesses to come forward and present evidence that could potentially be further investigated by law enforcement. While we value insights from family and community members, their statements should not be considered evidence and point to the challenges of verifying facts inherent in cold cases. We remind listeners that everyone has presumed innocent until proven
guilty in a court of law. Nothing in the podcast is intended to state or imply that anyone who has not been convicted of a crime is guilty of any wrongdoing. Thanks for listening.
On August twenty eighth, two thousand and one, fifteen year old jesse Marie Twilight Song Crooks, who everyone knew was Twilight, was hanging out at her home on Larman Mill Road in Plano, Kentucky, when she got a phone call. The phone call came in at ten point fifty two pm from a phone booth at the Plano County Store, which was a convenience store less than a mile away from her home in that small town. The Plano Country Store
was kind of the center of Twilight's social circuit. A friend of hers later told police Twilight would often walk by there to buy cigarettes or hang out, and would get people to drop her off and pick her up there, so receiving a call from that phone booth would not have been out of the ordinary for her. But Twilight crooks, like many teenagers, had secrets, and like many of us back in the day, sometimes she lived a double life after hours, a few minutes after getting that call, at
around eleven PM, Twilight snuck out of her house. Now according to the police report, when she left home, she was wearing pajama bottoms and a T shirt, and she was barefoot. Her friends later said that wasn't super unusual. It would make sense if she was planning on hanging out for a while and then coming back home.
On not being out for long.
Investigators have said they believe Twilight went out to meet someone she knew. Her friends told police when she left the house barefoot, a lot of the time, she would have someone pick her up. They would ride around, and then whoever picked her up would drop her back home. But her family never found out who she was planning to meet that night because she was never seen alive again.
I'm Catherine Townsend. Over the past eight years of making my true crime podcast, Helen Gone, I've learned that there is no such thing as a small town where murder never happens. I have received hundreds of messages from people all around the country asking for help with an unsolved murder that's affected them, their families, and their communities. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at six seven eight seven
four four six one four five. That's six seven eight seven four four six one four five, or you can send us a message on Instagram at Helen Gonepod. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. The next morning, Twilight's father, Bobby and his wife Linda, Twilight's stepmother, realized that Twilight was not in her bed. Anne had not come home the night before. They called the Warren County Sheriff's office to report her missing the next morning, August twenty ninth, at six oh five am. At the time, the police
report noted Twilight had run away in the past. We're trying to get more information about exactly what was going on in Twilight's life that year. Twilight Crooks was born on October twenty second, nineteen eighty five, in Santa Fe County, New Mexico. Her mother was Native American, part of the Arapaho tribe. She was also part Cherokee on her father's side.
Twilight lived with her dad and stepmom, but apparently regularly visited her mother and the rest of the tribe, and was excited to share what she had learned about their culture with her friends. In Kentucky, Twilight was, according to Bobby, doing well at school. Her family and friends all described her as very bright. She was a sophomore at Greenwood High School in Bowling Green and she was very accomplished.
Bobby Crooks later told journalists Twilight got straight a's and was very popular in her class, and that she had dreams of going to Harvard. But Twilight had reportedly run away several times before. According to the police report, Twilight was considered a habitual runaway. According to the missing Persons report, on August twenty eighth, the days she disappeared, Twilight called her father and asked if she could have dinner with a friend.
Her dad said that was fine.
After that, she went to that friend's house had dinner and was home by around seven pm. Linda and Bobby told police they went to bed at around ten pm after they said Twilight had done her homework, and they told police that when they went to bed, Twilight was taking a shower. After she got out of the shower, she got that late night call at ten fifty two pm, and a few minutes after that, without her parents knowing, left the house. Twilight's friend talked to us about the case.
We asked her how she met Twilight.
Me and Twilight we met in elementary school. We went to Cumberland Trace Elementary. I remember she was just so sweet and kind, and I remember her grandmother would come and eat lunch with her sometimes at school, and like I was always intrigued by her Native American roots and stuff like that. And she used to make bracelets for everybody with seeds and stuff. We were very close friends
all the way up until she was killed. We were teenagers and we experimented and weren't always making the safest choices. I just remember that she was very trusting, and she trusted a lot of people, and that is, you know, what cost her her life. I believe I always felt like it was somebody that we knew that we went to school with, or maybe somebody that you know, we knew from our town, because where her body was found was so close to her house. And she was a
good kid. I mean, she had good grades, She had big dreams and a bright future. She was just a really sweet girl. And she was always smiling and always laughing. She had the biggest smile, and it was light of a room. You know.
Twilight had a brother who was two years older. Linda told detectives they had reached out to Twilight's brother, but that he had not heard from her and had no idea where she was. They also called around to her friend's houses, but no one had seen her at first because she had stuck out and left home in the past.
Detectives treated the case like a run away, but when she didn't come home, police from the Warren County Sheriff's Office, who led the investigation, as well as other agencies including the Bowling Green Police Department and eventually the FBI, scoured the area for her, along with her family and the rest of the community. Her family pasted missing posters all over town looking for Twilight five foot five, one hundred
pounds with brown hair and brown eyes, wearing braces. On September tenth, two thousand and one, at around four pm, nearly two weeks after Twilight disappeared, a dog walker was in the woods near Matlock Old Union Road in Plano, about ten miles from Bowling Green. This is a very remote area that has a lot of trees and other types of vegetation around. Today it's a soybean field. The dog walker found skeletal remains near a dried up pond
that dental records later confirmed were Twilight Crooks. Her body was in pieces. On September tenth, two thousand and one, Twilight Crooks's body was found. The next day was September eleventh, two thousand and one, the day that terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, d C. And suddenly the entire country was
focused on the terrorists attacking the United States. The murder of a fifteen year old young woman of Native American descent seemed to be quickly forgotten, although back in Kentucky police were conducting their investigation, but it seemed like there were a lot of missing pieces. Law enforcement tried to figure out who had called Twilight minutes before she left her house. They checked and discovered that the caller ID showed the call came in from the Plano Country Stoor's
phone booth. But back then there were no surveillance cameras at the store. It was a very different environment in two thousand and one than it is today. There were no ring doorbells or cell phone cameras, no surveillance video outside that phone booth. The Independent newspaper in the UK did an article about Twilight's case in twenty twenty three.
They interviewed Warren County Sheriff Bratt Hightower. According to the article, Sheriff high Tower told the journalists quote, there is no way of telling who placed the phone call to her at the payphone that night end quote. Police were tight
lipped about the investigation. They did not even release a cause of death, but rumors in town were already flying, and when police talked to students at Twilight's high school, several teens told police that there was a rumor going around that Twilight had died of a methamphetamine overdose and that the people who were with her panicked and hid the body and Twilight's friend said police did not interview a lot of Twilight's friends, including herself.
It's hard because this has happened twenty four years ago, and I just feel like there wasn't much of a follow up or anything like that with her friends. They didn't give her story the attention that it deserved, and like they never came to school, never questioned any of us about what happened, or if we knew or or hung out or they never ever came to the school
to interview anybody. They just made one announcement when they had found her on the intercom that morning, and then you know, of course nine to eleven happened in the following day, which completely made her story just disappear. Like I don't remember seeing anything else about it on the news after nine to eleven. Everything was just focused on that. I don't think they mentioned her name for like probably a couple of years. I want to.
Say, though the case is still open.
We were able to access some information via a Foyer request, but it seems like everything is redacted.
On some pages. There are more black boxes than there are regular text.
So we're gonna have to do some serious sleuthing to figure out who these people are and how they were connected to Twilight. We got the autopsy report, but it's redacted too, so we don't know the cause of death. The toxicology report is also blacked out, so we don't know if Twilight had drugs in her system or not. But the incident report refers to a weapon being used
and it lists the weapon as a knife. That, plus the fact that the police were very clearly treating and labeling this as a murder investigation, would appear to point away from the theory that this was an overdose or something that could have been accidental. There were also rumors flying around that Twilight had been decapitated. Police also had some issues with the physical evidence. After nearly two weeks
in the Kentucky heat, Twilight's body had been skeletonized. Crime scene photos that show part of Twilight's remains show that her skull was lying next to the lower part of her body, her spine and legs, but we can't tell from these photos whether her head was removed by a human or whether animals detached her skull. We also aren't
able to see her torso in these photos. It's been reported that her body was partly covered with twigs and branches, like her killer was trying to cover up the body, but maybe didn't do a very good job or didn't finish. When police processed the scene, they did find some physical evidence. One of the items and evidence was a yellow and white drinking straw, but no fingerprints were found on that straw.
Since they hit a dead end with the phone booth, police were trying to figure out who Twilight was meeting that night by delve into her personal life, and like many teenagers, Twilight's love life was complicated. Twilight had been dating someone a boyfriend, but they had recently broken up. Police talked to him and he said he hadn't talked to Twilight in a while. However, another friend of hers told police she had seen Twilight standing outside the Plano
store arguing with the ex boyfriend. The friend could not remember the exact date when she witnessed that argument. The friend's name and the ex boyfriend's name are both redacted. But there was another guy whom Twilight was talking to, someone who friends said she met on the internet and had been talking to regularly before she disappeared. This guy was supposedly in Cincinnati, Ohio. Now police wanted to figure
out who this guy was and to find him. Could he have been the person Twilight was meeting that night. Twilight was active in church. She had recently taken a trip with Hillville Heights Church to Cincinnati July. One of Twilight's friends from her church group told police that during this trip, Twilight told her she had met a guy off the internet and she was supposed to be meeting
him in person at King's Island. The last day of that church trip, which was July seventeenth, Twilight stayed in a Hampton Inn hotel room with a chaperone and two other girls. The police talked to the chaperone, her name was Terry. Terry told them that Twilight was talking to the same guy the one she had met in Cincinnati for several hours on the phone on one of the nights they were there. She said she got concerned Twilight
might try to sneak out. Terry, the chaperone said, Twilight told her she had been sexually active with eight different guys, that she was on the pill, and that her dad was too strict on her. She also said that her stepmom was always telling her what to do. Twilight told the chaperone she had met the guy the summer before when she was with her mom in Clarksville, Tennessee, and that since that time, in addition to talking on the phone,
they had talked on the internet. Terry said that Twilight started talking to the guy on the phone at around eleven thirty pm and they talked for two to three hours. The chaperone said she was worried about Twilight sneaking out because she said she overheard part of the conversation and
Twilight was talking about meeting this guy later on. Terry told police that after that night, she told the church staff she didn't want to be responsible for Twilight anymore because she was afraid of what she might get involved in. One of the detectives on the case, Detective Davis, contacted the Cincinnati Police. He asked them to send an officer to the residence of the person whom Twilight had been
talking to. The Police in Cincinnati did locate the guy that she had been talking to online, but they found no trace of Twilight at his residence, and the guy said he had not seen her and had no idea where she was. This seemed to be another dead end, so with the internet love interest crossed off, Detectives back in Kentucky began looking closer to home. This included focusing on the people who last saw Twilight, her dad and stepmother.
In January of two thousand and two, Twilight's stepmother, Linda, contacted police. According to information contained in the autopsy report, she said she was upset about the amount of time the investigation was taking. She also said the family wanted to know more details about how Twilight died, but police declined to give the family any information about cause of death because, as indicated in these documents, they believe this
might harm the investigation. They asked Linda Crooks to take a polygraph test, which she agreed to do, according to police, but then when they called her to set up a time to come in and take it, Linda did not call back. At some point, according to police documents, they did tell Linda Crooks how Twilight was killed. They asked both Bob and Linda to take polygraph tests, but in
the end, both of them refused. On September twenty fifth, two thousand and one, officers searched Bob and Linda's residents and vehicles. They took a number of items from the home including a Dell computer, the one that Twilight was using to email from. They also filed court orders to get her email communications, but they found nothing of even
in cherry value in those emails. They began looking into Twilight's local romantic entanglements, and they learned that recently she had a boyfriend, though they had broken up sometime before she disappeared. After talking to Twilight's friend, who, as we said, saw Twilight arguing with the ex boyfriend late at night at the Plano store, police went to talk to the ex boy They asked him to take a polygraph test.
He said no and referred them to his lawyer. So it seems like that avenue of investigation was pretty much shut down after that. Police were also exploring other potential suspects near the area where Twilight's body was found. Police talked to people who lived near that area. They told law enforcement about another guy described as a local boy. They said this local boy drove up and down the road where Twilight's body was found on a regular basis.
Now this was before the murder, but they said after Twilight's murder, after her body was found, this guy disappeared and had not been back since. Police apparently tried to find this person, but he had left the area and quit school. As the days and weeks went by, police questioned several people, but they had no official suspects and made no arrests.
Seemed to be.
A flurry of activity early on in the investigation in two thousand and one, and then a little bit in two thousand and three, and after that. A couple of years later, items from the crime scene were sent in for testing, but to this day this case is still an open investigation. A podcast listener did a Foyer request and did receive part of the case file. Again, parts
of it have been heavily redacted. Even though there were a lot of blacked out areas, we were able to cross reference addresses with names, and in some cases previous interviews are mentions of people, and we were able to get some clues. Another natural question is how long was Twilight out in those woods? Could she have left home voluntarily or been kidnapped and held somewhere and killed later.
The autopsy report estimated Twilight's time of death as sometime around two or three am on August twenty ninth, which which would mean that the evidence points to her being murdered shortly after she left home, So the crucial window of time remains between eleven PM when Twilight left her house and early the next morning, August twenty eighth into the early morning hours of August twenty ninth, two thousand
and one. One of the bigger questions surrounding this case has been what was Twilight doing on the night she walked out of her house after she had dinner with her friend. Her parents said she came home and that she was there until ten pm to their knowledge, but she may have made a stop prior to or after that, because we've discovered. Police interviewed someone on September nineteenth, two
thousand and one. This person's name is also redacted, but they told police they saw Twilight at around nine to fifteen pm at the Plano store and that at that time she was wearing her pajamas, a white T shirt, and checkered bottoms. This person told police that Twilight had told him was going home and going to bed. The guy added that Twilight was a good girl who loved life and had no enemies. Twilight often hung out at the Plano store. She sometimes would stop there multiple times
per day. She smoked and it was where she would buy cigarettes. Twilight's friend said that to her knowledge, Twilight had never actually run away from home, but she admitted that back then, Twilight, like a lot of teens, had a wild streak and a habit of sneaking out.
I remember she got her tongue pierced and I had mine done, and a few other people did. And I remember one day at school she was crying and I said, what's wrong, and she said her dad made her take her tongue piercing out because she got caught sneaking out of her window, and so she was grounded. We were just young and rebellious and fishing boundaries and then experimenting with things that we probably shouldn't have been, not making
the safest choices. And I believe she snuck out that night to use drugs, but that doesn't change like who she was. You know, we all were kind of wild at that age. I mean, we all smoked weed, and we were experimenting like ecstasy and myths and cocaine. My class in two thousand and three when we graduated, I think we had fourteen of our classmates that were dead by the time we graduated. It was like our class
was just cursed or something. I felt like, you know, because there was people that died of overdoses, that they were people that died in correct from being intoxicated, you know, and then Twilight was murdered, and you know, there was suicides, and you know, it's just it seemed like our our class was just like, I don't know, we just we were all wild back then.
Bobby Crooks said in twenty eleven that he preferred to remember Twilight as she had been in life. Same quote. I have a beautiful daughter, and a certain part of me wants to keep that image. I'll eventually have to know, but it hasn't bothered me for the last ten years to not know. I've got this image of her growing up, what she looked like, and how she acts.
That's what we hold on too. I can completely understand.
Why he feels that way, but as an investigator, in my opinion, the key to solving this case is figuring out what Twilight did after hours, figuring out the things that she didn't tell her parents. I wonder could she have left home, then come back home and gone out again, because there's something else in the crime scene photos that
in my opinion makes that a possibility. When she was found in the woods, Twilight was wearing jeans, not pajama bottoms, So if she left the house barefoot, how did she end up wearing jeans and a completely different set of clothes. In two thousand and six, police released more information about the clothes Twilight was wearing when her remains were found. She was wearing a blue Edmondson County High School jersey
with the number ten on the back. This was a high school that was twenty one miles away from Bowling Green, where Twilight went to school. Her friends and family didn't recognize the jersey and said, to their knowledge, she did not know anyone from Edmondson County High School. So one theory is that Twilight snuck out to meet up with her killer and that her killer gave her the jacket.
Police did find hair at the crime scene. In early two thousand and three, detectives contacted Twilight's biological mother to get hair samples from her. They had hairs from the crime scene, which they were able to confirm were not a match to Twilight. Police also spoke to someone else, a friend of Twilight's, but the friend's mother told the young man to go into the house and not to
talk to law enforcement. They requested hair samples from this young man, but his mother told police if they wanted to talk to him to get in contact with their attorney. So this person's hairs were never tested. There are a lot of dead ends like this in the case file, and that's part of what we're going to be exploring
in Part two next week. We are going to go through this case file and we're going to find out who some of these redacted people were and try to see if we can nail down where Twilight Crooks was on the night she was murdered. There has not been a lot of media attention on this case. Some commenters online have said they think that's because Twilight was Native American. There have been a lot of stories about the epidemic
of missing and murdered Indigenous women. According to data provided by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the FBI reported five two hundred and three missing Indigenous girls and women in twenty twenty one. According to this report, which was quoted in The Independent newspaper, this is a race equal to more than two and a half times their estimated share of the US population. Though I'm sure that's true, and it may have been a factor.
In my opinion. It could also be a.
Case of bad timing, because after nine to eleven, everyone's attention shifted to national security and Twilight's case disappeared from headlines. But Sheriff high Toower told The Independent he believes keeping the case in the news could help get it solved.
He said, quote from a law enforcement perspective, the more that we can keep this on the front pages and on the front burner, then I think the more opportunity there is that it may resonate with that key person who is holding that particular piece of valued information that could really help unleash the rest of this case.
End quote.
The Warren County Sheriff's Office has stated this is still an open and active case. Meanwhile, Twilight's family is left wondering what happened that night twenty five years ago when she left the house. Bobby told The Independent in twenty nineteen, there are a million things that run through your mind. Who would have done it? Why would they have done it? There are no answers end quote. Next week, in part two, we are going to talk to more of Twilight's friends.
We're going to see if we can figure out if there were other people she was talking to, people who the police may.
Not know about.
We're going to try to see if we can figure out who the owner of that jersey is, if they know Twilight, who picked her up that night, and what horrors happened to her in those woods after that. I'm Catherine Townsend. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Helen Gone Murderline is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. It's written and narrated by me Catherine Townsend and produced by Etaly's Perez Special thanks to Amy Tubbs for her
research assistance and James Wheaton for legal review. Noah Camra mixed and scored this episode. Our theme song is by Ben Sale, Executive producers of Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and LC Crowley. Listen to Helen Gone ad free by subscribing to the iHeart True Crime Plush.
Channel on Apple Podcasts.
If you were interested in seeing documents and materials from the case, you can follow the show on Instagram at Helen gonpot. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone murder line at six seven eight seven four four six one four five. That's six seven eight seven four four six one four five.
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