From Deep Cover: Never Seen Again

woman resurfaced posing is the other. A small town detective became obsessed with the case, convinced that one of them was a spy. Okay, here's a sneak peek. I hope you enjoyed as much as I did. You can find deep Cover wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can get all six episodes right now at pushkin, dot FM, forward slash plus. This is a story about a young woman who ran away from home. At least that's how

it all started. I think people think that I had this master plan and I went out and did it, and like, you know, like it's not fun, right. You're constantly scared, you have no support, you have no one to talk to, which is part of the reason it got so carried away, Like if I had just talked to somebody, they would have been like, this is crazy. Along the way, there were plenty of moments where she could have stopped running, but she didn't. Sort of like

I got on a train track. There was clearly the wrong train track, and like, my train is running away, and at some point you're not thinking, crap, how do we get off this train track? You're just thinking, crap, how do I stop this train from like going off the rails? You know, I just kept making horrible decision after horrible decision after horrible decision, just trying to keep

the train from crashing and killing me. At that point, we're going to come back to this woman and go deep into her story so you'll hear more about all that, but not just yet, because this is actually a story about not one, but two young women who vanished at about the same time. The two of them were roughly the same age, but in so many other ways they could not have been more different. One grew up in rural Montana, where she was raised in a sheltered, devoutly

religious home. She was shy and kind of a nerd. The other was a kind hearted free spirit from South Carolina. She partied often and sometimes hung out with a rough crowd. They both disappeared in nineteen ninety nine. Their families searched for them, but didn't find many clues, and then improbably their stories collided when a lone investigator got involved and quickly became obsessed. I think of a situation as a sweater. So sometimes you have a loose thread and you pull

the thread and you get a naught. And sometimes you pull a thread and it just keeps unraveling and you just keep falling and falling and bone. This investigator was convinced that the fates of these two young women, the free Spirit and the nerd, were linked, and that by solving one of their cases he might also solve the other. Not just that he suspected that one of them was a master of deception, a highly trained chameleon who conned

her way into the ivy leagues. He began an investigation that ultimately drew in the Secret Service, the US Marshals, and the Justice Department. The media soon got wind of this. Allegations of murder, fraud, and espionage swirled. Eventually, a nationwide manhunt got underway, all because of this one investigator and his hunch. Now, given the giant, gantic scope of all this, you might think that our investigator worked for some big city police department or a fancy federal agency, or maybe

even an international outfit like Interpoll. Nope, he was a small town cop who'd just become a detective. He didn't have a partner, or for a while even a computer. But he was doggedly stubborn, almost perversely. So I just pulled a thread and it just kept going and going and going, to the whole thing unraveled. I get it. I love pulling on threads. As a journalist, I've done this so many times, pulled and pulled until I have lost track of what I was originally looking for or

whether it was worth it. And sometimes most of the time, in fact, it's not. But every once in a while, there's a set of facts it's so irresistibly curious that I just can't let go. And I suppose it doesn't matter whether you're a ernalist or a detective or just a nosy neighbor. So many of us believe that great mysteries lurk in the periphery of our lives. So when we find an especially curious thread, we keep pulling because

we won't be satisfied until we've unraveled at all. I'm Jake Alburn and this is deep Cover Season three, Never Seen Again, Episode one, The Dark Corner. The detective that I told you about. His name is John Campbell, and he's just about the friendliest guy I've ever met. He has whispy brown hair and a boyish grin. He wears a pair of those wraparound sunglasses that dads always wear a little league practice. He's also got this goofy and totally lovable laugh that he breaks into all the time.

So not an old timey lawman. In fact, one of the first things that he tells me is that he doesn't care for guns. When I retire, I can't wait to put this in a drawer. I mean, this is a this is the thing I banged my elbow on all the time. So it's not about carrying a gun. I carried gun because we have to. I'd rather be like Andy Griffiths and just be sharing with that a gun.

I met John Donnan Traveler's Rest, South Carolina, where he lives. This, by the way, was also the hometown of the free spirited young woman that I told you about, one of the two that went missing. Back in the early two thousands, when our story really starts. John was the town's loan detective. I asked him what this was like. He told me that back then, this was truly a sleepy backwater. Travel's Rest was almost a dry town. We had one bar and one liquor store, and the liquor store closed I

think at eight or nine o'clock at night. The bar closed at midnight, and we rolled up the streets and the only problems we ever had was at the bar, and so we could shut the bar down two or three times, took their license. Outside of town, well that was a different story. The thickly wooded slopes quickly rose into the peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The land was steep and craggy. Some called it the Dark Corner.

For generations it was known as a place where out and folk brewed moonshine and lived by their own rules mountain justice. By the nineteen nineties, that had begun to change. Newcomers were arriving, retirees and the like, but the Dark Corner remained a place where it wasn't wise to venture at night or turned down a road you didn't know. I talked to one local who told me he once found a great big log blocking the road with a stack of dog skulls on it, and then he just

knew better turn around. John says that occasionally the Mountain folks would just show up at John's office and hear this roar of a truck would come in, and people would pile out, and they'd say, we're looking for the law, you know, and Mountain justice had failed and they had to come to into town to find some law enforcement for the police and Traveler's Rest. The key was basically to secure the town's perimeter, so I called Traveler's Rest

of the circle of wagons. So we had seven square miles that was like a circle of wagons in our little town, and we kept all the crime out of our little circle out into the county, bushed it out. Wait, so your job was basically just like make sure that the criminals stayed out of the circle. Yeah, pretty much. Did you ever like like tell guys like not in here, you're on the Oh yeah, what you say, this is our town? Out take that up the mountains. John says

this strategy. It worked. Not much happened in the way of major crime in Traveler's Rest. But then one day, something rather sinister happened in this small town, something that broke the humdrum rhythm of daily life. A twenty year old girl went missing. Her name was Brooke Henson. She vanished from within the town's limits, inside the circle of wagons, and her disappearance would ultimately send John Campbell on an

epic quest. It would become a huge case, a national case, and John, the small town detective who hated carrying a gun, would be at the center of it all.