The Indiana Dunes disappearance is one of the lesser known cases in American true crime. One day in July nineteen sixty six, three women went for a day at the beach along Lake Michigan in northwest Indiana, not too far from Chicago. They vanished that day, and no trace of them has turned up since. It's one of our sadder true crime episodes because not only are the women presumed dead, their families never got even a hint of resolution. Listen to this one and see what you think happened.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of Iheartradios How Stuff Works.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Josh T guests producing away over there, and that makes this Stuff you Should Know super duper mysterious mystery edition. That's right, this is a super mysterious one. Super duper you could.
Say, this is a good one. I never heard of it.
I hadn't either.
Maybe we should have a spin off show just about mysteries and missing persons.
I've long thought that. Yeah, oh yeah, but.
Then everyone's like, just put him on Stuff you Should Know.
Yeah, every once in a while, pepper it we.
Gotta spin it out, right, spin it off?
They said? The Cleveland Show.
Oh man, I never watched that was a good I never watched it either. You weren't a Family Guy fan, that were you?
I mean it's fine, but no, I wasn't a fan. Yeah, all right. What about Laverne and Shirley? What is this Laverne and Shirley.
Spin off from Happy Days?
Right? That's rights?
Right?
Oh, let's do this.
And Mork and Mindy spun off too?
Uh? What is this? Too Close for Comfort?
Was that as good off?
You got this man?
Too close for comfort? He wasn't. No, I don't know what was it?
Oh no, I'm sorry.
I was about to say, I don't think that's right.
What is this the Ropers?
Oh? Well, sure, Freese Company?
Okay?
What is this? After match?
I thought? I thought Too Close for Comfort was a spinoff? I think it might be.
Well, my first guess was it was might have been Ted Knight's character from the Mary Tyler Moore Show. But that's not true because and too Close for Comfort he was a cartoonist, that's right, remember, Yeah, And the only thing I remember, well, I remember a lot about the show because I loved it. I was in love with those daughters.
Man, I don't remember them.
I mean that was the whole setup, is that their daughters lived in the same house or next door or something cause trouble. Yeah, you know, they were just a couple of hell raisers, hell raising beauties.
And who was the guy that was so great?
I think you're talking about Charles in Charge now.
I'm thinking of Too Close for Comfort.
But he was a cartoonist and he would wear college sweatshirts as part of his character. And he wore a Georgia Bulldogs sweat shirt one time, and I.
Was like, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. It's like, how did they know that that's a thing?
All Right? You're like, I'm basically on TV right now. That's what? Oh? Man Monroe?
That was him, the Monroe character, Jim J. Bullock, Ted Knight, Yeah, no, Ted Knight was the lead.
The main guy, Jim J. Bullock. Man, what was he? Hollywood Squares?
Sure? Among other things like Too Close for Comfort?
Does does this kind of a tangent if we haven't actually gotten started. This is a preamble, okay, preamble, Yeah, roughly done.
Yeah, this is a good one. And you put this together? Where'd you get most of the stuff?
Wrote it myself. Oh wow, there's one part that I was like, here, this is just easier if I copy and paste from a Chicago Tribune article from nineteen eighty seven.
I read that one.
It's very good, there's That's one of the things about this case is anyone who kind of gets involved in this, we'll see there is not a lot of information out there.
Yeah, and funny, And one of the biggest mysteries of this whole thing is what kind of boat that was, which we'll get to.
That was my bad.
Well, no, man, I saw it in a couple of other articles. It called this boat a trimaran, which is very much a catamaran.
Right, They made the same so they were just yes, okay, yeah, because it's same thing. I saw a tryhold. I was like, oh, it's a tricat, which is a sailboat, and that's what I thought it was. No, there's a trhold speed boat called the runabout that was kind of big in the sixties.
Well, more specifically, it's a tryholed run about. A runabout doesn't necessarily mean it has three holes. Okay, but those are my favorite boats in the world. Are these fifties and sixties fiberglass runabouts.
This is their amazing.
Fifties and sixties runabout of all time. Yeah, with three holes. He thought one was crazy. Just get ready for three.
So yeah, the boat will come up and I had to mark out try cat just about seventy five places.
I'm very sorry, it was yeah, my bad.
So what we're talking about here finally now is the disappearance of three young women in suburban Chicago in the mid nineteen sixties at Indiana Dunes State Park on Lake Michigan.
Yeah. Now it's Indiana Dunes National Seashore, National Lakes Shore, National Lake Shore, but at the time it was a state park. And this is Saturday, July second, nineteen sixty six.
That's right.
The three women there was a twenty one year old named Patricia Blow.
Yeah, I think so she went.
She got in her car, which was an eleven year old at this point, Buick Sedan nineteen fifty five. Buick went to pick up her friends Anne Miller at her house she lived with her folks, and then to her other friend, Renee Brule, who was the only one who was married, went to pick her up at her house. They were nineteen and twenty and they were.
Like nineteen and twenty one.
I think one on was twenty two at least nineteen twenty and twenty.
One, So was that right? Okay?
But those are nitpicky details. Sure, they were all late teen's early twenties.
And wait a minute, did you just call me nitpicky?
No? No, no, no, I think you did.
No, okay, and has called me a liar on National TV TV. I think you just did.
Anne and Patricia were friends. They were horse riders, and they were friends from these horse stables. But they were all three buddies, not since grade school, but for the last couple of years, it seems like, right.
Yeah, And they all lived around Chicago, and that's where they were traveling about sixty miles eighty miles I've seen both to Indiana Dune State Park to just basically go hang out on the beach. That day again, it was Saturday, it was the July fourth weekend.
It was out it yeah, super crowded.
They were just going to the beach to have some fun. Most people think they got to the beach by ten am park. The buick hiked over the dunes on the kind of rickety boardwalk over to the beach and set up camp. I think about one hundred yards from shore. That's a pretty substantial beach.
Wow.
Either there, they hiked one hundred yards and set up near the beach. It might be the ladder of the two that sounds more right. And on this weekend again, because it was July fourth weekend, the beach was just absolutely packed. And this is Lake Michigan, which is a pretty big lake in this beach itself, for this park itself, I think it's like twenty six miles of shoreline or something like that. But even still there's like nine thousand people on the beach that weekend.
Yeah, I saw nine to ten thousand people, four to five thousand cars in the parking lots, and four to six thousand boats in the water.
So packed, just packed. It's like Jaws or.
Something up in there, right Amity Island, fourth of July.
So the Renee and and Patty set up shop, put down their beach blanket, just kind of close by to this teenage couple who are like their beach neighbors.
You know, they mentioned everyone was pretty close.
Sure, kind of she elbowed a jowl and that's called sure, okay, and this this teenage couple kind of factor in big time, but just kind of note their presence for now.
That's right.
So about noon, Chuck, Well, actually, the teenage couple factor in now. They noticed that the three women were waiting into the water about noon, so I guess for about two hours they were just kind of hanging out in the sun and they got hot enough to go into the water about noon.
That's right.
And that was the last time that this couple saw them. Maybe perhaps the day went on, they never came back. This teenage couple said that there's stuff still laying here. You know, they may be off partying somewhere. So you know, they didn't think like these three young ladies are missing and perhaps murdered.
I think they were worried that their stuff might get stolen.
Yeah, I think it was as innocent as that.
Ye as a teenage couple. They were about to leave, and they didn't want to just leave it there. They felt kind of somehow responsible for it, like you will.
Yeah, which is what you did in nineteen sixty.
Six or today still if you're a decent person, that's right.
So they went to a ranger and they said, hey, these young women were here. They left their stuff. The ranger thought the same thing. He's like, well, let me just take care of this stuff and collect it and so it doesn't get stolen. They're probably off partying. But that was the last that anyone saw these three young women. No one to this day knows what happened. They vanished literally without a trace.
Yeah, there's never been any evidence of what happened to them, No trace of them, no, nothing, nothing. From that point on, I think we.
Should take an earlier break because of that dumb long preamble. Okay, and this is a great little spot for a cliffhanger.
Okay, so we'll be right back, okay, Chuck. So about eighteen hours after that park ranger collected their things that I'd say, around dusk, a call came into Indiana Dune State Park ranger station and it was from Harold Blaw or Blow Patty's father, and he wanted to know if the rangers had seen his daughter because she had been reported missing by her family back in Chicago, like you know, a few hours before.
Yeah, So they went through her stuff, the rangers did. They found a set of car keys that had a little minute Illinois license plate h that matched a license plate in.
The parking lot.
Yeah, either a great coincidence where you could get those custom made at some little beat shop, right, which is probably what happened. So they find her car, they found her buick there in the parking lot. Indiana State Police say we're going to take over here because it's pretty clear that this is a missing person's case.
Yeah, And so they it was obvious that they had they had never left the park, or at least they hadn't left, you know, in the car, right, and they left their car, they left their stuff. That's suddenly very highly suspicious. The idea that they were just off partying is suddenly kind of a tenuous theory, you know.
Yeah, like left all their stuff like purses and personal stuff.
We should we should talk a little bit about that. They left, Yeah, money in their wallets, they left their transistor radio, they left their magazines open, they left their suntan lotion. It seemed like the way they left their stuff that they were planning on just getting into the water and then coming back from the water. And then that was that. There didn't seem to be any kind of forethought to their stuff, and then the fact that their car was still there and this was a full
day after they had last been seen. It was suspicious.
So the like if they were going to party, they would have said at least like, oh, let me grab my purse.
Right by now a night had come and gone, and the next day it was already, you know, halfway done, and they there was nothing that they'd be a hell of a party. Yes, So people started to get kind of worried and they started to search the park and they couldn't find them anywhere. And that's when the police became involved, when it was obvious that they were no longer in this park, even though they didn't seem to have left, which means they just kind of vanished.
Yeah, And they had a pretty big search party. They had soldiers volunteering from a missile base. They had obviously the sheriff, had the Civil Air Patrol get involved. I think Patty's dad was a see A pilot.
He was a colonel.
He's a colonel in the Civil Air Patrol. Coast Guard gets involved, dive teams, airplanes, helicopters.
Sheriff's posse, and horseback.
Yeah, like they had people combing this area.
They went back to the nineteenth century to get people to search.
They searched about two hundred and fifty cabins in the area. They had a dune buggy trolling the seashore at night seeing if bodies were washing the lake shore. Yea, bodies were washing the shore like.
It was a land, sea, and air search of this area, and it was a pretty extensive area. But it was a really extensive search. The big criticism that's leveled today against the whole thing is that they're two full days passed before the search was mounted. This is July fifth, the first forty eight, first forty eight. Anybody who's ever seen that show knows like those are the most critical moments or the most critical hours in trying to solve a case, because it gets colder and colder with every
hour that passes. Yeah, so that was a big thing. And one of the most startling things about this case is that search turned up nothing. Yeah, no evidence of what happened to them at all.
Yeah.
The first little clue that they found wasn't something they found while searching, but inside Renee brules purse that she had left behind, that was a letter that she had written to her husband that was kind of like, I've had it with you. All you do is work on your hot rods and party with your friends, and I'm kind of done, hinting that she wanted to leave the marriage. The cop, you know, obviously that's going to be a suspicious kind of thing to find, say, yeah, go talk
to the husband. And they interviewed the husband and the family, and everyone seemed to agree, like, hey, things aren't perfect, but she probably wrote that letter when she was really upset. She didn't give it to me. Know, I might work in my hot rods a little too much, but I didn't kill my wife, and our marriages is fine overall. And and then the cops believed it.
Her face well, her family backed that up too. Everyone, we don't have marital troubles. This seems like something Renee would have done, and then just forgotten she even had the note. So the cops cleared her husband of being involved in any wrongdoing. But it raised a long standing theory that's still around today that we'll talk about theories later that possibly Renee ran off, and if Renee ran off to kind of start a new life or whatever, maybe the other women had too.
Maybe maybe so.
Another interesting thing they learned Anne Miller was by all accounts about three months pregnant and had talked to her friends.
By some accounts, not all Yeah, like like her closest friends had had said.
She said she was pregnant.
Yeah, right, But I don't think they had like physical evidence of like a pregnancy rest right, right, So they said that she had friends said that she had talked about having to go live in a home for unwed mothers.
She was sort of up against the wall with this.
Obviously, in the mid sixties it was not a great thing to be an unwed mother. And possibly we don't know this either for sure, but she was dating a married man and it could have been his baby, which would have been problematic as well.
Right, another good reason to r u nnoft.
That's right, okay, I think.
So now two of them have a motive to run off in certain new lives. Yeah.
And we should also mention too that Patty was also dating a married man, supposedly, and they both were buddies from this horse stable. And it turns out there was a real scumbag. I looked into this guy more, this Silas Jane. He was a rapist. He was linked to the murder of three boys. He was linked to the murder of to the grind sisters. He was looked into for the disappearance of some heiress in Chicago. He had
a hit put out on his brother. He had a fire bomb planet and in this other woman's car, Like, this is a bad, bad dude. And he had an affiliation with this horse stable.
Yeah. He his brother, I believe owned the horse stable. Yeah, and Si was like the organized crime boss running the criminal ring out of the horse stable. And this was the stable that Anne and Patty rode their horses at. I think Anne was actually she had a job as a horse exerciser at these stables. So they were like really involved in like just rubbing elbows with this organized crime ring. And so cops were like, well, wait a minute, this is this is kind of huge, like you know,
there's as far as looking into their backgrounds. This was the biggest red flag the cops had turned up for sure that they were known, not that they were like criminals themselves, but just that they were like they came in close contact with a really dangerous, violent criminal and his gang.
Yeah.
And one of the later theories was that they witnessed the rigging of the firebomb on this car of this woman.
Yeah, and you know, they had to be taken care of. But we'll get to the theories later.
Sure, So as they start, these are like the leads that the investigation turned up. But the cops also very wisely involved the media pretty early on, and so other leads started to come in, and you know, there's the usual like I saw them in Pontiac, Michigan, getting off of a bus, or they were all in my drug store alive and well, you know last week even though they've been missing for three weeks, that kind of thing.
But there were some solid leads that came in, and one of the big ones was a call from a couple from Indianapolis who'd been on the beach that day. And I think this is the problem with this. There's so little writing about this that you kind of have to piece together. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that this is the same teenage couple that were their beach neighbors. Okay,
I'm pretty sure. They said that they saw them go into the water at noon, and while they were hanging out in the water, a man probably in his early twenties with dark wavy hair, well tanned. Came up in a try hold run About ski boat, which is just stop and look up Tryhole run About nineteen sixties and
some will come up. They're really cool looking like it looks like a boat that Frank Sinatra would drive around on a lake totally, and it's the kind of lake that you would if you were like an early twenties guy pick up like girls at the lake in It's just like a fun, cool, zippy boat.
Yes, and side note, if you are turned on by those boats like I am, you can find these things and buy them for like twelve hundred bucks.
Yes, these old fiberglas.
And engage in mechophilia.
You can't.
You can't buy the old wooden boats. You can, but not for twelve hundred bucks. Oh okay, those are really expensive.
But the fiberglass ones you can get for fairly cheap. Yeah, well that's what this guy's supposed to restore it. And you know, sure, it's pretty cool. Yeah are you going to Are you saying that this is what you're gonna do? Now?
No, I'm not saying that, but I'm just I've looked into it because they're just so like stylish and cool and they had like this one was turquoise interior. They all have those, like like the ver sixties sort of colors.
And diamond dusted upholstery.
Yeah, yeah, they're pretty sweet.
Yeah. So yeah, this is a white try hole runabout with turquoise interior, and that this couple from Indianapolis who called in later said that they saw these the three women get on the boat with this guy and drive off.
Yeah, so that's a big one huge. They also get another report from witnesses who said these girls came back at some point, got something to eat, and we're hanging out on the beach. And then a third lead that came in and said they actually got on another boat, this big cabin cruiser and this was about three pm with three dudes and the boat didn't have a name on it that we could discern. So in that first
week they get some boat wreckage. It washes ashore, some syrofoam, some seats, an oil can looked probably like.
A busted or wrecked boat.
But the police said, listen, we got two boats we're targeting here, and none of the stuff from this wreckage or potential wreckage is from those boats.
Yeah, they didn't think so at least, yeah, right, so, but the weird thing about that boat wreckage is that no boat was reported wreck that weekend on Lake Michigan, certainly not in the area around Indiana Dune State Park. That's right, that's a big one. And then secondly, like you said, it doesn't seem to match any of the
boats that they were looking for. So if you step back and take these leads all together, a timeline, a possible timeline emerges where Patty and Renee wade out into the water around noon, go on like a little pleasure cruise on the little try hole, run about shortly after, come back to shore, go get something to eat, hang out, and then at three go out in another boat, a bigger boat which is possibly also manned by the same guy who is in the try Hole right about with a couple of his friends.
And that boat definitely had the name sanded off of it, which was a huge.
Red flat exactly. It's very fishy.
They found sandpaper and red paint on the beach that had been sanded off.
So the cabin cruiser seems to have been largely disincluded from suspicion by the cops because from what I saw the cops talk to some guys, three guys in a cabin cruiser who were there that day, who said.
We try to pick up some girls.
And they wouldn't go. One of them said I'm married, I can't go, and none of them did. Could have been them maybe. The other thing that really kind of seemed to have disincluded the cabin cruiser was that someone was actually filming. This is nineteen sixty six. They were filming home movies on the beach that day.
Yeah, that was inevitable, I think you think so. Yeah, sure, I found it astounding.
Oh really yeah, no.
Man, that's where all those old great color Super eight films. I bet there were ten of those cameras on the beach there probably right now. And this guy was, you know, because he was filming the day. He was doing a lot of panning back and forth, which was very fortuitous because it kind of proved out some of this stuff
they saw. And of course this is old film and it wasn't like zoomed in or anything, but they did see what looked like these three women on this little runabout just like everyone said, So that was like a pretty good find.
Yeah, the cabin cruiser there like it looks like there's three women on there, and they could be similar, but maybe they don't think so. So the cop seemed to have zeroed in on that. The three women waited out into the water around noon. The guy came up in the Tryhole run about shortly after they got on the Tryhole run about, and that was the last time anyone saw them.
Yeah, and apparently too.
It wouldn't have been the weirdest thing in nineteen sixty six, like to go off with the stranger on his boat. The thing I read said that kids are always pulling up on their boat and like, hey, ladies, you know, let's take a ride. That sounds like the fourth of July. It's fun, it's fun. It sounds like the seventies. Yeah, yeah, maybe sure, or the eighties.
Right, what about the night No, not the nineties.
Not the nineties. People were not boating in the nineties. Yeah.
Should we take another break? Oh sure, all right, let's take another break. We'll talk about the further investigations, right for this, So Chuck.
One more thing about the boat that we should say is, despite having eyewitnesses, despite having film seemingly show them in this boat, nothing ever came of it.
Yeah, and the cops even put out the word. They were like, surely someone knows this boat or this boat owner to tryhul turquoise interior. Not a crazy boat, but not the most common thing in the.
World, right, But they never found it, just kind of vanished along with the women.
Yeah, so mystery novels, that's pretty good, do.
You think so?
Yeah?
Thanks? So the weeks and months wore on, and as it did, like there are fewer and fewer people actively looking for them. As it happens, It just happens that way. But sadly, Harold Blow kept this vigil basically for the rest of his life.
Yeah, he just kept that stuff is always just heartbreaking.
Yeah. I don't know if he was if he kept actively searching, but I know he did some traveling even later on in life to go check out leads that he'd heard about. He kept in contact with cops and reporters who were working the case, and even afterward, after other groups stopped searching, he chartered his own plane so that he could fly reconnaissance flights looking for evidence. Yeah,
all to nothing. He never found any trace of his daughter or what happened, and he was convinced that all of them were dead or they were being held against their will.
Right he was.
He was like my daughter, you know, he said, we're not overbearing parents. He's like, she's got all the freedom in the world do what she wants. She wouldn't have to run away because like.
We're the coolest.
Basically, there was a psychic that got in touch, and this is pretty interesting. A psychic said, I visualize a cabin on Lake Michigan, not too far from the beach, blanket with dark colored sand, rickety wooden stairs up from the beach. The cabin's on a bluff, and it has a lawn chair outside with its bottom out. One of the cops investigated, drove as far as he could drive, then did some hiking and found a cabin that met this exact description, right down to the chair with the bottom rotted out.
And this was nine years later.
Yeah, I mean, you hear stuff like that, You're like, man, you know, I don't believe in psychics calling the cops with clues being super accurate. But it turns out there was no body there because she said to dig, and they dug for three days and found nothing. But unless it was a prank, it was a weirdly eerily accurate description.
Yeah, yeah, but I mean, if you have an old abandoned.
Cottage there, like a fifty to fifty chancer is gonna be a lawn chair with the bottom.
Exactly rusted out.
That's my theory.
Maybe it could be coincidence.
I'm with you, though, it is pretty interesting at the very least. So the case remains open. And again, not a hint, not a trace, Nothing has ever surfaced metaphorically or literally that suggests what happened to those three women, And so theories have been allowed to kind of grow and take different shape and be argued over. And there's like a handful. Most of them are fairly sensible. Actually, some are kind of pedestrians. Some are kind of sensational.
But because no evidence has ever come forward, like each one's just about as likely as the other.
Yeah, and well.
I think we should mention before we do that that drowning Miller and Blow were both really good swimmers.
Yeah, like super good.
Yeah, and I think that's supposed to be twenty thirty minutes right, surely not Miles.
I saw Miles. Really Yeah, let me look you do some tap dancing.
That's like a serious elite athlete endurance swimming.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was miles. Okay, I'm looking, I'm looking. I don't want to get too nitpicky, but.
Well, if they were swimming thirty miles and they were international champion athletes, okay, so regardless, they probably did not drown. It is possible that the boat crashed and they did drown and washed up somewhere, because you know, Lake Michigan is huge, sixteen hundred and forty miles of shoreline.
It is the.
Deadliest of the Great Lakes. But it's it's possible that they washed up somewhere and didn't you know, weren't ever found.
Yeah, because remember that that search didn't start for two full days after they were noticed to be missing.
Right.
So that's one of the more mundane theory. It gets a little more sensational when you look at Dick Wiley's theory.
Right. Dick Wiley was a crime reporter who basically, I guess he reported on the case almost from the outset and really stuck with it for years and years and years, and he developed a theory that Anne Miller being pregnant. It was Ann who was pregnant, right, Yeah, that Anne Miller had gone out there with her girlfriends that day because she was she planned on getting an illegal underground abortion.
It sounds very not believable to me.
So yeah, a lot of a lot of people don't believe it. But because so little has been written about this case and this guy is one of the kind of authorities on it, yeah, there's there is some credence to it.
Not that she would have gone to get an underground abortion, but that that would be performed on a boat.
That's the big, huge, one of the huge flaws in that it just seems weird. It's what, I can't imagine a more terrible place to perform a delicate procedure like an abortion on a house.
Boat on fourth of July in Lake Michigan.
Well that's another thing too, is Okay. So what what Wiley's theory is is that Anne went out there to get this abortion, and Patty and Renee went there as moral support, and they went out and met this guy who took them to the houseboat for the abortion to be performed. Well, the abortion was botched, killing Anne, and the abortionists said well we've got to kill you two now as well, and they got rid of all three bodies and that's what happened to them.
That'd make a heck of a movie.
A lot of There are a lot of holes in this theory, including the fact that why would you perform an abortion on a houseboat? But there is some things that kind of give it a little bit of credence. In particular, there was a couple named the Largos. Was it I always want to call her wand but it wasn't. Was it Helen? Yeah, it is Helen Actually, Frank and
Helen Largo. They actually did have an undergrown abortion clinic in nineteen sixty six in Gary, Indiana, which was very close to the state park, and their nephew, Ralph bore a striking resemblance to the description of the man in his early twenties who came up in the tri Hoole runabout.
Right, And I think Ralph is verified as being there that day as well so, and.
He lived with Frank and Helen Largo. So the Wiley's theory that this guy came up and got them to take them to go get this procedure done again, why would you do it on a houseboat when your clinic is twenty miles away? And then Secondly, why would you set up this kind of highly illegal procedure in front of that many witnesses? And then thirdly, why would they leave their stuff on the beach the way that they
did if they knew they were going for this appointment? Yeah, this theory is bonkers, So we'll discard Wiley's theory.
Yeah.
The other one, obviously, was the Silas Jane, the criminal dude from the Stables. People say that they think that they may have witnessed the car bombing of Sheryl Lynn Rude and that he was just getting rid of them and snuffing them out. There is every reason to believe that this guy would have done that looking at his history, if they did possibly witness this rigging of a car bomb.
He also had an associate who supposedly bore a resemblance to the man in the try Hole. Yeah run about.
Tan wavy hair.
Yeah, early twenties. And I saw this and I could not verify it elsewhere, But there is a widespread rumor that, or an unsubstantiated claim that that associate to cy Jane Silas Chain put in an insurance claim for a boat that had gone down around that time. Interesting, which would definitely account for things. It would also account for why there was no boat reported missing. You wouldn't report a boat missing if you used it to cover up a triple homicide.
Yeah, because that's the biggest thing to me is if there were other people on this boat and it was an accident, someone would have said, hey, my dark haired, wavy haired son is missing and he has this boat.
And there were no missing person from those three.
Yeah.
And what's more, even if like that guy was just a total loner who had no friends or family, somebody would say, a boat like that probably would have been towed by car and trailer, and that car and trailer would have just been left there. Over time, somebody would have noticed that there was this abandoned car and trailer hanging out in the parking lot at the state park. Nothing like that ever turned up.
Yeah.
The other theory in regards to Sila's Jane is that these young women did witness this car bombing and knew that they needed to disappear before they were disappeared on purpose. So this is and they like faked their own disappearance.
And that's Patty Blouse's brother's theory. Oh yeah, yeah, he showed up on a forum called web Sleuths and apparently he's verified. He's like, yes, I'm her brother, and he said that he thinks that they did go to stage this disappearance, but that the guy who was going to help them was actually in the employee of Silas Jane, and this helping them disappear actually turned into this triple murder, and that their bodies were disposed of. That's what her brother.
Thinks, and that the one who wasn't one of the stable people.
Yeah, that she was just there to help them disappear. I don't know got caught up in this. I don't know, because like why would she have gone out?
I don't know, I mean, bad marriage, who knows. Maybe it's a little thin, but I think it makes sense for his sister the other two. It doesn't necessarily make as much sense for maybe for Anne if she saw if she is in danger as well. I don't know.
I think the most likely thing it's like the Peter is it Peter principal?
No, the Ockham's razor? Is it the trolley problem? Ockham's razor? Is that they drowned. I mean that's possible, didn't wash a shore.
But here's the thing like in Lake Michigan's the deadliest great lake of all of them, all five. I think it accounts for out of all five, and it counts for half of the deaths in any given year. But most bodies do turn up. Most bodies are recovered. So if three of them or four, or however many people were on that boat that bow down, you'd think some trace of at least one of them would have eventually turned up.
You would think, so, you know, yeah, it's a true mystery.
It's also possible that they were taken away by somebody. They weren't planning on disappearing, They weren't planning on leaving. They just went on a pleasure cruise with the wrong person who murdered them. Right, if a guy got three women out on a boat and got it out into the middle of nowhere on this enormous lake and then pulled a gun on him, like you can, you could one person could conceivably stay in control of three under a situation like that. And that's that's, sadly enough, that's
a real possibility that that was their fate. They just went with the wrong person.
That seems unlikely to me too, that like a serial killer just picked up three women.
Here's the thing. There's one serial killer in particular that some people really like for this. His name's Richard Speck. Oh yeah, so Richard Speck is actually not a serial killer. He's a mass murderer because he killed eight women at a nursing college in one night. Yeah, which makes him a mass murderer, not a serial killer. He did that
on July thirteenth, nineteen sixty six, in Chicago. On July second, nineteen sixty six, he was dropped off at a dock about twenty miles away from Indiana Dunes State Park.
He was not tan with dark wavy hair.
Though that is very true.
He was a real creep though.
He was a super big creep, had a terrible personality, not a charmer, not good looking. So the idea that he could get three like women into a boat of his is kind of unlikely.
Yeah.
Also, he was well known as a very sloppy, opportunistic killer. And that this if they were killed by somebody, this seems to have been planned. The fact that their bodies never turned up suggests that who if they were killed by somebody, they would have had to have planned to have killed them, because they would have had to have brought along all the weights needed and right that stuff. Whatever it is like, any one of those theories is just as likely as the others.
Good stuff, sad, tragic, but I love a good mystery.
Yep. Well, if you want to know more about the disappearance of Patricio blow Ann Miller and Renee Brule, you can go read the Chicago Tribune article on it, the Northwest Indiana Times article, Web Salutes, and the project. All those are great resources on this case. And since I said that, it's time for a listener mail.
Hey guys, I'm writing to say thank you.
You.
See.
I recently divorced, and I spent about half the time I used to spend with my three young kids.
She goes to stay with me. I'm not going anywhere depressing. She said.
The divorce was the right move, and we're co parenting quite amicably, and it's all good. I've got a full life in meaningful relationships and lots to do ninety nine percent of the time. But the quiet of my day at times when it is a kid free house is something that's gotten some getting used to. I realize, without even thinking about it, that I've taken to playing old episodes like Bizarre Ways to Die.
It's an oldie, It's a real oldie.
She's like, just because they make me feel in a totally well adjusted and not insane way, like I'm in the company of pals.
I've been a listener for about five years.
Only recently have I come to appreciate that I'm always cheer it up and made it feel less lonely by hearing you guys talk to each other and to all of us in podcast listener land. So thanks for what you do, Thanks to the team who helps you, Like Jerry, you do a good thing for a lot of people, and I appreciate it. Big hugs from Katherine in Chicago.
Chicago, Chicago, how appropriate. Thanks a lot, Katherine, We really appreciate that. It's good to hear. Keep on keeping on, Yeah, keep on trucking. If you want to get in touch with this, like Katherine did to let us know how you're doing, we want to hear that. You can go on to stuff you Should Know dot com, check out our social links, and you can send us an email to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of Iheartradios How stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.