Introducing - Killer Story | 1. A Rose for Mom

Hi, there is Steve Fishman from Orbit Media. I want to introduce today's featured episode. It's the pilot of our new true crime thriller, Killer Story. It's a series about a teenager with dreams, a murder that no one knew was a murder, and a reporter with a hidden past that drives her to pursue this hopeless story for years. You're going to love the reporter, brazen, cunning when she has to be, and always endlessly relentless. Oh and there's a love story in the middle of this podcast too.

We were probably that ten twelve minutes into the water.

As they head across the water, the two watch out for debris and their path.

And that's when I see it. It's about seventy five feet away, seventy five eighty feet something like that. Dcolder was a log just looked like it was barely floating underwater, just barely breaking the surface.

Tom's not convinced, so he steers the boat closer. As he approaches, time seems to stand still.

I remembered everything. I mean, I could probably even tell you how many ripples were in the water at the time.

Tom sees something unusual. He can't tell what it is.

Looked like a beautiful mannequin. So I took the oar and kind of pushed on her, and she went about six inches under water and then floated back to the surface. And I'm going, no, it it was a girl. I didn't want to hurt her skin. I didn't want to touch right, I didn't want to touch her, and I was only just far away from her six eight inches. I remember looking at her hair, beautiful hair floating in the water, just floating out like a like a like

The girl's name was Sabrina Kid, but no one knew that. They won't know that for years. Nobody will know that Sabrina is dead, and still wouldn't know if not for the preternatural drive. I'm a total stranger, a stranger who decided for her own reasons to find out what happened to Sabrina. This is a story of lies, cons and cover ups.

He said she never came home. That motherfucker's line.

And if a woman compelled to get justice for someone she's never met.

No one ever did tell me anything. I did it because I wanted to, because I was telling the truth.

And it's a story of yearning for better endings, because I.

Just want someone to love me, someone to care about me unconditionally.

From Sony Music Entertainment and Orbit Media. You're listening to Killer Story ad free on the binge where you get all episodes all at once. This is episode one.

Arose for Mom.

Head west from the Colorado River and you'll most likely run into Las Vegas, known across America as Sin City. That's its attract Las Vegas is a place to do whatever you want. People float into Vegas to shake off their work today selves. They hit the Vegas Strip, a row of casinos with high stepping showgirls and flashing neon lights so bright you can see the miles into the Mojave Desert. Viva Las Vegas. A place where adults gamble on changing their stories. What Sin City is not is

She worshiped her mom.

This is Dewana, Sabrina's first cousin.

I remember when I would go over and I would spend the weekend. Were at my aunt Bobby's, and Sabrina and I would we would go walk the Strip mall.

Sabrina was probably eight or nine at the time. At the strip mall, they drifted past store windows, peering in until Sabrina found what she wanted, always the same thing.

Then her pride deal was always to stop and get her mom a rose.

And so I picture a young girl walking with a single rose in her hand. She holds it in front of her like a candle. I imagine it's red. She's moving with purpose, eager to get home to Mom with her special gifts. But Mom wasn't always there, not emotionally at least. Mom was beautiful herself, a playboy model at one point, according to Dowana, and men flocked. And when a man came into Bobby Sue's life, well that's when Mom's focus changed and Sabrina was out of the picture.

She spoiled Sabrina and gave her just about whatever she wanted, I mean material things she didn't do without. But my mom was always gone. So you know, as long as Sabrina got in the way of her boyfriends or got in the way of anything, then you know, she just shoved her off onto people.

At seventeen, Sabrina moved in with Dewana, whose family had migrated from Texas to Vegas. They shared an apartment for a time.

She was there in the one bed, and I was in the other bed and I asked her, I said, what do you want? And she goes, I just want someone to love me, someone to care about me unconditionally and not judge me.

Did you remember saying anything to that?

I told her, you know, I love you.

Sabrina wasn't particularly bold or assertive. She didn't strike people as driven. She was running from not too but she was a good friend, the kind everyone values. This is her friend Jennifer.

She was just a really nice, good hearted person, and she was very trusting, and she was a good friend. And the big standout for me is that she was just just really kind.

Sabrina did have moments of conflict, and not just with her mother. A few weeks after she moved in with her cousin do Wana, they had a falling out. Do Wanna didn't approve of a guy Sabrina was seeing so much for unconditional love. The boyfriend was soon gone and Sabrina was on her own again, hunting for a job and a home where she felt welcome. I imagine her rippling with anxiety, and yeah, I find that heartbreaking. Seventeen and on your own and just wanting to be loved.

As as I saw her, I was like, Wow, she's a kiddie, and so obviously I.

Started to strike up the conversation and we just hit it off.

This is Jim Bixel. Jim was a good looking Vegas native. He sported a moment when it was the going fashion and usually wore a leather motorcycle jacket.

She didn't get into detail with me, but just the little things that she did tell me.

Yeah, she did not have a great childhood.

So one of my goals was just for me to make sure she had a great time whenever we were together.

A lot of those great times involved Jim's motorcycle.

I bought a Kawasaki Ninja six hundred. The cross Rocket is what we called it. On the weekends, we'd meet at the Old Wet and Wild Water Park on Las Vegas Boulevard on the strip, right next to Sarah Hotel, and then at midnight we would all take off and we do really fast long rides.

Somewhere. We went up to Mount Charleston.

Mount Charleston is over two miles high.

We came down that canyon and we were doing one hundred and thirty five hundred and forty miles an hour. She was definitely pulled it on for dear life. She would love going fast. She would say, you know, right on the bike really makes me feel free.

In Las Vegas, friends remember Sabrina as a blonde, though I've seen early photos, and in them she's a brunette with thick, gentle waves of hair. She has hazel eyes. Her skin is almost as pale as her shining teeth. In most of the photos, she's smiling, though it strikes me as the smile you put on for the camera, thinking one thing, showing another. To me, Sabrina looks almost middle aged in these photos. In one she actually wears pearls. She looks ready for a job as a bank teller

So Sabrina liked that idea, said yeah, I'll do that.

Sabrina hasn't had a steady address in the six months she's been in Vegas, and now that problem seems solved. Life seems to be getting better and better for Sabrina. A dependable living situation, new friends, a boyfriend who makes her feel free, and she's recently interviewed for a job at the fashion wall and she landed it, her first solid gig since arriving in Las Vegas. She seems to have, to her credit, developed a network of support in an

He asked her something the effect of, hey, what do you want to do ultimately with your life?

And she said, you know, I'd like to be a model.

And her landlord, a kind fatherly figure, encouraged her. And so for Sabrina kid life is looking pretty good. She's too young to gamble, but it's as if she walked into a casino and exited with a pocket full of cash. And then, just as everything is coming together, one morning in late summer, one of Sabrina's best friends knocks on her door, expecting to spend the day with her. Instead, she learns that Sabrina didn't come home home the previous night.

Talk about like girl shed and boys and what are we doing this weekend? And what are you wearing? That's the kind of stuff today. It's weekend to weekend. It's not really deep like oh my mother's you know it doesn't It never got into that.

So you were all seventeen, Yeah, Vegas was a good town to be seventeen, and it was because.

You knew everybody. You know, there was only so many high schools. Everybody knew everybody.

So they did last Vegacy things like hang on the strip and teenage things like attend a junior varsity football game, which is what was on the agenda on what would be the evening before Sabrina disappeared. After Sabrina vanished, Jennifer and Crystal Wood review again and again their last hours together. It's September seventeenth, nineteen eighty seven. The evening starts with

Right.

About an hour later, Crystal pulls up to Sabrina's place. It's around nine to thirty in the morning. Sitting in her car, Crystal honks, expecting Sabrina to pop out. As her friends know, Sabrina is dependable and always He's punctual, but Sabrina doesn't appear, so Crystal gets out of her car and goes to the front door and knocks two times, three times. The door finally opens, but only a few inches. It's the landlord in his bathrobe. Usually he's friendly to

We waited twenty four hours and then we went to the police. We said she's missing, something happened, and they just didn't believe us. One point, they said that she was class as a runaway and there's nothing they could do.

Jennifer isn't satisfied when Sabrina doesn't show up. In the next couple of days, she and Crystal returned to the police department. This time the cops accused them.

I remember them saying, oh, you were a prostitute that went to Caesar's Palace, and I was like, no, even if it was for it had nothing to fucking do with the fact that she's missing. I remember being so fucking angry.

What happens after Jennifer and Crystal visit the police. As far as they can tell, nothing. Sabrina's case is filed with the files of hundreds of other missing teenagers, seemingly a final resting spot, except that her family back in Texas, Bobby Sue. Sabrina's mother, along with her aunt, will not give up. They scour missing person reports from around the country.

And I'm sitting there one day on the phone rings and I pick it up.

So in nineteen ninety one, Lindall Marx answers the phone in her office. Lindall is at that moment a new reporter at the wildly popular TV show A turn affair leader in the newest TV genre, the tabloid.

I mean, we would get calls often. It would be people that knew were crazy, people who just had dumb stories, just unbelievable stories, or you know, I've spotted a celebrity or whatever, and you know, how much? How much will you pay for my tape today?

The caller is a woman, middle aged. From the sound of her voice, I've spoken a Texas draw. She introduces herself as the aunt Lindall. Here's the mother in the background.

So I'm talking to her. I'm talking to her and and they weren't crazy at all. And this woman tells me that her niece is missing, and my first reaction was okay.

Theann explains that her niece was living in Las Vegas when she vanished.

And she was clearly upset. We have phoned newspapers, We've phoned other people in the media, we have phoned the local press. No one cares. We can't get anyone to do anything. You are our last resort, right Okay, So what have you done? Have you told the police? Yes, but the police have done nothing. What do you mean the police have done nothing. We reported her missing a few days after she went miss they've done nothing. And when I hear that, that makes me go, I'm here

Linda is in her twenties and already a seasoned reporter. She comes from a hard news background. She's Australian, but more at home in a place like New York, where ambition and she's ambitious matters.

I've seen a.

Bunch of her TV segments from the nineties, and she looks cool in a ninety sort of way, petite with perfect bangs and those shoulder pads that seem so excellent back then. She's down to earth. She does her own makeup for TV. As a reporter, she's old school, lots of shoe leather, door knocking, file searching, and relentless like irrationally relentless, prides herself on that. The word hard bitten comes to mind.

You never take no for an answer.

But also she's like wildly idealless. She seems to truly believe that her efforts, her relentless efforts, can change the course of history.

If I feel like there's a big man kicking a little guy in the guts, I will go after that story. I will go after that with aggression and passion.

And from where she sits at a desk on a phone in a New York office, the mom and the aunt in Texas are the little guys. Lindall can't believe that the cops shrugged at the report of their missing girl, that they shirked their duty for a soft spoken, helpless aunt and mother. The system couldn't be bothered, or so it seemed to Lindall at that moment. On the phone, the aunt shares more details. She says, her niece disappeared from Las Vegas when she was seventeen.

I asked her when did she go missing? She said, four years ago?

WHOA, Lindall? Four years ago? And they're just popping up now. If there was a trail, it's not there. Anymore. That timetable would have made a lot of reporters hang up. Lindall keeps listening.

So she's begging me to help. I just I filled a connection with that family. I felt their pain, and I just I felt something was wrong. People don't just disappear into thin air.

So, Lindall, you thought everyone's pushed him aside, so you can do something different.

Yeah, one, just one problem.

Lindall doesn't actually have the authority to decide what story she works on at a current affair. There's a chain of command, So she hangs up with the mother and aunt and heads to the office of news editor Dan, meaning it's Dan who clears or kills story ideas. Reporters are in and out of his office all day. It's a busy place. Lindall edges her way in. This is Dan.

She came up to me and said she got a phone call and what do I think of this story? I said, it's some missing persons. We don't do missing persons. There's no conclusion to the story, and she kept insisting there was. I said, I can't, no, I can't waste any money on this. I'm sorry, there.

Is something going on here. This this just doesn't sound right. She's so young. How do you not follow this kid? She's a baby? How do you not follow that? How do you ignore a mother?

She argued with me and said, it's a story here, I'm telling you I feel it. This is a missing girl, and it's not a murder investigation, and we don't have facts. What is the viewer going to walk away with?

Lindall, He's being clear, Stop the nonsense, get back to work.

You know, this is a sausage factory and I've got to come up with about four or five stories a night. So I can't be wasting my time on stories that I feel doesn't have a conclusion.

Lindall's reaction, Yeah, totally fuck off.

All right, So a girl is missing, a girl who because a one phone call Linda feels tied to and so guess what, Linda will find a way.

When I feel something and my instinct is telling me this is right, I have to follow this, I will follow it. I will go down every rabbit hole if I feel like a victim hasn't been given a voice, I won't stop until I have found a way to tell that story.

Now there's a reason that Lindall is so compelled by this phone call and by this story, a reason that Lyndall's kept secret for years, a reason that she's ready to reveal on this podcast to a national audience. Just like it's a segment on a current affair, only better next time. On Killer Story, Lyndall's secret revealed.

A friend of mine came to visit me and she just walked in and I remember the shock on her face.

I felt an incredible sadness because I could feel that it was going to have an impact on her for the rest of her life, not in a good way.

I completely connected to what happened to me.

I was glad somebody was investigating it, and I remember being glad somebody believed that.

If this wouldn't have worked for lend her career at a corner, fair may have come to a dead end.

You wake up one morning, you go, screw it, I need to do the story.

You're listening to Killer Story ad free on the Binge. As a subscriber, you get Binge access to new stories on the first of every month. Check out the Binge channel page on Apple Podcasts, or getthobinge dot com to stay up to date on all the Binge worthy shows included in your subscription. Killer Story is a production of Orbit Media in association with Signal Company. Number One. Creator