Welcome back to the Pathwind Chiley for part two of our series about the disappearance of Cindy's Song. Robin, do you want to catch everyone up on what we talked about in our previous episode.
Well, this is a Halloween mystery involving a twenty one year old exchange student named Cindy Song who was originally from Korea. She went out partying on Halloween night, dressed as a playboy bunny with pink ears and was hanging out with some of her friends going to a bunch of clubs. Then around four am on the morning of November first, her friend dropped her off at her apartment complex,
yet Cindy would somehow vanish without a trace. When they checked inside her apartment, they found some of her items from her Halloween costumes, so she did get inside at some point, but there were no signs of struggle or forced entry. So the theory which has been pushed forward is that she may have stepped out to go to an overnight market or something, but then just cross paths with the wrong person who wound up abducting her. The big lead in this case is when they would look
at a serial killer named Hugo Selenski. A couple of years later, they found a bunch of human remains on his property, located about a one hundred miles away from
State College. These victims had been murdered and incinerated and the remains buried, and a former associate of Selenski's named Paul Weakley would claim that Selenski and another accomplice named Michael Kurkowski, had driven to State College and picked up Cindy while she was walking the streets, kept her in captivity for a little while at the residence, and sexually assaulted her before she was murdered. But they could not
find any remains on the property that match Cindy. And of course Michael Kurkowski, the person who allegedly assisted Selensky with this crime, he was also one of the victims. They found his remains on the property, so there's been some doubt about the veracity of Paul Weekly's story. Selensky has been sent to prison for a number of other murders, but he has never admitted any involvement in Cindy's case,
So that's the big question here. Was she murdered by Hugo Selenski or did she cross pass and be murdered by someone else. But all we really know for certain that is that here we are nearly twenty four years later and she is still a missing person. So this is one of those missing persons cases which offers nothing
but pure frustration for everyone involved. You can understand the frustration on the part of the victim's family since the investigation has made such little progress, but you can also understand the frustration from the police because they have such little evidence to work with. I know there was a lot of friction between Cindy's family and the police after the Song's called a press conference to express their displeasure
with the investigation. The specific mention of the Alicia Koza Keewitch case seemed to imply that Sidney's disappearance might have been handled with more urgency if she had been white. Well. Sadly, race can definitely be a serious issue when it comes to how missing person's investigations are handled, but I'm not sure it applies in this particular case. As I'd say, the problem was not so much police indifference but a
lack of solid leads. They had no witnesses, no physical evidence, and no potential suspects, and Sidney just happened to go missing during the early morning hours when most people would have been asleep. I think the main reason Alicia Koza Kiwich had so many FBI agents assigned to her case is because she was a thirteen year old missing child while Cindy was twenty one and legally an adult. And since Alicia had gone missing after meeting someone online, there
was a lot more evidence to work with. I suppose the biggest mistake in Sidney's investigation is when her family was allowed inside her apartment and they decided to clean it, destroying potential physical evidence before the police could perform a more thorough search. It sounds like this whole situation was due to a miscommunication, but I personally don't believe anything happened inside the apartment, and I think that Cindy was most likely abducted after she already left. If that's the case,
then cleaning the place wouldn't have made any difference. The Ferguson Township Police Department believed that the Song family's dissatisfaction was due largely to a quote unquote cultural gap between how investigations are performed in the US and South Korea.
We've actually seen the opposite side of the coin in cases where an American citizen has gone missing in a foreign country and their family expressed frustration because the police were handling the investigation in a different fashion than they're used to. The fact of the matter is that it must be a helpless feeling when your child goes missing
thousands of miles away from you. And I'm sure it was daunting to travel to a country where you don't even speak the language in order to help out with the search effort.
And you know what, guys, I think that it's not just a cultural gap where it needs to be an international kind of gap. I think there is a natural disconnect between law enforcement and families because there isn't a structure in place where law enforcement can be the emotional support and provide the information that families need when they're working an active case. So when I would meet with families, one of the things that I would do is I would say, here's where the police are limited in giving
you what you need. Right they're working an active case, even though it's a cold case. For many of the families I worked with, it's active and so you don't necessarily even want to be in a position where they share information that you might later be discussing with someone and actually harm the case accidentally. Right, that's a big burden for families to hold. So a lot of times law enforcement does keep the family at bay, even years later,
because the little information that they have. You don't want the family to have that information and accidentally share it with someone who is not necessarily the right party to share it with. And then when you look at police officers, I would work with them and say little things like answering the phone, checking in with the family, trying to have some more empathy and compassion, even though that's not
your quote job. Trying to add that layer of care for family members who are actively engaged with you matters. And so I think it's that just separation of someone doing their job and truly oftentimes trying to do it well and family saying well, if you can't find them, if you can't help us, then you're failing us and you're failing the victim. That's a natural kind of upset
that's going to occur between those two parties. So it's so sad here it is hard not to make parallels to cases that are close by geographically that meet similar victim characteristics. But here I truly think those two cases that they're comparing with Alicia and Cindy, you do have more evidence in Alicia's case, and it's a underagediled that they thought they might have more leads to follow. So
this whole case is tragic. Cindy was a young kid going out to have fun, she got home, she made it home safely, and she probably did what she did many and many a knight's, which was want to go get a snack or a drink, and then she ends up never coming home. So a lot of burden and heavy grief on the family. And I think the same kind of grief exists for many law enforcement agents who wanted to know where is Cindy, if she's still alive, is she being hurt, how do we protect the community
from whoever took her? So just such such a sad case.
So ask question for you, you've worked sort of as a bridge or a go between with law enforcement and families. Do you think that it would have made a greater impact or a difference if law enforcement had somebody to facilitate that type of a position with the Song family that spoke Korean.
Oh my gosh, yes, oh my gosh, yes, honestly needs to be. There are a few victim advocates that are provided to each law enforcement agency, but they're understaffed, they're under resourced, and they honestly don't have the training for a plethora of crimes. Right you have someone who's willing to hold a victim's hand and help, but when you only have two of them or one of them at a law enforcement agency, you have several cases that need someone to assist the family and police who are untrained
to do so. If there was that kind of bridge person who could assist or even come in, especially with language gaps, even racial gaps, all of those things where culture does matter, and especially understanding the language of the officers you're trying to communicate with as a family member and vice versa for law enforcement, I think it would have highly changed the dynamic. But again, unless they had
apprehended someone. In Cindy's case, I think in the back of people's heads, if you can't tell me who did it, then I'm going to blame you for failing to provide that information to me, And so that blame that would normally go to a suspect, it would normally that anger and disappointment and frustration that would go towards the suspect has to be funneled somewhere. So oftentimes it's law enforcement for quote, failing to do their job when sometimes the evidence just isn't there.
Yeah, we mentioned this on our last episode, but I know that Cindy's brother became very frustrated because law enforcement had to get a subpoena in order to search her phone and internet records, and he was saying, well, we don't have to do this in Korea. What's the hold up here? This is wasting valuable time. But it sounds like someone really didn't take the time to sit down and explain to him that law enforcement just works a lot differently in the US than Korea and their procedures
to go through. But they just took it as wasting time, thinking that going through all this bureaucracy and red tape was preventing them from finding out what happened to her.
I think any family would feel that way. If you told me right now you can go help me find Reagan because there's red tape you've got to go through, I'd be like, what the hell are you doing? No, my daughter's missing. You get up now and find her phone, get her records, get her bank account. We're doing that now, and the officers would tell me the same thing. We
have to wait. I'd be heartsick, I'd be angry. I'd be so infuriated that you're allowing her to be hurt right now by somebody because of your quote red tape, and you're not finding.
My baby for me.
So it's a very difficult situation, especially with a missing person versus let's say, finding a deceased victim. Right when there's the missing person, that urgency is there, that every second counts is there, and maybe I can get my arms back around my child.
Please help me.
Anyway. The only thing we know for certain about this case is the chances of Cindy running away voluntarily or completing suicide seem pretty much non existent. It was actually Cindy's own family who pushed forward the theory that she may have taken her own life because she was despondent
over her breakup with her boyfriend. But you have to remember that they weren't living near her, and Cindy's friends, who were around her all the time, insisted that she had gotten over the breakup and was not feeling depressed
or suicidal. By all accounts, Cindy was in a great mood on Hallowey night, and it seems unlikely that she would spend the night partying with friends, go back inside her apartment to drop off some items, and then leave again to go somewhere to complete suicide, unless she jumped into a body of water somewhere or traveled to a remote area. I think Cindy's remains would have surfaced by now if she had taken her own life, So the most logical explanation for her disappearance is an abduction, But
the big question is how would have transpired. The presence of Cindy's bags, cell phone, and fake eyelashes proved that she made it inside her apartment after she was dropped off, but since the rest of her bunny costume was never found, that seems to indicate that she went missing before she had a chance to change clothing, so she probably wasn't
in her apartment for very long. Since there was no sign of struggle or forced entry, it seems like someone could have knocked on Cindy's door and abducted her after she opened it, or she was abducted after stepping outside to go somewhere. I get the impression that the door was locked when Cindy's roommate returned to the apartment later that day, and since she didn't seem to notice anything out of the ordinary, I'd say the second scenario is far more likely. In spite of the fact that it
was four am. It apparently wasn't that uncommon for Cindy to visit the nearby twenty four hour market at odd hours, and given that her purse was missing, she probably made the impulsive decision to go grab something and wound up crossing paths with the wrong person.
And think about this too, when you think about the iconic playboy bunny and the way that boy buddies are sexualized, there a sexual icon right that you could imagine this young girl in a bunny costume, right, even though her ears are back at the house. Let's say she had on a leotard and a tail or, a cute little shorts and a tail on it or whatever. On Halloween night.
You could imagine the kind of men who would be driving around at four am in the morning what they could be thinking when they pass a young girl like that what kind of sick, depraved thoughts could go on. She's alone, there probably aren't many other people out and about on the streets at that hour, and so I just feel like the combination of factors playing in right there, the vulnerability, the sexualization, the kind of depravity that could come from that could escalate quite quickly.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking has happened. That if she was out there alone at four am and just some predator just happened to be driving by, if he saw her in the playboy buddy costume, he may have decided this is a great target. This is who I'm going to to have ducked. The big issue which hampered the early stages of the investigation was the lack of suspects, as Cindy didn't have any known enemies and her ex boyfriend, the one person who might have had a potential motive
to harmer, was ruled out almost immediately. Since Cindy spent the night partying at a club, you could easily assume that someone who was there might have developed a fixation
on her and followed her home. But the problem is that Cindy left the club at two AM and spent the next two hours, traveling to various locations such as a friend's place, before heading back to her apartment, and I'm not sure anyone would have followed her for that length of time, particularly if she was in the company of other friends, and even if they did, they probably wouldn't have been able to predict that she would enter her apartment and then decide to leave again at that
time of the morning, So I think her abduction may have been completely random, as the wrong person could have seen her walking down the street alone and took advantage of the situation to grab her. The most prominent eyewitness sighting of Cindy after she would sing is the woman who claims she saw in Philadelphia's Chinatown district a few days later screaming for help while in the clutches of
another man. This led to speculation that Cindy may have been kidnapped and forced into sex work, and this man was her handler. However, I'm inclined to think the witness may have been mistaken and after she saw another Asian woman who was not Cindy. In fact, I wonder if her account is even true at all, As investigators claimed the witnesses story changed multiple times so I'd hate to
think she just made the whole story up. But if she was telling the truth and she really did see a completely different woman crying and screaming for help, then I have to wonder what was going on there. Regardless, it does not sound like the authorities found the Philadelphia sighting to be credible.
Yeah, with eyewitness identification, especially if this was like a cross racial kind of identification, like a Caucasian woman I didnifind an Asian woman, or let's say that she might have been a black woman, identifying this Asian woman, you will see lower rates of successful eyewitness identification. Scientifically, it just says we paint a canvas clearer on the same color skin that we have, and so I think that
complicates the situation. I also think that you have to remember, if Cindy's face is plastered everywhere as a missing girl, people might in their mind replace the face of the person they saw with that image that's on the missing poster or on the news that night. And so I rarely think eyewitnesses are coming forward trying to complicate or hurt a scenario or an investigation, But I do think that they often get it wrong trying to help and
just not having accurate information. If this woman did see Cindy that day, it does make sense that she could be trying to scream out in public when she's been let's say, held captive, and then this man takes her out for sex work or even just to be out in public, and when she thinks she has a chance, she screams for her home. How scary to think if it was Cindy, she truly was at that moment trying to get someone to recognize and help her fight for
her life. And it doesn't seem like anything happened from that dispute in public with this man.
I think it would be a lot more credible if the witness was Korean themselves, because what we know about cross racial identification being so poor. Do we know anything about this witness?
Robin Uh, I'm just going to check the unsolve Mysteri's reenactment. I mean, I can't say it to be accurate, but I'm curious to see if the woman was white or if she was Asian herself. Well, I don't know any information about her as a person, but let me just see. Uh, Okay, Well, the reenactment shows that the witness was an Asian woman, So I'm not sure if there was any cross racial identification here.
Well, I definitely think that would strengthen her her reporting at that point that you have same race identification, which helps. But again, you also have a moment where there's a struggle and a kind of chaotic scene where a woman's screaming for help. There's a lot of factors that'll go into distracting someone's brain from focusing specifically on facial features. When you have a lot of chaos at the scene, or you have a weapon present lighting, all kinds of
things matter. So again, I don't think many people come forward trying to distract police. But I wish our story had stayed the same, and I wish there had been more clear evidence that this really was Cindy.
I mean, if she was telling the truth, it might have been nothing more than a regular domestic dispute involving a pair of a couple or something like that and had nothing to do with Cindy.
And who knows, Maybe it was somebody who was in a situation where they were being trafficked, but it just wasn't Cindy. For a while, the Philadelphia sighting was the only major lead in Cindy's case until she was connected to Hugo Soelenski. Now, like we mentioned in our last episode, trying to cover Hugo Selenski's story from beginning to end would probably take an entire long form podcast, and we don't want to become too distracted by it in order
to take the focus away from Cindy's case. But the whole story is pretty crazy, and I'm not sure we'll ever learn the full extent of all the horrific crimes that Selensky has committed. Before he was charged with any murders, Selensky was already in jail because he'd been arrested for extorting money from Michael Kurkowski's father After he murdered Kurkowski
and buried his body. Selensky had the audacity to keep visiting the guy's father to inform him that his son was on the run and needed money to help him hide out. When Krekowski's father eventually became suspicious, Selensky threatened him with a gun in order to get him to hand over his money, and in total, he managed to
extort around one hundred thousand dollars from him. Another crazy part of his saga which we didn't mention is the shortly after he was charged with the murders of Frank James and a day Keeler Selenski managed to perform a daring escape from the Luzerne County prison by trying twelve bed sheets together as a rope and using it to climb out a six floor window. He turned himself in only three days later, but the escape was pretty big news in Pennsylvania at the time.
How scary when you have this idea that we know he killed the two people and then he also murdered Kurkowski, but then he goes and extorts the father of one of his murder victims and someone who was supposedly quote his friend.
Is that right? Yeah, Like Selensky have been helping Kakowski out because he had his own legal situation where he was getting arrested for illegally selling pharmaceuticals. But it seemed like an obvious con job where he was going to bleed Kurkowski drive then kill him, and then after he's dead, he starts trying to bleed money from Kurkowski's father.
That's insane. And in the story from the the other we have another person who comes forward and says both of those men were the ones who could have possibly abducted Cindy.
Right exactly. Yeah, And that's the run reason people are skeptical because even though Kurkowski was a drug dealer, he doesn't have any known history of violence. So people are wondering, would he really team up with Selenski just to abduct some random woman and then kill her and hold.
Her captive and things like that. That's quite a jump.
Selensky is clearly a sociopathic monster who has murdered multiple people. But all that being said, I can't say I'm entirely convinced that he murdered Cindy Song. Let's go back and examine how Sidney's disappearance was linked to Selensky. To begin with, this was all due to a secondhand story shared by Paul Weakley, the same man who led the authorities to
the murder victims buried on Selenski's property. According to Weekly, Selensky had told him that he and Michael Kurkowski saw Cindy walking down the street, thought she was a sex worker, and decided to abduct her. Kurkowski then kept Sydney confer find inside is safe at his home to have his way with her for a while before she died curiously.
Not even the accounts of this story described Cindy's exact cause of death, only that she died while in captivity, but afterward Selenski and Kurkowski proceeded to bury her body somewhere together. It's been established that none of the victims found on Selenski's property in two thousand and three were Cindy, but there is some confusion about how many victims there
actually are. Initially, it was reported that they only found the remains of five people, but a grand jury report from twenty fourteen stated that Selensky was believed to be involved in the murder of twelve people, and Weekly claimed
that Selensky was responsible for at least sixteen murders. I think some of the confusion might stem from the fact that a number of bone fragments were found in a burn pit, and some of them were so badly burned and destroyed that it was impossible to extract any DNA from them. We know some of these fragments belong to Frank James a Day, a healer, and a third person
who has never been publicly identified, but it's possible. They've since determined that there's some remains there which belong to other people.
What do we know about Weekly himself. Is it possible that he could have actually been part of this and had an ability to put people on Selenski's property with him, or is he been ruled out as having any kind of foul play recognition with Selensky.
They're not entirely sure yet, because he does seem like he could be a compulsive liar, and I know that he definitely helped with the disposal of some of these bodies at the very least. And they think that maybe he's just making up stories because he's trying to beat his own charges and hoping that if he can offer more information maybe he'll get a reduced sentence or something. So authorities have never been entirely clear about whether everything he's telling is the truth.
I think it's very scary that the grand jury report, not just Weekly, but a grand jury report actually believes Lensky's involved in the murder of up to twelve people. That's insane because right now, really it's five, three to five, and then they said, well, actually we believe it's twelve. That's an insane victim count for somebody.
And it can't just be this arbitrary number that they're coming up with. They must have people that have disappeared or that they believe are murdered that are very specific, like they know the identities of them. Otherwise, how could you just put a number out there like, oh, it's twelve, since you know that there's at least the remains of
three people there. I don't understand how they're supposed to be this other nine people unless you just think he's this killer and he's got these other like associates if they're doing illegal things together and a lot of these associates have disappeared, and it seems like he's a common denominator.
Yeah, that's always been very secretive about how they came in with that number twelve, because there are just so many bone fragments all over the property, Like how do you term in an exact number from what you find? So it does make me think that they have more information than they're letting us know. But this grand jury report came out nearly ten years ago, and we still don't have any further information about why they came to
that number. And Selensky has never been linked to any additional murders.
But even if the authorities have managed to uncover additional victims who were murdered on Selenski's property, I really don't think it's relevant to Cindy's case. Remember, Selenski did not actually move on to this property until the spring of two thousand and two, months after Cindy went missing. In fact, his entire motive for murdering Kurkowski around this time period was because he needed money to close on the purchase
of his new home. So if Selensky was involved in Cindy's murder, he probably would have buried her body somewhere else. And unless Lensky decided to recover her remains at a later time and then move them to his property in order to bury your birth in them, I have my doubts that you're ever going to find her there. But
all this talk about remains is completely irrelevant. If Paul Weakley's story about Cindy's alleged abduction and murder aren't even true and there are definitely some serious credibility issues with him. The problem is that both Selenski and Michael Kurkowski were accused of committing this crime together and I'm not entirely
sure if this fits Kurkowski's profile. The reason Selensky and Kurkowski became acquainted in the first place is because Krekowski had been charged with several felonies because of his illegal prescription drug bring. While he was out on bond, Selensky convinced Kurkowski to pay him to help him out with his legal issues, but of course this turned out to
be nothing but an elaborate scam to extort money from Kurkowski. Obviously, Krekowski was not a saint, and he deserved to spend time in prison for his crimes, but as far as I can tell, he did not have any known propena city for violence before his legal troubles. He was a married man with two children who ran a successful pharmacy, and it seems like his crimes were entirely motivated by greed.
There doesn't seem to be anything in his background to suggest that he was a type of guy who would abduct a woman, keep her imprisoned as a sex slave, and then kill her.
And what's really interesting is that these are he's committing white collar crimes. He's stealing illegal prescription drugs. I believe in selling those from the pharmacy, and so that's a very different level of crime than let's say a street drug dealer who might actually be involved in things like sex work, all kinds of things where he's doing other street crimes to help supplement or provide more power and
control on the streets for him. So I keep wondering what the heck did Kurkowski think Selensky was going to help him with when he went and started getting conned out of money from Selensky. What did Selensky offer?
Yeah, that part is confusing to me because it's not like he was a lawyer, so I don't know what he thought Selensky was going to do to help him, to help him to cause him to beat his charges. So he must have been a very smooth talking con man.
But Jules brought this up in the last episode, and while this has never been conclusively proven, we also wondered if Kurkowski might have had addiction issues, that maybe he had been having issues with a lot of these prescription drugs himself and that's why he became desperate enough in order to start selling them legally because he desperately needed money. So, like I said, he may not be a bad person
at heart. He may have just done a bad thing because he was desperate, and that's a far cry from actively participating in the abduction, sexual assault, and murder of a woman. At the time Cindy disappeared, Kurkowski's wife had already divorced him and moved out of his house with their kids. But no one is certain when he began
his relationship with his new girlfriend, Tammy Fassett. We know she was at Kurkowski's home on the day Selensky killed him, but I'm not entirely sure if they were living together
at the time. Regardless, if Kurkowski and Fasett were involved in a serious relationship in November of two thousand and one and she was often frequenting his home, would he really be keeping a kidnapped sex slave in prison inside a safe But even if you don't believe Kurkowski was a sex criminal, that doesn't really fit Selenski's profile either.
As awful as Selensky is, it seems like the murders he committed were motivated purely by financial game, as he killed his four known victims in order to rob them. I see nothing to indicate that he was the type of guy who would abduct random women off the street in order to rape and murder them. The circumstances of
this alleged crime really don't make much sense. Kurkowski was out on bond facing potential prison time, and Selensky is supposed to be helping him with his legal situation, So would Kirkowski really want to take the risk of abducting someone. It's also where mentioning that Kurkowski lived in Humlock Creek,
which is over two hours away from State College. So the idea of him and Selensky making a four hour round trip to cruise the streets and abduct a random woman at four am before taking her back to Kurkowski's home just doesn't ring true to me.
No, it doesn't really seem to fit. I agree with you. Even Selenski doesn't seem to be the sexually motivated, crazed killer that would be someone. As he's driving past, he sees his girl on a playboy bunny outfit and abducts her and keeps her. Right, that's a whole nother level. You're going to take the risk of keeping her for days and abusing her and then killing her with other people like a lot of those things totally changed the
organization and the style of a killer. Selensky seems to use people for financial gain and murder them and hind them. Never before have we seen him really killing with someone else. Un last week happens to be part of it as well. But it is odd. It's very weird, especially for Kurkowski. He had a good life and even if he was struggling with addiction, obviously he's facing legal issues. He was
just just a different part of his life. Like if he's trying to get away from these legal charges, try to figure out how to get his LFE back on track, and he truly thinks Celensky can help him. Why all of a sudden is he going to take those kinds of big risk and say, you know what we should do, abduct, torture, hold and then kill a girl together. Just doesn't seem to make sense.
I think the biggest issue is that the only thing linking these two men to Cindy's disappearance is Paul Weekley, who is just not a very credible source. It was established the Weekly had downloaded articles about Cindy's case off the Internet prior to sharing his story, so he very well could have been looking up information about random Pennsylvania cold cases and keeping it in his back pocket if
he ever felt like feeding something to the authorities. To reiterate, Weekly decided to snitch on Selenski and lead authorities to the remains on his property because he was facing a burglary charge, but he did not tell the full truth about what happened. He initially claimed that Patrick Gruson was with Selenski when he murdered Michael Kurkowski and Tammy Fassett, but it actually turned out that Weekly himself was there instead.
Weekly also initially said that Selensky murdered Krekowski because he was angry about him keeping Cindy's bunny ears as a souvenir, but it turned out the real motive was to steal sixty thousand dollars from Kurkowski's house, and Weekly conveniently neglected to mention that he personally got cut out of that money. So you can see why he might feel the need to fabricate a story about Cindy's abduction and pin the crime on a guy who was already dead in order
to take the heat off of himself. But there might actually have been an ulterior motive for this. What if this was actually Selenski and Weekly who abducted and murdered Cindy. When the allegation's first surface, Selenski's defense attorney claimed that several people could place his client over one hundred and thirty miles away in wilkes Bury at the time that
Cindy went missing. Although I'm not sure if this was ever confirmed, But if Selensky wasn't involved, could it be possible that Weekly himself might be responsible for Cindy's disappearance. This might explain why he had so much information about Cindy on his computer. After all, if weakly wanted to divert suspicion away from himself, pinning the crime on an associate who already had a bunch of murder victims buried on his property wouldn't be the worst idea in the world.
It's definitely an intriguing theory, But much like Selenski, it seems like most of Weekly's crimes were motivated by financial gain, and there's nothing in his background to suggesse he's a sexual predator.
I think we really could have a lot of motivations. I definitely think he could be the person who did it. I mean, that's, like you said, not a not a dumb idea. If you know that you have an associate who's pretty evil themselves, and you do something that's dark and devious, why not just blame it on the person that's already going to go down for a lot of really bad things. But I also think like Weekly could
have had a falling out with Selinsky. Selensky could be threatening Weekly, and there could be like a revenge kind of thing where he wants to just get back at Selensky. And I mean blatantly say I'm lying about you, but here you go, I'm turning against you on this case. Or it's very possible too, Like you said earlier, that Weekly is trying to get favoritism with whoever he's going to be up against for legal issues, you know, the prosecutor or law enforcement things like that, to get better
treatment for himself. And so it's really nothing to do with Selinsky. He's just saying, Hey, I'm going to help the police because then they'll see me as someone who's valuable. I could be more of an informant and maybe they'll reduce my charge. They'll actually lighten up things that they're doing against me because I'm helping them.
That definitely would make sense to me, because he was facing all these charges and he knows that his former assays he has all these human remains buried on his property, so he could just say, hey, I can pick some other missing girl whom I found in the news and claim that she's among the remains, and maybe they'll give me some leniency. Be able, they'll believe me. But they
just never found any conclusive evidence to approve that. Overall, there has never been any hard evidence to implicate Selensky, Kurkowski, or Weekly in this crime, and when you look at the situation as a whole, it just seems more likely that the real perpetrator was someone who was yet to show up on the radar. Weekly probably learned about Sidney's disappearance on the internet and decided to fabricate a story about Selensky's involvement in order to potentially earn some brownie
points from the authorities. On the one hand, I really hope Weekly story isn't true, since it's horrifying to consider the idea of Sidy being held captive in a safe and being repeatedly sexually assaulted before her death. But on the other hand, if you completely disregard Weekly's story, then that means the investigation is back at square one and
there are no other leads or suspects. Sadly, Cindy was probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and while she was walking to the market, some predator happened to notice an attractive young woman walking alone, and since there was no one else around during the wee hours of the morning, he took advantage of the situation by abducting her. If no one saw anything and the perpetrator did leave any evidence behind, it's going to be
very difficult to figure out who is responsible. The best hope for solving this case is if Cindy's remains just happened to be found somewhere, or if whoever was involved in her disappearance decides to talk. Remember, for the first year that Michael Kurkowski and Tammy Fasset were missing, everyone just assumed they were wanted fugitives on the run until Paul Weekly talked and revealed they were buried on hyug Selenski's property. So maybe the same thing will happen in
this case, and Sydney's remains will be recovered. If you happen to have any information about the unsolved disappearance of Sidney Song, please contact the Ferguson Township Police Department at eight one four two three seven one one seven two. That's eight one four two three seven one one seven two Jules Ashley. Any final thoughts in this case.
The missing person's cases break my heart in a different way that there's a family wondering what happened to our baby girl and knowing that it's likely horrific, knowing that it is likely something that is so devastating that the human mind can't wrap, you know, its own head around. But when you think about it, they have zero peace. They don't have a body that they can go visit.
They don't have the ability to say she was safe at the end of her life with us right we had our body back, we were able to cremate her, bury her, or bring her home to her home country like none of that, And so then your brain starts to think what could be done to her? Is she deceased, is she cold and alone somewhere? Is she being trafficked? Is she still alive somewhere? All that I think adds a totally different kind of heartbreak to these kinds of cases.
Her family came here and sent her here thinking she was going to get this amazing opportunity, and that's exactly what she was doing. She was going to school, she was going to parties, she was just being a kid and having fun and exploring a new country and making
new friends. And literally a Halloween evening, I believe she was probably doing something she did all the time, which was getting settled at home thinking, you know what, I want a little snack or something to drink before I go to bed, and walking to the very close by convenience store, and on that route, especially that night, because she was dressed in her Halloween costume, someone increased their feeling of vulnerability for her and abducted her and hurt her.
I do not think Cindy hurt herself. I think she had a lot going for her, and her friends were able to vouch for the fact that she was happy and she was making plans and she was engaged. That night, I think someone saw an opportunity and they took it. And my heart breaks. It's cases like this that I just want her found, no matter what condition. That's inn I want her found because there is a different level of peace that comes when I know she's at least not being hurt by somebody else.
I really don't have a lot to add on top of what Ash said, because you summed it up so succinctly, and I agree with every single point that she made. My heart breaks for the family, and I truly believe that Celenski, Krakowski and Weekly as the informant, are a red herring here. I think was an opportunistic predator. Somebody just came alway long in that small window of time and they snatched her off the face of the earth.
But I truly hope for the family's sake that they're able to have some kind of resolution, that her body or her remains will be found somewhere, and that if anybody knows anything that at this point, I would truly hope, after it's been so many years, it's been like what twenty three years at this point, that if somebody had information, I would truly hope that they would go to the authorities so that this family can get a resolution and they can truly heal or at least begin the process,
because not having a body not having somewhere that you can go and visit for a loved one and to be able to say what you're thinking, but to know that their remains are out there somewhere and they aren't where you are is just another kind of horrible.
Yeah. I remember learning about this case on Unsolved Mystery shortly after it origidly occurred, and I also vividly remember when the news started coming out that her remains could be on the property of Hugo Selenski, And there were a couple of years where I legitimately believed this was the best lead, that Selenski was responsible, and that the stories about her abducted and held in captivity were true.
And it was only after I put together my original Trail and Cold episode way back in twenty eighteen and started digging more into this that I realized, like you said, that this is probably all a red herring, that even though Hugo Selenski's a serial killer, he's a monster and he's done some awful things, this really isn't his m He seems like the type of person who would kill people just purely for financial gain in his own benefits, and not someone who would abduct a random young woman
he saw walking down the street at four am. So, unfortunately, I do believe that this whole lead is not really viable and that city was just a victim who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, that she made a last minute decision to leave her apartments and go to a nearby market or something, but someone just happened to see her and abducted her. And we just don't know who this person is, what they did to her,
and what they may have done to her body. So I guess that is kind of the downside to this whole Hugo Soelenski angle not going anywhere? Is that? Where do we begin now? Because there's just no evidence whatsoever to work with if Cindy was abducted by a completely
random stranger. But all we can to really do is just keep her case out here on the spotlight, spread the word, and maybe one of these days the right person will come for with information which leads to a resolution and her family will finally get some closure.
Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit about the Trail Went Cold Patreon?
Yes, the Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three years now, and we offer these standard bonus features like early ad free episodes, and I also send out stickers and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs up with us on Patreon. If you join our five dollars tier Tier two, we also offer monthly bonus episodes in which I talk about cases with are not featured on the Trail went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to Patreon and if you join our highest tier tier three,
the ten dollars tier. One of the features we offer is a audio commentary track over classic episodes of Unsaved Mysteries, where you can download an audio file and then boot up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in the background, where I just provide trivia and factoids about the cases featured in this episode. And incidentally, the very first episode that I did a commentary track over was
the episode featuring this case. So if you want to download a commentary track in which I make more smart ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor, then be sure to join Tier three.
So I want to let you know a little bit about the Jewels and Nashty patreons. So there's early ad free episodes of the Path Went Chili. We've got our Path Went Chili mini's, which are always over an hour, so they're not very mini, but they're just too short to turn into a series, and we're really enjoying doing those, so we hope you check out those patreons will link them in the show notes.
So I want to thank you all for listening, and any chance you have to share us on social media with a friend or to rate and review is greatly appreciated. You can email us at The Pathwentchili at gmail dot com. You can reach us on Twitter at the Pathwink. So until next time, be sure to bundle up because cold trails and chili pass call for warm clothing.
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy