S05 Episode 16: Built On Shifting Sands (Pt.1 of 2)

July fourth weekend. The park, located on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, was comprised of over two thousand acres of sand dunes and rugged grassland, as well as a fifteen mile stretch of sandy beach, and on days like these, it was just about the most popular place in the state. Letting out a side of relief at having made it through without incident, Bud turned and headed back to the ranger's hut when he was approached by a teenage couple

making their way to the car park. It probably wasn't anything to be concerned about, they said, but they thought he might like to know about the blanket and a number of personal items that appeared to have been left behind. On the beach. The items belonged to three young women who the couple had seen arriving around ten am that morning before settling down under several poplar trees close to

where they were sitting. The couple were sure they'd seen the women boarding a boat on the lake sometime around twelve, but hadn't seen them since. Bud gave a rise smile at the thought of all the young women he'd seen getting hit on by groups of guys trying to various degrees of success to get them onto their boats. Chance its were, he thought, if these women had boarded one under similar circumstances, they'd be back soon enough to collect

their things. Bud thanked the couple and waved them on their way, then headed over to pick up the items, figuring the least he could do was make sure they didn't get stolen. What Bud Connor couldn't possibly have known then was that he just walked straight into one of the greatest mysteries the American Midwest would ever know. You're

listening to Unexplained and I'm Richard McClean smith. With most people having left the beach by then, it wasn't hard to spot the abandoned blanket laid out about a hundred yards from the shoreline under the poplars, just as the teenagers had said. Moments later, Bud was stood over it

with a look of deep confusion on his face. There were the usual things you might expect to get left behind, like the yellow beach rope, sunglasses and suntan oil, or the nearly empty packet of cigarettes, but there was other stuff too that gave him pause for thought, like the wallets, transistor, radio,

and even a set of car keys. Bud looked about the beach at the remaining couples and families in various stages of packing up and heading home, then down to the shoreline and out across the water, where earlier there'd been hundreds of bathers and boats bobbing up and down on the lake, only a few diehards remained splashing about in the shallows. He looked down again at the items, then bundled them all into the middle of the blanket

and pulled it up from the sand. A few minutes later, Bud arrived at the office of park Superintendent William's Vettich. After explaining what he'd found, the pair placed the items in lost property for safe keeping, then closed up and headed home. It was two days later, early in the morning of Monday, July fourth, when the phone rang in

the ranger's hut. Spetich picked it up. It was a man named Harold Blow in obvious distress, calling from Westchester, a suburb of Chicago located about fifty miles west of the park. His nineteen year old daughter, Patty, had left with friends for the beach early on Saturday morning, but hadn't been seen since, and neither had her two friends. Though he knew it was unlikely Spetitch would remember them personally, Blow proceeded to give a description of the young women

just in case. Patty or pat was about five foot six with brown hair and dark brown eyes. He believed she'd taken a bright yellow bikini to wear at the beach that day. Anne Miller, five ft two with brown hair and blue eyes, was twenty one and would most likely have been wearing a blue two piece swimsuit with a red belt. And Lastly, Renee Brule, also nineteen, was about five ft nine with brown hair and hazel brown eyes. Her swimsuit, according to her husband Jeffrey, was brown and

had green flowers and gold leaves printed on it. The three would have driven there in Anne's nineteen fifty five buick. Sveetich leant back on his chair as he wrote it all down and peered through to the storeroom at the box of items that Bud Connor had brought in a few nights ago. After reassuring Harold that his daughter would soon turn up, Spetich hung up the call, then grabbed the box from the storeroom. Pulling off the lid, he took out the various items, including the bright yellow robe

just like the bikini that Harold had described. Moving it to the side, he spotted the car keys, noticing now the key ring attached to them in the shape of a miniature Illinois license plate to tread two six five four eighty seven. With it being so early, it didn't take him long to spot the corresponding vehicle, parked up on its own at the far side of the car park. When he saw it was a buick, his stomach dropped. A few calls later and Chicago police confirmed it the

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That's better help dot com. Forward slash unexplained. Join the over one million people taking charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional. Better Help wants you to start living a happier life today. With the Indiana State Police taking over what was now an official missing person's case, members of the women's families were invited to inspect the items left behind the beach. All were

confirmed as having belonged to pat Anne and Renee. It was shortly afternoon when thirty nine year old Sergeant Edward Burke, widely regarded as one of the best detectives in the state, arrived at the park and swiftly set about trying to establish a course of events. Having spoken to Bud Connor, Burke was keen to learn more about the possible boat the women were said to have boarded, according to the

young couple who first alerted to the items on the beach. However, since Bud thought nothing of it at the time, he'd neglected to take their details down, leaving Burke with only the vague information that the boat had headed west after the women boarded it. With close to six hundred boats estimated to have been on the lake between Chicago the Indiana June State Park that day, locating the one in

question would be almost impossible. Finding more witnesses who might also have seen the women would prove equally difficult, since close to nine thousand people were thought to have been at the park around the same time. With little else to go on the next day, Burke initiated a full search of the two thousand, one hundred and eighty acre reserve and shoreline, enlisting the help of the Coast Guard, as well as forty two soldiers from a nearby missile

base and ten mounted officers from the Porter County Sheriff's Department. Meanwhile, police issued a statement to the press giving descriptions of the women and asking for members of the public to come forward with any information they might have on them or the mystery boat. Later that afternoon, witnesses from South Holland in Illinois and Indianapolis called in to say they too had seen the women getting into a boat that day.

They were certain it was the women in question on account of the unmissible bright yellow bikini worn by pat Blow. Perhaps more importantly, they also remembered the man on the boat who'd invited them onto it, describing him as being well tanned and in his early twenties, with wavy raven colored hair and wearing a windbreaker jacket. As for the boat, however, they were less sure, remembering only that it hadn't been especially big, perhaps only fourteen to sixteen feet long, and

was possibly white and blue in color. By the end of the first day, scouring the parks, dunes and meadows, sifting through every blade of marram grass, the search teams found no sign of the missing women. Suspecting they may have drowned, Detective Burke ordered a crew of beech buggies to continue patrolling the shore line in case their bodies washed up in the night, but by first light the

next morning nothing had come in. The search continued through Wednesday, with an additional one hundred volunteers joining in to help, but with no further clues on the women's whereabouts, Burke's thoughts turned to a letter that had been found left behind at the beach in Renee Brule's purse, dated two weeks prior to her disappearance and clearly written in anguish, It was addressed to her husband, Jeffrey. In it, Renee accused her husband of being more interested in his friends

and hot rod cars than spending time with her. The marriage was over its set, and she wanted a divorce. When Burke brought the letter to Geoffrey's attention, he was stunned. Though he wasn't so naive to think they hadn't been having problem, he hadn't fully appreciated the depth of Renee's misery. Renee's family insisted, however, that the fact she never sent the letter was evidence that she hadn't been serious about leaving Jeffrey, and had perhaps written it more out of

frustration than anything else. Then a call came into Burke from the beach. The search team had found a pile of debris that appeared to be pieces of a boat, loosely matching the description of the one the women had been seen getting into. It was found about three miles to the west of where they'd been sitting, in the shadow of the Bailey Generating Station, a large coal power station that sat at the far end of the park.

The debris was comprised of twisted pieces of metal, oil soaked wood, and large chunks of styrofoam thought to have come from the back of boat seats. Oil and gasoline

canisters were also found nearby. Despite still no evidence of the women being found, police began to wander if they'd been involved in a boat crash, possibly with a water intake crib, a structure designed to feed water into the power station that was positioned in the lake close to where the debris washed up, But detective Burke wasn't so sure.

Surely anything like that would have been seen by somebody, and nor was there a record of any boat being reported missing on that day, And by the third day, even the boat lead was beginning to look a little dubious. With more and more people contacting the police claiming to have seen the women, They soon found themselves dealing with a number of competing statements. Some had seen the women get onto a boat with three men, others that there

were two men, or sometimes just one. The color and size of the boat also varied significantly, with some saying it was roughly fifteen feet long and others that it was nearly thirty feet in length. On Thursday, July seventh, scuba divers and air patrols were brought in to scan the water for bodies and any more debris. Pat Blou's father, Harold, who was a member of the Illinois Civil Air Patrol,

also joined the air search. In the meantime, eyewitness reports continued to trickle in, with most being quickly discounted, while others offered faint glimmers of hope, only to be quickly dashed when they were followed up on. When a rumor spread to the press that three bodies had been dragged from the lake. Detective Burke was forced to issue a statement denying it, while also clarifying there was no concrete evidence linking the boat debris to the missing women, something

heat himself increasingly wary of. Then later that afternoon, a report came into the Indiana State Police from South Haven, a lakeside town in Michigan located about eighty miles east of Indiana Dunes. It came from police officers who reported seeing three women wearing swimsuits and no shoes, asking for directions to Saginaw, a town close to Lake Huron, one hundred and sixty miles away. The women said they were traveling from Chicago. It seemed unlikely it could be them,

thought Burke, but it did make him wonder. All this time he'd been acting on the assumption that the women had spontaneously boarded a boat for fun. But what if something else was going on? It was time he looked a little closer into the lives of the three women. Although Patricia Blou worked as a secretary for the utility

company Commonwealth Edison, her real passion was horses. Having ridden throughout her childhood, Pat's parents eventually clubbed together to buy her a horse of her own, which she kept in Illinois's oak Brook Polo Club stables, where Anne Miller was employed to exercise the horses. Over time, the pair had got to know each other there and became firm friends.

Renee Brule was a friend of Pats from their time together at Proviso West High School in Maywood, and had recently completed a course in medical technology in the Loop, the main central business district of Chicago. Renee loved horses two, and the three friends often rode together at Tri Color

Stables in Palatine, Illinois. But there was more too. All three women socialized regularly together at a bar in Hodgkins, about a twenty minute drive from where they lived, where it is believed Anne and Pat each struck up relationships with married men. After speaking to a number of the women's friends, the police was surprised to discover that Anne Miller was three months pregnant at the time of her disappearance,

while Pat Blow may well have been two. Miller had even told friends that she was planning to enter a home for unwed mothers. Something else of interest was a letter found by Harold Blow in his daughter's bedroom, written by Pat to her ex boyfriend, John Paul Jones. Jones was six years older than Pat and had recently moved to California. Like Renee's letter to her husband, this one hadn't been sent either, and talked mostly of Pat's unhappiness

that Jones had left without even telling her. Jones, who was ride by Detective Burke as an ex convict and rodeo cowboy who presumably met Pat through horses, denied all knowledge of Pat's disappearance after being interviewed by the FBI. However, when added all together along with Brene's marital troubles, it painted a complex portrait of three troubled young women, each

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before purchasing. Try Warby Parker's free home tryon program. Order five pairs of glasses to try at home for free for five days, with no obligation to buy ships free and includes a prepaid return shipping label. Try five pairs of glasses at home for free at warby Parker dot com. Forward slash unexplained. That's w a r by Parker dot com. Forward slash unexplained. It was three am in the morning of July ninth when the phone rang at the Blouse

residence in Westchester. Pat's parents, who'd barely slept a wink since her disappearance, ran blearily to the hall to pick it up. Hello, said Pat's mother into the receiver, as Harold waited anxiously by her side, but the caller didn't reply, letting the silence hang between them. Unable to bear it any longer. Pat's mother burst into tears, telling whoever it was on the line, if it was Pat, that she had nothing to worry about, and that she should come

home as soon as she could. Then there was a click, and the corps went dead. The following day, at a complete loss what to do, Harold made an appeal in the press to Peter Herkos, a self described clairvoyant from the Netherlands. Harold had seen her Cos on the news the night before, promoting an E. S. P card game

in Hollywood, but the plea was never answered. When Harold had read his daughter's letter to her ex boyfriend, his heart had broken at the anguish in her word, breaking all the harder of the thought that he might never get the chance to console her over it. Either way, He just simply couldn't believe that she would deliberately disappear, as some were beginning to suggest, not least of all because of her horse, who she'd named Hank, who meant

more to her than anything else in the world. In recent months, thanks to Pat's hard work and dedication, Hank had developed into an impressive thoroughbred. Only days before her disappearance, Hank had won a race in Winnipeg, Canada, and was due to race again on July eleventh. As for any suggestion that she might have drowned in the lake, he thought that unlikely too, since his daughter was a strong and experienced swimmer, easily capable of swimming over twenty miles.

The only logical explanation he believed was that for some reason or other, the women had been abducted. On July tenth, Harold and two colleagues from the Civil Air Patrol mounted their own investigation of the lake and surrounding areas, flying to every airport between DuPage County and Ludington, Michigan, asking

residents along the way if they'd seen anything. Back down at Detective Burke's office, after six days of searching, they had nothing to show for it, except for a few pieces of possible boat debris and a handful of conflicting witness statements. When finally they got a break, about a week after pat Blow, Anne Miller, and Renee Brule were declared missing, a man from Liganeer, Indiana, contacted the police with some extraordinary information. As it happened, he'd been filming

at the beach the day the women disappeared. And had just gone back to inspect the footage after hearing about the case. Incredibly, he'd managed to capture the women, identified clearly by their swimming costumes, the moment they boarded the mystery boat. In the footage, the women could be seen climbing on to what was in fact a sixteen to eighteen foot trimaran with three holes, with Pat in her yellow bikini seen taking a seat up front while the

other two sat at the back. The man on the boat was also visible, looking just as the witnesses had described, early twenties, with dark wavy hair. The footage was taken early on in the day, yet many witnesses were adamant that they'd seen the women back on the beach later in the afternoon. There was also the fact that many witnesses, including Robert Blatts, a lawyer from Gary, Indiana, also claimed to have seen the women boarding a completely different looking

boat with three men on board. Blats described it as being twenty six to twenty eight feet long and possibly a Trojan cabin cruiser, with no name on its side and a large radio antenna. It then occurred to the police could it be that the women had in fact boarded two boats that day. After checking the footage again, a boat was spotted matching Blatz's description, and the police

immediately got to work tracing its owners. Now with solid proof that the women had boarded a boat after all, more statements were released to the press asking for the men seen on the boats and the footage to come forward, or for anyone else who might have seen them or knew them to contact the police. Another search of the coastline was made, with divers also instructed to check inside the water intake crib in case the women had somehow

been sucked or placed into it. But nothing was found and no one came forward, With Detective Burke becoming increasingly convinced that, for whatever reason, the women would not be found at the beach, the search of the park was eventually called off. Then something else came to light. According to a friend of Pat Blouse, the young woman had been seen a few months back with a bruise on her face. When asked where it had come from, she'd replied vaguely that she'd got into trouble with some horse

racing people. Then another friend added that Pat had told her secretly one day that she was just going to leave and nobody would find her. This new information led the investigators back to the girl's personal belongings and to something in particular that had been found in Pat's purse, her phone number belonging to a man named George Jane, the owner of Tricolor Farm where pat An and Renee rode horses together, had the answer to the women's whereabouts

been staring at them the whole time. You've been listening to Part one of Unexplained, Season five, Episode sixteen, built on Shifting Sands. Part two will be released next Friday, May twenty first. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help supporters, you can now do so via Patreon.

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