Small Town, Big Secrets — Talina Zar E2

This episode mentioned suicide. Please take care while listening.

Middletown have their skeleton. I mean they're not with that.

Greg Thompson is fifty three years old and has lived within a forty five minute drive of Wagner, Oklahoma, his entire life.

Wagner is a small town. I don't even remember what the population is here rad off In. I want to say three to five thousand people or something, but that could be totally out.

I looked it up.

It's about double that eight thousand. Still small, a place where everyone kind of knows everyone and neighbors act neighborly. When Greg meets Tealina, she's a recent transplant to the area.

Outsiders don't normally take interest in what tier. With Tlena not being from the area, that made her even more special.

In my opinion, Greg became friends with Telina because he's the guy you call when you've got odd jobs that need doing.

She hired me for like candy man stuff like mowing and weed eat and hanging TVs and just all kinds there's handyman type stuff.

In early twenty twenty, before COVID shuts the world down, Teleina is on the hunt for the perfect mattress to help her troubled sleep. This turns out to be a tedious task for the fifty three year old who buys and returns multiple mattresses in the process, but luckily she has Greg to help her with the heavy lifting.

Telena wanted to change the mattress out in her bedroom, and she got a new mattress and needed somebody to unpack it and put it on and then haul the old and off. And so I did all that well. A couple of weeks later she said that she didn't care for the mattress, who wanted it return. She's got another one, Kevin.

Finally, Teleina finds a mattress that checks all the boxes, but now she has an extra mattress on her hands. Luckily she knows a family in need.

She was going to guess that bed to us. Our son is like six foot one now, so like make bed to word that for him.

This is aris house, another one of Tolena's local friends. Aris had just closed on her very first house. Teleina had guided her through the process emotionally and sometimes even financially. In fact, the bed was just one of many things Teleina offered to help make Eris's new house a home.

She was a part of the reason why we were able to.

Get utilities turned on new law, new light. She had been saving up a Nashtag for I've ever since I told her that we were starting a profit to buy a house. I can't even put a name to all the kitchen appliances and trinkets and items that she's put in our house and added to our lives.

The way she did.

As COVID hits Oklahoma, Aris doesn't get to see her friend very often. Tuleina has rheumatoid arthritis and other health issues that make contracting the virus a real concern.

She was a you know, compromised, so she was taking it very, very seriously.

But Tealina still wants to hand off the mattress as she promised, and so on Friday, March twenty seventh, Tulina texts Eiris to organize a pickup.

She was checking to see if we were coming to get to bed this weekend. That next morning, the twenty eighth, I got a message that said.

A bort mission. I've got a terrible migraine. I've been staying in bed today.

I said, okay out.

A few days go by, having not heard from. Her friend Aris checks in.

On a third and I said her that I hope you're feeling Betters wanting you know, if I get dropped by it.

Yes, I don't.

Want anybody coming to the porch and making the dogs bark because I'm sleeping a lot.

I said, that's okay, maybe another time.

This is her last exchange with Telena before she goes missing from iHeart Podcasts. I'm Melissa Jelson, and this is what happened to Teleina's oar.

Hey everyone, I'm on day nine of this virus, and I am pretty sure it has reached my lungs.

For her to just leave people with no way of contacting her and knowing if she was alive or.

Dead was strange to me.

There were a lot of secrets that were very hard to find, and no one wanted to talk about anything.

I'm a really nosy person, so that's how I got caught up in all this.

I was like, this is this is crazy.

Episode two small town big Secrets.

She wanted to help anybody and anybody.

This is Greg, the local handyman in Wagner.

She helped us volunteer picking up trash a few times. I'd heard of her giving food to people that needed it or giving them little jobs to do.

Like me.

You know, she knew that I needed something to do, so she'd give me jobs. And she had other people that would you know, do little odd jobs for or somebody he moved through the area from bigger towns and just take in the interest in what's going on here and trying to help people that live here that may impression on me.

When Teleina moved to Wagner, Oklahoma, in late twenty sixteen, she did it with her partner Tom. They left their longtime home in Indianapolis and purchased a brown ranch house in Whitehorn Cove, a lake community near the border of Arkansas. From the outside, the home is rustic looking, cozy, private, set back from the road and nestled among the tall trees. It's not easy to move to a totally new place

Could be exactly the person that she was here and that was a little weird, a lot filly a little queer Oklahoma had all the people who brought out the those aspects for her.

The two women were several decades apart, and ers looked up to Telena like a big sister.

She always left you kind of enraptured by what she was saying because she had a unique way of telling stories. She had a very dry wit, and it.

Helped that they shared the same offbeat sense of humor. Aris told me about one time Telena was giving her some spices from her pantry that she no longer needed.

I grabbed a bottle of dill weed and I said, oh, look at the bottom of my husband the dill weed. And we laughed really hard about it, and then she snatched the bottle away from me and a land of the other round.

She had a label maker. She typed in that labels at.

The bottle of Jason and clapped it on the bottle of dill weed and handed it back the look.

Of absolute joy and mischief in her faith. When she handed me that bottle, it was like sharing the best secret, and we both fell apart in laughter.

To her friends, to Lena was not only kind, generous, and hilarious, she was also super smart, here's Greg again.

She was a self proclaimed computer I called her my own little hacker.

Talina was a techie and a good one. She worked on Microsoft products, fixing code errors that no one else could solve.

My wife was going to school at the time for her bachelor's and didn't know anything about powerpart presentations and Microsoft Office and all these things. In Tolena had worked for Microsoft and she dropped some of these program so she saw another opportunity to help my wife, and she started helping her with these presentations and showed her how to do it herself and things like that. She felt like she could help you out of the hole you're in. She was here, was all in.

Telena was helpful to her community and also devoted to her partner to The two had been together for more than a decade.

They had one of those bonds that you know, everybody could aspire to.

You could see you could just look at him in a glance, the way they looked at each other.

They were young fool anytime they looked at each other.

But Teleina wasn't a homebody. She travels a lot for work, often swinging through Indiana, where she and Tom used to live, and some of her extended family remained, and then while she was on one of those routine trips, the unthinkable happened.

They both went here and then like not even I don't even think it was a year later. Tom had a stroke while she was away on work, and when she came back from work, you know, they had found it on the floor. He was still alive. He had hung on long enough for her to say goodbye.

Tom was only fifty nine. In his obituary, he was described as a twenty two year veteran of the army and an avid gun enthusiast. The family asked that in lieu of flowers, well wishers could donate to his favorite charity, for Love of Dogs.

I remember after Tom and path and we went over to her house for the memorial. It was an intimate gathering with probably about twenty of us, and we all kind of said a word for Tom, and you could see around the house where she left ticket that they do not move, do not touch. The general assumption was so I was was the left eye inst he had cut and she wasn't ready for those to.

Move Toalina was shattered by the loss.

They were deeply connected and while she was able to regate her joy and find life again.

It wasn't the same as she couldn't share it with him.

Tom's death on moored Toelena, and for a long while afterwards she battled with a stubborn depression.

And I actually spend a lot of phone calls together afterwards, because whenever you spend an amount of your life with somebody bouncing decisions off of them, or you know, looking for validation for a decision, you get kind of lost. And there were a lot of time where she would call me and ask me, Hey, what do you think about this? That happened a lot more after Tom had passed.

I had her come afterwards, and I was a little nervous.

This is Kim, a hairdresser and wagner who cut Telena's hair. She remembered Telena's first appointment after Tom passed.

I had my mom, who is a widow as well, come fit and be with us so that i'd have like them backup in case it got to too sad. I don't like to handle that stuff, and I'm not good at saying.

The right word.

But we got through it.

There was just a few, you know, peers that were shed Tolena. She had even asked if my mom would maybe be her roommate for a while after, you know, because my dad had passed and she was living alone too, and she had been talking about finding a roommate to share in the bills and stuff.

Telena didn't like living alone in the house she'd shared with Tom. Nicole, her friend in Tennessee, remembered how Telena navigated her new role as a relatively young widow.

Of course, she missed him greatly and missed their life together. She was dealing with it with grace and moving on with her life the best she could. She had told me that she had taken in a roommate and that was mostly more for having someone around them necessity.

It was in twenty nineteen that Lena invited Corey Bamiley, a fifty eight year old woman she knew through friends, to move in with her. Corey was also in a transitional period, in the middle of a divorce. I couldn't get Corey to speak to me, but from what I've learned, the two had a lot in common. They were both

After they had moved in together, every time I cut Tolena's hair, the first thing I would say was, how was how's your roommate going?

And she always answered the best I've ever had.

It didn't take long for Toleina and Corey's lives to become intertwined. Soon enough, Corey was over at Kim's getting her own haircut, while Teleina was adventurous with her hair, dyeing at different colors and even giving a perm Corey preferred a look some might call a mullet.

We'd go short on the you know, straight across prop of the ears, and a little bit longer in the back. It wasn't anything that I wanted to do to her, but that's what she wanted.

Corey quickly fell in with Teleina's social circle too. Here's Greg again.

We'd had Telena and Corey over for dinner, and a couple of times went out with him. You would have thought they were best friends. Had had noting Cheddar for a long time.

Greg found a kindred spirit in Corey. She too was a handyman of sorts, strong, industrious.

From the term that I met Corey Bromley, she was somebody that you know, I could relate to, and you know, at the time I was going to things that you know, I could talk to her about.

Corey also found unique ways to make money, like buying people's old stuff and selling it on eBay and Greg's maybe he could do that too.

I like, you know, pilfer and through stuff. I had done some other work elsewhere and accumulated a bunch of things, and she was helping me, you know, kind of take inventory and possibly help meself some of it.

Telena seemed to really enjoy having a friend around too. It lifted her spirits. Here's ris again. Having Corey air improved their quality of life.

He would go out in the yard and you know, play with the dog. They would go on car ride together and just take the bogs out of the lake.

While Corey's presence was a comfort, there were clues that Teleina was still struggling with Tom's loss. In November of twenty nineteen, a few months before COVID hit, Tlena wrote a note to her friends on Facebook entitled Grief Etiquette. Here's a reenactment of some of that post.

Over the last two years, many people have said they don't know how to interact with me ari Tom's death. The anniversary of Tom's death is approaching. I'm already struggling with that, combined with lonely holidays. What I do not need right now are unsolicited videos and picks of Tom. At this point, it's difficult for me to concentrate on work or have pockets of happiness if I see an unsolicited pick or video.

During those times, I feel like I ran flat out into a wall. It's painful.

If you ask first, I can respond when I'm emotionally and physically available to reminisce.

If you post on your own feed, I can choose whether or not to serve that content.

If you send me or tag me in unsolicited reminiscence, I will block you to save my sanity.

Please don't slap me in the face with my grief. Thanks for hearing me.

Heelena was never one to let anything do. She would say that head on and a threat it because you know, sitting in silence is uncomfortable. Let figure out what went wrong and how we can avoid it in the future.

Aris described to Lena as assertive and good at setting boundaries, and so in April twenty twenty, when Telena posts on Facebook.

I made the decision at the ownset that if it got bad enough, I would not go to the hospital. Please respect my privacy and give me my alone time, Aris does.

There were a lot of parts of her life that she kept private, and we respected that, like we love the person that she gave us every time we got to see her. It did seem out of character, but considering the fact that she had lost her husband not so long ago. People can be consumed with Greece at different times, it would make sense to me.

Quick note, you've heard most of Telena's cryptic Facebook post already, but there's a few lines I withheld that mentioned Tom. Now that you know who he is, this will make more sense.

In and out of fever and chills with Tom just out of reach, I'm going to either beat this virus or be with Tom.

I see it as a win win situation.

Please respect my privacy and give me my alone time on the lake with Tom.

In this part of the post, it resonates with those who knew Telena in real life, who had witnessed her debilitating depression after Tom's death. Here again is Nicole, who saw Telena just a few weeks before she went missing.

I didn't take it as her being suicidal. I just took it to mean that if she passed away from COVID, she was at peace with it because she would be with Tom, not that she was actively licking doorknobs and trying to get COVID so that she could pass away.

I took it that she was.

Good either way, and I feel like I feel like that was true. Telena fashioned you know, well, if I die, I die.

Yeah, There's not much I can do about it.

And if I live, I'll hug you again.

A week before Telena disappeared, she posted about her illness on Facebook.

I called my doctor and was told to stay in bed and stay hydrated and self medicate and call back or go to the er. If my tempreach is one O two. I think Oklahoma's medicals system is stretched thin right now. I am thankful and grateful that I do have someone watching out for me and running the household.

Back to bed. I'm exhausted. I love you all.

Telena is talking about Corey, her roommate, running the household and watching out for her. Corey had been the last person to see Telena before she disappeared. On the day Telena posted her mysterious message, Corey said she'd been out running errands and came home to an empty house. The next day, Corey posted to her own Facebook page, alerting everyone to her missing roommate and asking for help. Here's a recreation of parts of the post.

I called every taxi service I could think of last Eve, and drivers don't keep records. I also called our phone carrier to try and trace or track Telena's phone and was told of an app that could do this if the phone was turned on with location services activated. As of this morning, she hasn't called home and her phone still appears to be turned off. Anyone else hears from her, please update me.

A day later, core posts again, this time sharing insight into what Telena's experience with COVID had been like.

So this is my COVID nineteen rant and the state of affairs here in rural Oklahoma.

Feel free to bypass this post.

I just need to rant or I will scream.

Maybe I need to do that. Anyway.

When Telena first got a fever of one hundred point five, We packed up and went to the er. We expected to be able to get her a test. A tech met us outside, questioned all of her symptoms and sent

A few days go by. Talina's friends hear nothing and start to worry she's died of COVID alone in a remote cabin. But they also start imagining other worst case scenarios, like Greg who speculates that maybe Tolena was abducted.

When she came up Methan and put this big Facebook post on there say I'm going to the wood to die. It didn't sound like her. We didn't, I mean me and my wife and talked about it. We live on the Highway sixty nine and Highways sixty nine goes from the heart attackes all the way into Tangas. At the time, you know, there was a lot of abductions and stuff from even walmarts. You know, over here in our area there was ladies picked up from Walmart for suspected sex

Her friends think hope, maybe Toleina will emerge over the weekend, But as Saturday and Sunday come and go, they're polite. Respect for her privacy kurdles into concern and dread, and there's consensus that the police now need to be involved. On Monday, April thirteenth, Corey goes to the shriff's department, but she's told that an adult woman leaving on her own is not considered a missing person, at least not yet. Four more days pass by Friday, Telena has still not returned,

All Right, I just got cold in here.

Yeah, I'm glad I wore a sweatshirt.

I'm going to turn this up.

Okay, Now, two weeks after Telena's Facebook post, Corey arrives at the station wearing a COVID mask and gloves. We don't have a recording of the conversation, but we do have a transcript, parts of which we've recreated.

Let me just get some background information from you, sure, and then we'll kind of go from there. And I don't want you to think that you're in any trouble because you're here, Okay, yeah, yeah, And that's pretty standard.

It's just normally I would have come to the house, but give them the situation and all that.

Detective Weber asks Corey how they met and came to live together.

I've known Telena about fifteen years, but we've really just become close in the last couple of years since her husband died.

How did you originally meet up with her?

There was a festival here in Wagner, Oklahoma that we both attended fifteen years ago, and my husband and I went and met her and her husband. Then she had just gotten together with him, and it was actually a big weekend party. So that's how we all got to know each other first.

Okay, that's interesting.

Corey explains that she moved in less than a year ago, in May twenty nineteen, and the two of.

You get together.

Is it because of her husband dying that you rekindle or become closer?

Yeah, I think so.

I was starting to have problems with my husband and initiated a divorce, and she had lost her husband and really lost an interest in living, and then we were getting to know each other better and better, and it just got to the point where she asked me if I would stay with her because she couldn't be alone.

Sure, and then she was having I don't think she's ever been diagnosed as.

Bipolar, but she had really up periods and really down periods, and she didn't want to be alone during the very down periods, Okay, so she needed a roommate.

Corey tells the detective that when she moved in, she took on a lot of responsibilities for Telena, who had been struggling with her health. Corey ran errands for her, handled the household duties. They got close fast. They considered each other their emergency contacts. Telena even listed Corey as the executor of her estate in her will, and so when Telena got COVID, Corey went into full caregiver mode.

The first thing that happened she gets bad migraines, okay, and she finished work on a Friday, went to bed early, woke up Saturday morning with a really bad migraine that ended up lasting two days. She pretty much stayed in bed for two days with migraine. Okay, Monday, she's due back at work. And Monday morning she asked me to come in and take her temperature, which I did, and she was running a one hundred point five, And so

In or come back in.

So we went home, and she was kind of at that point disheartened or kind of disgusted with things that she couldn't get any help or diagnosis or couldn't even check in.

By this point, there are over two point six million confirmed cases of COVID globally. The US leads the world. In New York is the epicenter with over two hundred and fifty thousand cases, thousands of deaths, and hospitals beyond capacity. Oklahoma was preparing for the worst, predicting a surge in COVID cases any day now.

She developed a really barking cough and sometimes she'd start coughing and couldn't stop coughing.

She was starting to wheeze a little.

Bit, and I said, you know, we do not want you catching pneumonia. So I asked her the night before, I said, let's take you back to the emergency room. I think you're bad enough now that they will admit you, right, And she said no, she just wanted to spend the night in her bed with one of the pops.

On the morning of April seventh, Corey says, she asks again if she can take to Lena to the hospital and toe Lena again says no.

She asked me to go out and do a few things and give her some more time to snuggle with.

She's got a little yorky that she likes to stay.

In bed with, and she just wanted to I don't know what she just wanted to do.

Did she ask you to do something specific or just leave for a while.

Yeah, she just wanted me to leave her alone for a while. I wish I had never gone and run errands that day.

When Corey gets home sometime in the afternoon, she goes into Toelina's room to check on her, and Toelena's gone. Corey can't tell if Teleina has taken clothes or an overnight bag, but her phone is missing, along with some medication and Toleina's guns.

She always kept a forty five magnetized to the bottom of her bed.

Okay, that was gone.

And she always kept a nine millimeter in the car, okay, and it was gone. She really she gets into these places where she just she just wants to expire, and so she doesn't really care.

She always says, you know, I've got my DNA orders. I'm not going to let anybody you know, into vate me or whatever.

Right, And she said, she said, it's a win win, I get to see Tom sooner. And she talked like that a lot. She'd have good days where she'd be really excited about her job and we'd be planning a trip and I think this is great, she's got a reason to live.

It's all good.

And then she'd say, yeah, and the first chance I get, I'm gonna check out. So she'd go really high on her job or a trip, and then she'd get really down and depressed and just not want to be around.

Has she ever attempted suicide that you know of?

She has not. She has not ever attempted it with me, and I would know.

Has she talked about how she would do it if she did constantly?

Well, what is the what's her general conversation.

On that general conversation with me?

That I would know when she had done it, that she had a favorite little spot that she was going to go to, and I think she was going to use a gun.

Corey explains that Telena was very matter of fact about death. Telena had already organized her own funeral and made plans for her estate.

Telena has always had an end of life game plan ever since Tom died. She prepaid her funeral, she planned her own music and the order of songs.

She was going to do. She told not just me, but I think.

All of her friends that you would talk to that sooner or later she was going to go join Tom on her own time.

Still, Corey says she's holding out hope that Telena is alive and offer to help Detective Weber in any way she can. He asked her to watch the mail for credit card statements and phone bills that may offer clues to her whereabouts.

What's tough about the situation that we're in is that we don't no. There's no clear evidence that a crime was committed, so because she everything points to her intentionally leaving. In other words, people are free to leave on their own accord anytime they want, and just because they're missing doesn't mean anything was nefarious.

There's still part of.

Me thinking that maybe someone will just call and say she's sick somewhere. Most of me is saying that when I get that phone call, it's gonna be because someone found her.

I'm supposed to identify her.

While the cops are talking to Corey, the online sleuth have their own sprawling investigation.

It was super intense. I mean we'd stay up for hours late at night. During the day, I was always on my phone. We were always googling something, looking up people online, reaching out to people.

Everybody had their roles. Brittany, as an Arkansas native, was trying to piece together Telena's movements and timing. Jess was the instigator reaching out to new contacts.

I probably spent twelve fourteen hours on my phone or computer talking to people a day, cold calling strangers, We tried several times to break into her email. We asked her friend, Jim, who works night with Telena, if he knew her passwords, and he sent him to us passwords that he knew that didn't end up working. We talked to the neighbors. The guy across the street. I called him because he had a ring camera and we thought maybe like he's seen Telena leave. He said it was

Jess and some of the other girls felt more comfortable calling and talked to people than I did. I was not the person that called. I was sort of the fact checker.

This is Rosie the small business owner in Ohio.

So if people were telling me things, I would, you know, look things up and figure things out and try to see if these stories made sense. It got really fast, really intensely fast.

Telena's real life friend Nicole starts taking advice from Jess and the sleuths.

They were like, well, why isn't there a missing poster?

And I thought, well, why isn't there and so we put together a missing poster immediately, you know, after that, in a post that we could share.

Being in marketing, I kicked it up.

You know.

I contacted a friend who has a friend that's a producer of Dateline. We started a missing videos. We put together all kinds of things. We put together a team in Wagner to do a vigil. We never let them forget the name of Telena.

Meanwhile, membership of the Fine Telena is our Facebook group grows rapidly to almost four hundred participants, and with the growth some growing pains.

There were some people like good intentions and some people who I questioned their intentions.

There was a lot of trolls. Somebody had posted that they saw Telen at a truck stop in Wyoming, just out of nowhere. Oh, we she's working at a truck stop in Wyoming at this diner. And so I think probably forty people reached out to this woman and she's like, hey, I'm joking. It was that's what I would do if I was going to disappear, And it was like, why would you post something like that.

The group starts off public, but obviously that's a mistake, so they change it to private. Jess In some of the other original members do admin duty, vetting new requests, approving comments, keeping things civil.

Some of these people are jerks, tempers were high. I think a lot of that came with being stuck inside too.

Jess is a true believer in the power of the crowd source.

I watched Don't Fuck with Cats on Netflix, and those people literally stopped a serial killer. They did. The internet came together and was like, look at this room, let's draw a map.

And the investigation into Telena's disappearance was, she admits, kind of fun.

I really enjoy the picking apart why, and the gathering information, and the talking to people and sometimes being the person that knows more than the other.

Guy, scheming with a bunch of strangers, laughing, brainstorming together. It also makes Jess feel connected.

I think the whole world did that, didn't they. I mean, I think everybody reached out to anybody they could because we all felt so isolated. Any kind of connection you could make with somebody, you kind of held on tight to it because you couldn't see most of the people in your life unless they lived with you.

It's a new community, united by a common goal find to Lena's are, but it's hard to know just how trustworthy everyone is. And there's a name that keeps popping up in Jess's conversations. Has she talked to Toelena's close friend Marty just gets a hold of his number.

I was sitting on the side porch I smoked at the time. I smoked cigarette, so I didn't smoke in my house. I have children, so I stepped outside of smoke and I just called him.

Did you feel nervous about doing that? No, So I think most people would not cold call someone random whose friend dis disappeared.

I'm very I hate to say impulsive, because it's not necessarily my entire personality, but a lot of stuff. If I want to do it, I just do it.

I don't know.

I'm very direct. It doesn't help me make friends. Nicole had told him that I was going to call, and so when I called, he said, oh, hey, Darlin, how are you. He had a very grandfatherly Southern drawl, just very approachable, and I was like, oh, this guy's not scary. He sounds like anybody's grandpa. And I just said, tell me what's going on, and that's he just started talking.

Connecting with Marty is like hitting gold for Jess and the online sleuths because he's on the ground in Wagner looking for Teleina too. And he's also been talking to the Sheriff's department. For whatever reason, he's willing to share everything he has with them. He's not skeptical of a bunch of strangers doing their own investigation into Teleina's disappearance. In fact, he welcomes it. The first big clue Marty

He had told us that the phone pinged in Arkansas by Lake Mamel and it could have pinged within a thirty mile radius.

Please respect my privacy and give me my alone time on the lake.

Lake Mamel is a three and a half hour drive from Wagner. Brittany, who happens to be in Arkansas, starts putting together a map.

We looked at up the phone towers and stuff, and I went and like screenshoted the map of the lake and then put a radius over it.

So we started like going on maps and finding out what could be within a thirty mile radius of where her phone pained, and just trying to figure out where she could be. What cabins or for rents where she could stay. What lake is over there, what tiny lake even if it's not the big lake mouth or something else, a pond or whatever.

At one of my favorite idaways at one of my favorite lakes, and I've booked it for the remainder of this week.

We had come to the conclusion that there might not have been very many airbnbs available at the time because of COVID, because of the time of the year, and because that area that her phone had pained in is not really like an area that people go to for vacation, like ma Mill is just like a business town, like that's where work and go to school and stuff.

It's not like a vacation town. Didn't feel up to driving, so I hired a ride.

We called all the uber and lyft hubs that we could to see if their drivers kept track of who they would pick up. Because she said she hired a ride.

Pretty quickly, Marty becomes their main source, a person who seems to know a lot, who's just as committed as they are to finding to Lena. He goes around town passing out the missing poster, helps organize the vigil, even talks to the local press.

I saw her my birthday on which is March twenty six, and then I spoke to her on the phone on the twenty seventh.

During this time, Marty and Jess are in constant communication way.

My text message is to twenty seven pm, three fifteen pm, same day as just bam bam, bam, bam, bam, throwing ideas at each other. It was obsessive.

It's a mutually beneficial relationship. Marty likes to talk, Jess likes to listen.

He would talk and talk and talk, so he'd give us information. He'd give us names, he would give us phone numbers.

In the beginning, Jess doesn't know if she should trust Marty, and that's just her baseline. She doesn't trust anyone before they prove themselves to her. So she's kind of pretending with Marty to get him to open up to her. She'll say whatever to make him comfortable to get the information she wants.

So all of us wear masks. Right at first, it was almost like copying the way he'd talk to me. I'd talk back to him that way to try to make it so it's easier for us to communicate. And then we go off on little talks.

Even though she's acting friendly on the phone. Jess is double checking everything Marty says on Facebook. She can see that Teleina and Marty seem to be good friends. Like he said. They're tagged in each other's posts a lot, including in a phone koo taken at the Oklahoma Renaissance Fair in April twenty eighteen. It's Teleina, Marty and his wife Lorianne. It's a warm day. They're dressed in shorts

I'd done some Internet digging, you know, basic Google stuff, and I googled Telenazar, and then that popped up with the John Norman Gorrian novels, and I was like, literally not very polite of me, What the how are you people into? What is going on here?

Gore was a world of slaves and beautiful women of human domination by the alien secret priest Kings. And it was also the world of Telena.

Lena to Lena.

Lawrence.

That's next week on What Happened to Telenazar. What Happened to Telenazar is a production of iHeart Podcasts. It's written, reported, and hosted by me Melissa Jelson, with writing and story editing by Lauren Hansen. Our executive producer is Ryan Murdoch. For iHeart Podcasts, executive producers are Jason English and Carl Catel. Fact checking by Savannah Hugley. Zoey is our associate producer. Jeremy Thal is our editor. Original music by Aaron Kaufman