Unanswered Vol. II

0:00Today's podcast will feature three stories about mysterious disappearances. The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode. The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description. The first story you'll hear is called Lava Tubes, and it's about two women who go for a hike in a part of the world that is known for its hundreds and hundreds of miles of underground tunnels. The second story you'll hear is called Stay in the Car, and it's about two people who go missing after a car crash. And the third and final story you'll hear is called What Just Happened?

0:35And it's about a woman who repeatedly calls 911 and then vanishes. But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the strange, dark, and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday. So if that's of interest to you, please replace the liquid in the follow buttons hand sanitizer with glue. Okay, let's get into our first story called Lava Tubes.

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2:26On September 19, 2013, 69-year-old retired middle school teacher Amy Linkert and her friend, 63-year-old Joe Blakeslee, who was a physician, headed off to the Craters on the Moon Park in Idaho. This park is actually a dormant volcano. It's not extinct. It's going to be active again, probably in the next 1 ,000 years. But for now, it's this beautiful park that is known for these crazy lava fields that look otherworldly. You know, barely any vegetation can grow on them, and there's just a strip of pavement they've kind of weaved through these massive jagged lava fields. And then you have all these big mounds that are the actual volcanoes.

3:04Another feature of this park are all the lava tubes underground. All the molten lava, when it jets around underneath the surface before shooting out, it carves these natural tunnels underground, these huge caverns. They're like these big caves you can explore. And there's 1 ,100 miles of lava tubes, tunnels, and caves underneath this park. The two women told their families they would be back in Boise, Idaho by the 21st. But when the 21st came and they were not home, their families were suspicious. They tried calling them. They didn't pick up. And for the next 36 hours, they just kept trying to call them and, you know, called around to see if anybody else knew where they were.

3:41And then finally, on the morning of the 23rd, when no one knew where they were, they reached out to the authorities. The formal search for these two women began on the 24th, so five days after they had initially left for this trip. And the searchers quickly found their pickup truck parked in the parking lot of the Craters on the Moon Park. And in their truck were their two dogs who were alive, they were okay. And in the front seat were their purses and their cell phones. But there was no sign of Amy or Joe. This was obviously a bad sign and so the search was really kicked into high gear to see if they could find these women before it was too late.

4:17But unfortunately within 24 hours of finding the truck they would find Amy's body. And her body was located way off of the main trail. She was in an area that the park superintendent described as incredibly rugged and inaccessible. Now at this park there is a strip of cement that weaves through this really dangerous lava field. And if you were on this strip of cement, you wouldn't be thinking about walking onto the lava field. Not only would you need to navigate all these massive mounds of jagged, cooled lava, there's all these cracks in the ground that you could fall through and just plummet to your death.

4:54So no one's about to start walking off the trail, especially not two older women that went here just to have a casual stroll through the park. They were not there for some grand adventure. They were not athletic distance hikers. It made no sense that Amy would be so far off the trail in an area that was so dangerous and so clearly off limits. When the families were notified that Amy had been found and they were still looking for Joe, the detail that the family keyed in on was the idea that these two women left their dogs in the truck. That was something so unbelievably uncharacteristic of either of them.

5:30They adored those two dogs. They would never ever abandon them like that. In fact, because of that detail, the families jumped to this has to be foul play because they never would have done that. They wouldn't have abandoned these precious dogs. The search for Joe would continue. They basically shifted the entire effort to center over Amy, where she was found, and work in circles out from there to see if they could find her. They had helicopters flying overhead, they had mining experts walking through all the lava tubes below, and they couldn't find her. Finally, on October 23rd, so 28 days after Amy was found, Joe's body was discovered as well.

6:07And she was lying one mile away from where Amy had been found in a similarly inaccessible part of the park. that would have required significant climbing over jagged, cooled lava fields and all these cracks in the ground she would have had to navigate to reach where she was. And even more strangely is the area where she was found had been searched extensively by air with helicopter pilots flying overhead and by cadaver-sniffing dogs that had been in that area and they had not picked up her scent. So either the helicopter pilots and the cadaver-sniffing dogs were just wrong or missed something or Joe had not been there the whole time.

6:45A cause of death has not been determined for either of the two women. However, what was released is neither of them appeared to have suffered an incapacitating injury, meaning they weren't struck down where they were. They were traveling and ultimately stopped where they were. It seems highly unlikely that these two women abandoned their two dogs and left their cell phones in the car and then wandered way off the trail and separated from each other, all without supplies. But even if they had done that, even if they had, you know, separated and left the trail, where they ultimately reached seems like an area they would not have been able to get to without assistance.

7:24And since they were separated, they weren't able to help each other get where they were. So although authorities have ruled out foul play, this was deemed an accident, it does seem like if there was ever a place to commit an attack, it would be this particular park because underneath the park is 1100 miles of lava tubes that connect to each other and weave all through the park and there's hundreds of caves many of which have not been found or explored that it would be pretty straightforward to attack someone and then go underground and not be found. Certainly makes you wonder who or what could be hiding underground in those lava tubes.

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10:51Our next story is called Stay in the Car.

11:08Before dawn on December 12, 1992, a 17-year-old girl named Tracy Dion sat in the passenger seat of a little two-door car that was swerving down a deserted road in the Yankton Sioux reservation in South Dakota. Everybody in the car was drunk, including Tracy. Sitting next to Tracy in the middle front seat was her 19-year-old cousin named Ruby, and Ruby's boyfriend, a 20-year-old named Arnold, was driving the car. All three of them had been out partying all night, and so now they were trying to make it home. The swerving was making Tracy feel sick to her stomach, but she didn't want to say anything to Arnold in fear that she might distract him.

11:46I mean, it was really dark outside, there was no streetlights, there was ice on the road. I mean, for a sober driver, this would be a challenging drive, let alone a drunk driver. They were coming up on an intersection and Arnold brought the car to a stop with a lurch. Tracy watched as Arnold checked for cross traffic and then pulled out onto Highway 281. But halfway through this turn, as Arnold was accelerating, Tracy began to feel the car slide. And even in her drunken state, she could tell Arnold had hit a patch of black ice. And so as the car began to skid, she wanted to scream. Before she could, the car was already flipping over, and then everything went black.

12:26A short time later, Tracy came to. The car was upside down, and Tracy quickly realized she had fallen out of her seat and was now basically resting on the roof of the car, which was now on the ground. From what she could tell, after the car had finished rolling over, it had come to a stop just off the side of the highway, and so they were not in immediate danger from other cars striking them. But she couldn't really see outside because the windows were so badly cracked. Beside her, Tracy could hear her cousin, Ruby, pounding on the driver's side door trying to get it to open, and so Tracy tried to look around Ruby to see Arnold to see if he was okay, but when she did, she saw the driver's seat was empty.

13:07Tracy tried to make sense of what she was seeing. The driver's side door was closed, but Arnold was gone. Just then, Tracy heard the sound of the driver's side door opening, and she turned to see her cousin Ruby forcing the door open just a few inches, and then a second later, Ruby was slithering out through that crack to the outside. To Tracy, everything felt like it was happening in slow motion. She was too shocked and confused to make any sense of it. But if Ruby was getting out of the car, Tracy felt like she should too. And so Tracy turned and crawled across to the driver's side and was about to make an exit the same way Ruby had when the door slammed shut violently right in Tracy's face.

13:50Tracy didn't understand why Ruby would do something like that. Why would she shut the door that aggressively when she knew her cousin was still inside? Tracy tried to open the door again, but she was too weak to do it. She figured her cousin Ruby was okay, but she couldn't see outside because of how cracked the windows were. At this point, Tracy began to feel woozy. She laid her head down on the roof of the car, wondering to herself why Ruby and Arnold had left her behind.

14:19Tracy would stay trapped inside of the car, alone, for a few hours until finally a motorist saw the flipped over car and called 911. Shortly after that, first responders arrived on the scene, they pulled Tracy out of the car, and shockingly, she actually didn't have really any serious injuries at all. She didn't even need to be hospitalized. But rescuers could not find Ruby or Arnold anywhere. They were gone. And once rescuers had scoured the entire area around the crash site, the sheriff who was in charge of the scene started to wonder if Arnold and Ruby were not just missing. Maybe, he thought, they had fled.

14:58Arnold had been driving drunk, and all three of them were underage, and so the sheriff thought maybe Arnold and Ruby were scared to get in trouble. Over the next few days, the police continued to search the surrounding area for Arnold and Ruby, hoping they were not badly injured and that they would just turn up on their own, but they never did. And as the days turned into weeks, hope began to wane for the young couple. Their family and friends kept searching the area along 281 where the car had flipped, looking for any clue as to where these two had gone. But there was nothing, there was no trace of them.

15:31It was like Arnold and Ruby had gotten out of the car and just vanished. But in January of 1993, so three weeks after the crash, strange and conflicting reports of sightings began to trickle in. First, a woman came forward claiming to have seen Arnold alive and well at a New Year's Eve party. Now, the police doubted this claim, but this woman was insistent that she had seen Arnold. And they actually hooked her up to a lie detector test, and she passed the test. And so officials brought in guests from this party who this woman claimed were with Arnold, and they asked them, were you with Arnold?

16:08And they said no. But they failed their lie detector tests. Now, of course, this was suspicious, but police really didn't know what to do with this information. Assuming this woman's story was true, that she really did see Arnold. Well, according to the details of her story, Arnold did not appear to be in any kind of distress. And even if he was in distress, the police still had no idea where he was, so how could they help him? Other locals came forward, claiming to have spotted Arnold around town as well. But nothing came of those reports either. Neither Arnold nor Ruby turned up. Months went by, and the case went cold.

16:46Until March 10th, when a driver was going down Highway 281, and they noticed a strange object in the drainage ditch next to the road. By now, the weather was much warmer than it had been on the day of the crash, so instead of snow and ice inside of the drainage ditch, it was run off water, and the strange object was floating in it. The driver stopped his car, got out, and walked up to see what this thing was, and as soon as he saw it, he turned, ran back to his car, and called the police. Because what the driver had just found was a dead body. And when the police arrived and searched the area, they found another body not far away.

17:23The bodies belonged to Ruby and Arnold. But this discovery did not solve the mystery of what happened to Ruby and Arnold. Instead, it made it much more bizarre. Because first of all, the bodies were found 75 feet away from the original crash site. And the exact spots where the two bodies were found had been searched many, many times on the day of the crash, days after the crash. They were searched by police. They were searched by friends and family of Ruby and Arnold. The idea that this is where the bodies had been the whole time was impossible. They would have been found. And then there was the condition of the bodies.

18:02Ruby's body was extremely decomposed, which made sense given the fact that the crash was three months earlier. But Arnold's body was barely decomposed at all. And in the pocket of Arnold's jeans, police found a mysterious set of three keys. One was a vehicle key and two were house keys. But none of them opened any vehicle or building that Arnold was known to frequent. And nobody recognized them. Finally, the police found a tuft of hair lying near where the bodies had been found. It was Ruby's hair, but it didn't look like the hair had been there for very long, certainly not three months. Instead of being dirty and matted like you would expect, given how long she must have been there, the hair was perfectly clean.

18:44The official coroner's report on Ruby and Arnold's deaths were that they died of exposure, and then their bodies were just overlooked by searchers for months. But to a lot of people, including the sheriff who was in charge of the original crash site, this made no sense. Despite the coroner's findings, law enforcement officials believed that Ruby and Arnold's deaths were the result of foul play. Under the foul play theory, somebody pulled Ruby and Arnold out of the crash site while they were still alive and then killed them later. And then perhaps they killed them at different times, which would account for the differences in decomposition of their bodies.

19:19The FBI ultimately came in and took over this case, but they eventually closed it down, citing a lack of evidence to support the foul play theory. However, with or without foul play being involved here, nobody has a good explanation for all those sightings of Arnold after the crash. And also, nobody can explain why the door was slammed in Tracy's face in the immediate aftermath of the crash. Maybe it was Ruby or Arnold who slammed the door, or maybe it was their killer. To this day, what actually happened on December 12, 1992, on the side of Highway 281, remains a mystery.

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21:53the third and final story of today's episode is called what just happened

22:10growing up colton louder was a joy to be around he was always goofing off and making people smile and he had a really infectious laugh. But secretly, he was depressed and began self-medicating at a very young age. By the time he was 18, he was a full-fledged drug addict, and by the time he was 25, he was in jail on a life sentence for murdering his uncle over a drug-related dispute. Colton's actions had a profound impact on his family, but none more so than on his twin sister, Kalen. She had known about his pain even when he was putting on that facade of being happy and bubbly and outgoing and she had reached out to him and tried to help him but she could never get through to him and when he was ultimately convicted it was crushing to her.

22:55She felt like she couldn't help someone who was really vulnerable. But instead of just feeling bad about this she took her sadness about her brother and watching him spiral and turned that into a laser focus on helping other vulnerable people that were struggling with addiction and depression to try to help them before they end up like her brother. And eventually, she would get her degree in social work from Utah State. But despite Kaylin's best intentions to want to help as many people as she could, she found it very difficult to find work in her field, and it wasn't uncommon for her to have fairly long stretches of unemployment.

23:30And it was during one of those long stretches in 2014 that Kaylin's life rapidly fell apart, and it left everybody who knew her thinking, what just happened? On September 26, 2014, a little after 9 p.m., Kaylin calls 911. She reported that there was this huge, brutal fight taking place in her condo's clubhouse. Basically, it was like a restaurant where you could rent it out in the first floor of this condo complex. And she said it was getting out of hand and police needed to come over here and stop it before someone got hurt. The police asked her if weapons were involved. Were people using weapons in this fight?