On March 2, 1996, 25-year-old Alicia Showalter Reynolds set out before breakfast, pointing her white Mercury south from Baltimore toward Charlottesville for a shopping day with her mom. Somewhere along U.S. Route 29 in Central Virginia—near Culpeper—that ordinary drive met an extraordinary danger, the kind that hides in plain sight on the shoulder of a busy highway.

By nightfall, Alicia hadn’t arrived. Her car was found on the roadside; witnesses remembered a clean-cut man in a dark pickup offering “help.” In this episode, we walk the Route 29 corridor minute by minute, piecing together what Alicia saw, what bystanders noticed, and how a roadside “good Samaritan” ruse may have masked a predator.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Virginia State Police Culpeper Division toll-free at 1-800-572-2260, the Bureau of Criminal Investigation toll-free at 1-888-300-0156, or you can also email them at [email protected].

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