This is episode two of two. Please listen to episode one first, this story has too many details to be one part. 

When a former employee named Steven Durst was caught collecting ransom money for the missing couple, the investigation took a dark turn. Durst failed a polygraph and had been telling people the Markleys owed him exactly $1,000 — the same amount withdrawn at the bank. 

He was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, but has steadfastly maintained his innocence when it comes to the disappearance.

Twenty-five years later, a shooting in the same small township led to a massive property search with excavators and state investigators — and a sheriff referencing a cold case "dating back historically twenty years."

If you have any information about the disappearance of John and Shelly Markley, contact the Trumbull County Sheriff's Office at 330-675-2540.

You can also reach Detective Rick Tackett directly at 330-675-2508.

If you don't want to call law enforcement, you can message the family's Facebook page — it's called Missing Persons: John and Shelly Markley. They're still there. They're still checking it. They haven't given up.

To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here.

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On a Friday morning ten days before Christmas 1995, John and Shelly Markley helped their five children get ready for school. By the time their kids came home that afternoon, both parents had vanished — leaving behind Shelly's purse and cigarettes, John's wristwatch, an open gun cabinet, a ransacked safe, and a coffee pot that had nearly boiled dry.

The only confirmed sighting that day came from a bank teller, who watched the couple withdraw $1,000 in cash at a drive-thru — with an unidentified man in the passenger seat of their truck. Their vehicle was later found locked, abandoned, and covered in mud ten miles away. Inside: their cell phone and tarps stripped from John's prized Corvette. 

What follows in one of Ohio's most baffling mysteries.

If you have any information about the disappearance of John and Shelly Markley, contact the Trumbull County Sheriff's Office at 330-675-2540.

You can also reach Detective Rick Tackett directly at 330-675-2508. 

If you don't want to call law enforcement, you can message the family's Facebook page — it's called Missing Persons: John and Shelly Markley. They're still there. They're still checking it. They haven't given up.

To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here.

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Hey, Crime Clueless family — we're doing something a little different this week. We're bringing you a two-part crossover from our sister show, Vanished Voices, hosted by Jenna and Shannon.

This is part two of two, if you haven't listened to Part One yet — start there. This story deserves to be heard from the beginning.

On the morning of April 20th, 2011, workers near the Conowingo Dam on the Susquehanna River spotted something in the water.

It was Phylicia.

In Part Two of our Phylicia Barnes episode, we cover the discovery of her body, the homicide ruling, and the man investigators believed was responsible. We walk through three separate trials spanning nearly a decade — a conviction, an overturn, a mistrial, a dismissal, and a final acquittal. We talk about what that process cost the Barnes family. And we talk about the extraordinary legacy they built in Phylicia's name when the legal system gave them nothing else.

Closed is not the same as solved. And solved is not the same as just.

If you have information about Phylicia's murder, contact Baltimore Metro Crime Stoppers at 1-866-7LOCKUP. You can remain completely anonymous.

Resources:

To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here.

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Hey, Crime Clueless family — we're doing something a little different this week. We're bringing you a two-part crossover from our sister show, Vanished Voices, hosted by Jenna and Shannon. Vanished Voices focuses on cases that deserve far more attention than they get. 

This week's case is Phylicia Barnes. She was sixteen years old. A straight-A honor student from Monroe, North Carolina, with a scholarship ahead of her and a whole life waiting.

On December 28th, 2010, Phylicia Simone Barnes was last seen in her half-sister's apartment in Baltimore — and never seen again.

In Part One of this two-part episode, we introduce you to Phylicia — who she was, where she came from, and the family that loved her fiercely. We walk through the days after her disappearance, the massive search that consumed Baltimore, and the devastating silence from a national media that couldn't find the time for a missing Black girl.

One hundred and thirteen days passed.

What happened next changed everything.

Part Two is available in your feed right now.

If you have information about Phylicia's murder, contact Baltimore Metro Crime Stoppers at 1-866-7LOCKUP. You can remain completely anonymous.

To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here.

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The murders of Rose Burkert and Roger Atkison at the Amana Holiday Inn in September 1980 left investigators with a hotel full of witnesses and not a single person who heard a thing. In Part Two, Jenna and Laura dig into the suspects — and there's no shortage of them.

There's Danny Burton, Rose's ex-boyfriend who stalked her relentlessly, killed her dog, and was the person Rose herself told police to look at if she ended up dead. There's the hotel bartender who argued with Rose the night of the murder, then abandoned his truck, left his paycheck behind, and enlisted in the military. There's a serial killer in the family tree. And then there's the theory that changed everything — investigator Paul Holes' connection of Room 260 to two other hatchet murders at highway hotels across three states, all linked by one bizarre detail: toothpaste left at every scene.

After forty-five years of silence, new DNA evidence and a reopened investigation suggest that Room 260 may finally give up its secrets. Jenna and Laura lay out every theory, pick their sides, and make the case for answers that are long overdue.

If you have any information about the murders of Rose Burkert and Roger Atkison, contact the Iowa County Sheriff's Office at (319) 642-7307, the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation at (515) 725-6010, or the FBI's ViCAP at (800) 634-4097.

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September 1980. A young couple drives four hours from Missouri to a Holiday Inn in rural Iowa for a secret weekend together. When they arrive, the hotel is fully booked — a morticians' convention has taken every room. But a last-minute cancellation opens up Room 260.

By the next afternoon, both are found dead — hacked with an ax, face down on the bed, in one of the most disturbing crime scenes in Iowa history. Chairs pulled up beside the bodies. Toothpaste squeezed around the bathtub. A bar of soap carved into pieces. And a single word left on the bathroom mirror, written in soap and then wiped away: "This."

In Part One, we introduce Rose Burkert and Roger Atkison — a 22-year-old nursing student being terrorized by a violent ex, and a 32-year-old married telephone repairman living a double life. We walk through the night of September 12th, the haunting crime scene, and the question at the center of everything: who knew they were in that room?

If you have any information about the murders of Rose Burkert and Roger Atkison, contact the Iowa County Sheriff's Office at (319) 642-7307, the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation at (515) 725-6010, or the FBI's ViCAP at (800) 634-4097.

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Holly Searcy lost her mother to murder at 10. She lost her father to murder at 19. She battled her own addiction before getting sober and becoming a substance abuse counselor. Now, she's the one fighting for the case no one else has been able to solve.

In Part 2, Holly opens up about what it's like to grow up with both parents taken by violence, the moment she decided to pick up the torch from her exhausted aunt and become her mother's advocate, and the emotional cost of re-traumatizing yourself over and over again to keep a cold case alive.

She shares the devastating story of Hurricane Ike washing her mother's casket away three years after the murder, the possible connection to the Jennings 8 serial murders just 30 minutes away, and the painful realization that the physical evidence in her mother's case has been exhausted — meaning it will only be solved if someone comes forward.

Holly also shares a message for the person who killed her mom. And she talks about what it means to try to forgive someone you've never met.

Somebody knows something. If you were at Crystal's Nightclub in Lake Charles on the night of November 4th, 2005 — or if you knew Jeremias Salazar in the Lubbock or Levelland, Texas area — please contact the Lake Charles Police Department.

Follow Justice for Brandy Dyson on Facebook for case updates and to support Holly.

Visit projectcoldcase.org for support in similar fights for justice

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In the weeks following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, 32-year-old Brandy Renee Dyson was living alone on a pier behind the Lake Charles Civic Center in Louisiana. She'd lost her apartment after taking in friends displaced by the storms. On the morning of November 5th, 2005, her body was found floating in the lake — just feet from where she'd been sleeping. She had been strangled.

A man named Jeremias Salazar was arrested, indicted on second-degree murder, and held on a million-dollar bond. Then the DNA came back — and it wasn't his. The charges were dropped. He walked free. And for twenty years, no one has been held accountable.

In Part 1, Brandy's daughter Holly Searcy — who was just 10 years old when her mother was murdered — shares who Brandy really was: a mother who loved fiercely, who fought addiction with everything she had, and who wrote poems for the daughter she couldn't raise. We walk through the night Brandy was last seen alive, the evidence that built a case and the DNA that destroyed it, and the question that still haunts Holly to this day — if Salazar didn't do it, who did? And if he did, why can't anyone prove it?

If you have any information about the murder of Brandy Renee Dyson, please contact the Lake Charles Police Department.

Follow Justice for Brandy Dyson on Facebook.

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This is Part 2 of a two-part episode. If you haven't listened to Part 1, we strongly recommend going back — this story builds on itself, and the full weight of what you're about to hear depends on understanding everything that came before.

In Part 1, we introduced you to Mitrice Richardson — a 24-year-old honors graduate from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in psychology, a dream of going to grad school, and a life full of promise. We walked through the warning signs her family noticed in the days before her disappearance, the alarming evening at Geoffrey's restaurant in Malibu where every person who interacted with her recognized something was wrong, and the devastating series of failures at the Lost Hills Sheriff's Station — where deputies arrested her on minor charges, promised her mother they would hold her, and then released her at 12:28 in the morning with no phone, no money, no car, and no way home. Into the dark canyon roads of Malibu. Into an area she had never been. The department's official position: "She was fine."

Part 2 picks up at 6:30 the next morning, when a retired KTLA news anchor spots a young woman in his backyard in Monte Nido — six miles from the station. She tells his wife she's "just resting." She's gone before deputies arrive. It's the last confirmed sighting of Mitrice Richardson alive.

What unfolds over the next eleven months is a search effort plagued by decisions that defy explanation. K9 dogs pick up Mitrice's scent and are pulled off the trail. A two-day search is cancelled after one day. A volunteer drone is redirected away from the area where her remains will eventually be found. Over 300 volunteers comb 18 square miles and come up empty. Privately organized searches discover disturbing, racially offensive graffiti in a canyon drainage culvert — which authorities paint over.

And then, in August 2010, California State Park Rangers — who are not looking for Mitrice at all — find skeletal remains in a remote creek bed in Dark Canyon. Naked. Clothing scattered hundreds of feet down a ravine. Adjacent to a secluded ranch known for producing pornography. Residents had reported hearing screams from the canyon in the nights after Mitrice disappeared.

The coroner rules the cause of death undetermined. The sheriff's department says no foul play. Deputies move the remains against the coroner's explicit orders, then can't lead investigators back to the correct location. Critical evidence — including Mitrice's clothing — goes missing from the chain of custody. The family is taken to what they later believe was the wrong discovery site, where they find a bone left in the dirt.

No one has ever been charged. No one has ever been held accountable. Mitrice's mother, Latice Sutton, who spent sixteen years fighting for answers, died in September 2025 without ever learning what happened to her daughter.

This one stays with you.

If you have any information about the disappearance and death of Mitrice Richardson, please contact the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department at (323) 890-5500 or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 1-800-222-8477. A $25,000 reward is available for information leading to an arrest and conviction.

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On the evening of September 16, 2009, a 24-year-old Cal State Fullerton graduate named Mitrice Richardson walked into an upscale Malibu restaurant and immediately alarmed everyone she encountered. She told the valet she was there to avenge Michael Jackson's death. She told strangers she was from Mars. She couldn't pay her bill.

The staff didn't just call the police — they called because they were worried about her safety. One employee refused to cover her tab, saying: "She's not safe to go out on her own."

Deputies arrested Mitrice on minor charges and drove her to the Lost Hills Sheriff's Station in Calabasas. Her mother called, begging them not to release her. They promised they wouldn't.

At 12:28 AM, they let her walk out the door — no phone, no money, no car, no way home — into the pitch-black canyons of Malibu. She vanished.

What followed was eleven months of botched searches, hidden surveillance footage, contradicted testimony, and a department that insisted, at every turn, that everything was fine.

This one stays with you.

If you have any information, contact the LASD at (323) 890-5500 or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 1-800-222-8477. There is a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction.

To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here.

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