On November 5, 2005, a jogger found the body of 32-year-old mother of three Brandy Dyson floating in a lake behind the Lake Charles Civic Center. 

Brandy had been struggling with mental health issues and with addition. 

For a while she was doing well, and settled into an apartment. But then she lost her apartment after taking refugees in from Hurricane Katrina. She then moved to the Civic Center in Lake Charles with a lot of other evacuees from the storm. 

After that, Brandy was caught drinking, which broke the rules of the Red Cross, the organization that was running things at the Civic Center, so she was asked to leave. This seemed to start what would turn out to be her final downward spiral. 

Police believe she set up camp on a pier nearby and had been living there for a few weekends when the next massive hurricane, Hurricane Rita, hit and devastated the state. 

Sometime in the midst of the storm chaos, Brandy was brutally murdered. The bruising on her neck was so bad that her father said that she had to be buried in a turtleneck sweater. 

It’s been almost 20 years. The person arrested and at first charged with her murder has been released, and no new suspects have come forward. But the unsolved case is still on the minds of the detectives at the Lake Charles police department. 

Down there, Brandy’s family tells me, they have a nickname for her. They call her The Lady in the Lake.  

If you have a case you’d like Catherine Townsend to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.

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On November 5, 2005 a jogger was out running beside a lake in Lake Charles, Louisiana, behind the Civic Center, when he saw something floating in the water. When he took a closer look, he realized it was the body of a woman.  

Police identified the body as 32-year-old Brandy Renee Dyson, a mother of three who had recently been made homeless after Hurricane Katrina and then Hurricane Rita, which devastated the state. 

It’s been almost 20 years, there’s been one arrest and  a lot of controversy, but her case is still unsolved. There's a lot we don't know about Brandy's murder, but we do know that it was violent. 

Her father Adley Dyson told a local news station,  "We had to bury her in a turtleneck sweater because she was strangled and she was thrown in the lake."

If you have a case you’d like Catherine Townsend to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.

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It was July 29, 2022, just another quiet summer night in Atlanta, Texas. The sun had just gone down when 28-year-old Shommaonique Oliver got a panicked phone call. That’s when her nightmare began. Three of her children- her middle daughters, nine-year-old Zi’Ariel Robinson-Oliver, eight-year-old A’Miyah Hughes, and little five-year-old Te’Mari Robinson-Oliver were missing. Law enforcement found them a few hours later. Divers dragged their lifeless little bodies out of a neighboring pond.  

Initially this was described as a drowning in the local media, but months later, law enforcement said that these three little girls had been murdered. The cause was strangulation. And this person could strike again at any time. 

If you have a case you’d like Catherine Townsend to look into, you can reach out to the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. 

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On July 30, 2020, in Starke County, Indiana, a 911 call came from North County Road 1025 East just before 3:30 a.m. 

The caller, a man named Zachary, had worked late that night and had gotten home and climbed into bed when he said that he and fiancé were woken up by someone pounding on their door. 

The man was 27-year-old Nicholas Rudd. Nick said that he had been shot, but neither Zachary nor his fiancé had heard gunshots. 

What he didn’t know was that Nick had not been shot, he had been attacked with a hammer, and stabbed in the neck. He was bleeding to death on their doorstep, and the killer was still outside. 

If you have a case you’d like Catherine Townsend to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.

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Six bodies were found in Wonder Valley between December of 2019 and January of  2021. Some of the bodies in the desert, including the disappearance of 37 year old single mother Erika Lloyd, started making local, then national, news. But there were no national news reports about James Escalante. 

We’re going to dive into the missing persons report and compare accounts from the last people who saw James to see if we can shed more light into what really happened out there in the desert on June 25, 2020. 

If you have a case you’d like Catherine Townsend to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.

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On June 25, 2020, 56-year-old James Escalante, who also went by Blackhawk, left home on a red mountain bike to help Dee, a friend of his and his girlfriend Sherry’s, whose truck had gotten stuck in the desert. 

But he never made it back home, and no one reported him missing until September 7th. Heather Escalante and her husband Jon, James’ son, began their own search. 

After Heather started posting on social media and looking for information, she heard that remains were found in the desert on August 8th by a hiker. The body was a John Doe. Half his face was missing, he had long black hair and there was no ID found. 

Heather contacted the detective working the case to say that she believed that the body could be James, and on December 15th, the family’s worst fears were confirmed. They got a call from the coroner. James Escalante was dead. His cause and manner of his death were undetermined. 

What happened out there in the desert?

 

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On June 25, 2020, a 56-year-old named James Escalante, who had Native American heritage and was also known by his nickname, Blackhawk, left his home in Wonder Valley, California on his mountain bike

James lived with a girlfriend, Sherry, and she told law enforcement that he left the home that day to head down the road about 10 minutes from their place to help a friend of theirs named Dee whose car had gotten stuck in sugar sand, which is almost like dry desert quicksand.  

It’s hot out there; the average temperature for that part of the desert in July and August is 89 degrees and highs regularly top out over 100, or even 105. 

And out there in the desert it’s dry heat so it feels like you’re baking in an oven.

It happens every year - hikers go missing or people just wander off and get lost and don’t come back. But the terrain also means that when people do go missing under mysterious circumstances it can be easier for local law enforcement to write it off as just an accident. 

Now supposedly the friend, Dee, had been out looking for rocks near Highway 62 and Shelton Road east of Twentynine Palms. And James had lived in that desert for a long time, and knew the area well. So the plan was for James to meet her at a specific  intersection to rescue her. 

But once he got out there, according to Sherry, he couldn’t find Dee. So James called Sherry on his cell phone to figure out what was going on. At that point, Sherry called Dee on a three way call, and James told Dee to honk her horn so that he could find her. 

He seemed to think he could hear her, so he hung up. But he never got to Dee’s car. And no one ever saw James Escalante alive again.

If you have a case you’d like Catherine Townsend to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. 

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On September 29, 2023, just over nine months after William Vick was found dead on his bedroom floor in Clarksville Arkansas, his house caught on fire and burned down under very suspicious circumstances. 

If you have a case you’d like Catherine Townsend to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. 

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Christine Harron, a book-loving teenager from Hanover, Ontario, leaves for school in the spring of 1993 and is never seen again. A suspect emerges, confessing to her murder, but the case falls apart and Christine's family are left without answers.

In Season 9 of the award winning podcast Someone Knows Something, David Ridgen, along with Christine's mother, reopen the investigation and come face to face with the man who said he killed Chrissy.

Someone Knows Something is the investigative true crime series by award-winning documentarian David Ridgen. Each season tackles an unsolved case, uncovering details and bringing closure to families.

More episodes are available at: lnk.to/beLwSGEq

 

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On January 23, 2023, just six days after William Vick was found dead on his bedroom floor at 1954 County Road 3259 in Clarksville Arkansas, police did a welfare check on his wife Larenda’s mother, 72-year-old Martha McLean, who lived in a detached house on the property with William and Larenda.

They found Martha struggling to breathe with drugs including lorazepam and morphine around her. Martha had overdosed and was close to death, but paramedics administered Narcan, a drug that blocks opioids. So Martha's breathing improved, and she survived. 

Matt Foster with the Arkansas State Police wrote that Martha had a pen and a partially handwritten note in her hand when he found her. The note stated that Martha didn’t want to hurt anyone. And after he found her, he executed a search warrant for the  property, and he found a second handwritten note where Martha confessed to tampering with William’s medication and to killing him. 

But why did Martha kill William, and what really happened to her? 

If you have a case you’d like Catherine Townsend to look into, you can reach out to us at our Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.