In October of 1947, a logger working a timber cut in Stanley Park, just outside Vancouver, found small bones half-buried near a cedar tree. The bones of children. Police found two skeletons in a shallow grave that had been there for years. A forensic examiner said one was a boy and one was a girl, both around six or seven years old, dead since the late 1930s or early 1940s. Nobody knew who they were. Nobody came forward. For fifty-six years those two children had no names, no family, and no story. They became known locally as the Babes in the Woods.Investigators spent years checking missing persons records, following tips that went nowhere. The working theory was a predator who knew those woods well. Without DNA technology or a family match, there was no way to put a name to bones. The case stalled repeatedly over the decades. Those children sat in an evidence box while the years kept passing.By the early 2000s, cold case units were running old evidence against DNA databases built from people who submitted genetic material to trace family histories. In 2003, forensic experts pulled DNA from the Stanley Park remains and ran it against those databases. A match came back from a woman in eastern Canada whose family stories included an uncle named David who had lived in Vancouver in the 1940s and had lost two young daughters who were never found. She had submitted her DNA hoping it might someday help. It did.Investigators found a missing persons report David Baxter had filed in 1948. He said his daughters had recently wandered off and never came home. There was one immediate problem. The original 1947 examiner had identified one of the skeletons as a boy, and David was missing two girls. The combination did not match, which is exactly why no one had ever connected them. When forensic experts re-examined both skeletons with modern techniques, they found the original examiner had been wrong. Both children were girls. A single forensic mistake had pointed every investigator in the wrong direction for more than fifty years.Investigators built a timeline. Forensic analysis placed the children's deaths around 1945 or 1946, at least two years before David filed that missing persons report. He had told police they recently wandered off, not years ago. When the Babes in the Woods story ran on the front pages of Vancouver papers in 1947, David said nothing. He never called the tip line. A neighbor later told investigators she had not seen his daughters around for a long time before the story ever ran, and had simply assumed he sent them to stay with relatives. She had never thought to make the connection because the papers said one child was a boy.David had worked near Stanley Park and knew those woods. The forensic timeline put his daughters in the ground roughly two years before he ever told anyone they were gone. He died in 1999, and investigators were never able to charge him with anything. Whatever he knew died with him. The two girls buried in that shallow grave were finally identified after fifty-six years, and the man most likely responsible never spent a day in a courtroom.

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In December of 1932, a drifter died on the side of a road outside Clarendon, Arkansas, alone in the cold with nothing but a knapsack nearby. That would have been the end of the story, except three years earlier this same man had done something nobody could explain. He had walked into a courthouse and testified at the trial for his own murder. Nobody had the full story at the time. The truth of what he really was changes everything about the verdict that came out of that courtroom.It started in January of 1929, when a man calling himself Calvin Franklin drifted into St. James, Arkansas. He was a timber cutter, a harmonica player, and within weeks he was courting a sixteen-year-old local girl named Ella. They set a wedding date. Then on March ninth, Calvin Franklin vanished without a word, leaving behind his knapsack, his belongings, and no explanation. Eight months later, a bloody hat and human bone fragments turned up in a burn pit in the woods outside town. Ella came forward and named four local men who she said had attacked them on the road the night of their planned wedding, beaten Calvin, murdered him, and threatened her into silence. She had been too terrified to speak for eight months. Now that there were bones, she was ready to talk.The four men were arrested and indicted for first-degree murder. Reporters came in from Kansas City and Memphis. The little courthouse in Mountain View was packed, with people standing outside in the cold December rain trying to get a look. Then, ten days before the trial was set to begin, a man walked into town claiming to be Calvin Franklin. He said he had simply left after Ella called off the wedding, that he had been living and working on a farm a hundred miles south, and that he knew nothing about any murder. Some people in town swore it was him, same voice, same walk, same way with the harmonica. Ella swore it was not. The man produced fingerprints and dental records that matched Calvin Franklin's registration at the lumber mill. When he took the stand and told his version of events, the jury came back not guilty on all counts. The four men walked free. The reporters left. And the man who had saved them went right back to drifting.Three years later, he died alone on that Arkansas roadside. And what investigators found when they looked into who he really was reframed the entire case. He was not Calvin Franklin. His real dental records identified him as Marty Rogers, an escaped mental patient who had been on the run for seven years. He had worked at the same lumber mill as the real Calvin Franklin, which gave him access to those records, and at some point he stepped fully into that identity. Nobody could ever prove what the townspeople suspected, which was that the four acquitted men knew who Marty Rogers really was and helped him swap the employment records at the mill before the trial. The theory was that there had been a deal, that Marty Rogers walked into that courtroom and lied under oath to hand four murderers their freedom. The real Calvin Franklin was dead, just like Ella had always said. Burned in that pit, just like she described from the beginning. And the men who killed him never spent a day behind bars.

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On the night of December 28, 1956, two sisters left their home in Chicago to see Elvis Presley in Love Me Tender. Barbara was 15. Patricia was 12. They had already seen the movie eleven times and begged their mom for one more showing. She said yes, told them to be home by midnight, and they promised they would be. They never came home.What followed became the largest missing persons investigation in Chicago history at the time. Over a hundred officers spent thousands of hours on the case. Tips flooded in from across the city. People swore they saw the Grimes sisters at department stores, hotels, and diners throughout early January. Elvis himself went on national radio and asked the girls to come home if they were listening. Their mother waited by the phone and prayed.Twenty-five days after they vanished, a construction worker driving past a guardrail spotted what he thought were 2 mannequins lying in the snow just off the road. He came back with his wife to check. She took one look and fainted. Barbara and Patricia Grimes had been found.The autopsies took five hours each, with three doctors in the room, and they could not agree on a cause of death. They settled on shock and exposure. But the evidence pointed in other directions, and the investigation that followed would become one of Chicago's most haunting cold cases.Police focused on a drifter in his early twenties who looked a little like Elvis. After three days of questioning, he confessed. He claimed he and another man had kept the girls for a week, taken them to bars, fed them hot dogs, and that something went wrong when the girls refused to cooperate. Their mother went on the news immediately and called it a lie. The autopsies backed her up. No alcohol in either girl's system. No food matching his story. The timeline did not fit. He recanted within days and the charges were dropped.Detectives then turned their attention to a man in his thirties with a prior record who had been seen near the theater the night the Grimes sisters disappeared. He was brought in twice, questioned for hours each time, and released both times for lack of evidence. The investigation stalled. Months passed with no arrest.Then in May of 1957, five months after the bodies were found, the girls' mother received a phone call from a man she had never spoken to in her life. He told her not to hang up. He said he had information about Barbara and Patricia. He told her the police had been chasing the wrong men all along. And then he said something that stopped her cold. He told her that Barbara had crossed toes.That detail had never appeared in any newspaper. It had never been released by police. It was known only to the family and the medical examiner. There is only one way a stranger knows that a girl has crossed toes. He had seen her. Up close. And he wanted her mother to know it.She tried to keep him on the line. She asked who he was. He laughed and hung up.She called police that same night. Detectives set up equipment to trace any future calls and told her to keep him talking if he called again. They asked her who else might have known about Barbara's toes and began going through names close to the family.The phone never rang again. Not from him.The Grimes sisters murder case was never solved. Their mother waited thirty-two years for another call that never came. She died in 1989 without knowing who killed her daughters, or whether she had ever unknowingly sat across from him at her own kitchen table. The man who called has never been identified.

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In the spring of 1908, a farmhouse in La Porte, Indiana burned to the ground before dawn. When the sheriff arrived, he found four bodies in the ashes, including a woman he assumed was the widow who owned the farm. He was wrong.Belle Gunness came to America from Norway in 1881 and settled in Chicago. Over the years, the people closest to her had a habit of dying. Her first husband died of heart failure and she collected the insurance. Two of her children died in infancy and she collected on those too. Her second husband died in a home accident involving a meat grinder. She filed the claim and moved on.By the early 1900s she had settled on a farm outside La Porte, Indiana. She placed ads in Norwegian-language newspapers circulating among immigrant communities across the American West, describing herself as an attractive widow and the owner of valuable property, looking to meet a gentleman of means. She told every man who answered to bring all of his money.Norwegian-born bachelors came from South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and farms further west. They took the train to La Porte, walked down a country road toward the farm with their life savings, and were never seen again. Belle always had a story. He was the wrong sort of man and moved on. He went back to Norway. He took the train to St. Louis.When the farmhouse burned in April 1908, the sheriff arrested a local farmhand named Ray Lamphere, who had been threatening the widow after she dismissed him. The body found in the ashes was identified as Belle and buried in the family plot. The case was closed.Then a man named Anders arrived from South Dakota looking for his brother Andrew, who had come to Indiana with his life savings to meet a Norwegian widow and had not sent word home since. Anders would not leave town until the sheriff investigated.They started digging. In the hog pen behind the burned farmhouse, a few feet down, they found what was left of Andrew, in pieces. They kept digging into the orchard. Body after body came up out of the ground, some elderly, some barely out of their teens, dismembered and buried over years. By the end, more than a dozen sets of human remains had come out of that property.At trial, Lamphere told his lawyer what he knew. Belle Gunness had been killing those men for years. The night of the fire, she murdered her own three children. Earlier that day she brought another woman to the farm, killed her, dressed her in her own clothes, placed the body on the first floor, and walked out while the house burned. When investigators measured the remains, the body was five inches shorter than Belle Gunness had been. The woman in the family plot was not Belle.The jury convicted Lamphere of arson but refused to convict him of murder. They believed Belle had faked her own death and disappeared.She was never caught. Sightings came in for decades. In 1931 in Los Angeles, a Norwegian woman named Esther Carlson was arrested for poisoning a man for his money. She was the right age, the right build, and had the right accent. People from La Porte who had known Belle looked at her photograph in the newspaper and said that was her. Carlson died in jail before her trial began, and the question was never resolved.Belle Gunness is believed to have killed as many as 40 people across two decades, making her one of the most prolific female serial killers in American history. The La Porte murder farm is one of the most chilling true crime cases of the Gilded Age.Tales from the Glovebox brings you true crime stories, unsolved mysteries, and stranger-than-fiction tales told as campfire-style voiceover narration over late-night driving footage. New episodes weekly. Subscribe and join us on the road.

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On the night of June 11, 1994, a couple was driving home on Highway 50 through the Sierra Nevada mountains when the woman spotted a figure on the shoulder. A woman in torn, dirty clothes, arms up, waving. Pointing down toward the edge of the road like she needed them to look at something. The husband hit the brakes and backed up, but when the headlights swung back around, there was nobody there. They searched the shoulder for ten minutes with flashlights and found nothing. No footprints. No tracks. No sign that anyone had been standing there at all.What they did not know was that forty feet below that exact spot, hidden in the trees at the bottom of a steep embankment, a car had been sitting there for five days.Christine was 24 years old and had a 3-year-old son. On Monday, June 6, 1994, she loaded up her car at her family's place near Sacramento and told her father she was heading to Nevada for a fresh start. He stood in the driveway and watched her pull out, her son strapped into his car seat in the back. That was the last time he saw her.When Christine never arrived and stopped answering her phone, her father filed a missing persons report and started driving Highway 50 himself, stopping at every shoulder and parking lot, hoping to find her broken down somewhere. Investigators traced her to a gas station stop in Placerville on Monday afternoon. A clerk remembered her. Remembered her little boy in the back seat, playing with a toy car. After Placerville, there was nothing. Christine and her son had simply vanished somewhere on that mountain road.Four days passed with no trace. Then on Saturday night, the couple reported the figure they had seen on the shoulder. Officers searched the area and found nothing. They told the couple it was shadows and exhaustion. The woman who had seen the figure could not let it go. She made her husband find a payphone and call the police, because she knew what she had seen and she knew someone was out there.The next morning, a deputy who knew about both the sighting and the missing woman drove back out to that curve and walked the shoulder slowly. Six feet from the edge of the road, he found a small toy car lying in the gravel. A few feet further, a highway mile marker was lying flat, the metal bent and scraped. He walked to the edge and looked down. The brush was broken wide open. A trail cut straight down through the trees. He worked his way down the embankment and found Christine's red sedan forty feet below the road, completely hidden from every car that had passed above. Christine had not survived the crash.He made himself walk around to the back of the car. When he looked through the glass, he saw movement.Christine's 3-year-old son was still strapped into his car seat. He had been there for five full days without food or water. Barely conscious, lips cracked dry. Doctors said one more hour and he would not have survived.The spot where the woman in torn clothing had appeared on the shoulder was directly above where the car had gone off the road five days earlier. She had been pointing straight down at the location of the car. The woman on the shoulder was never identified. No explanation was ever found for what the couple saw that night. Some people say it was shadows and exhaustion. Others say a mother does not stop trying just because she is gone.

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In 1969, a young woman named Diane Linkletter fell from the sixth floor of her Los Angeles apartment building. She was twenty years old and the daughter of Art Linkletter, one of the most beloved television hosts in America. Within hours, the story was everywhere. Her father went on national television and told the world that LSD had killed his daughter. The headlines ran it. Schools taught it. Politicians cited it in Congress. It became one of the most famous drug deaths of the 1960s. There was only one problem. It was not true.The man who told the story was Edward Durston, a well-connected socialite in his thirties who had been spending time with Diane. He was the only person in the apartment that morning. When police arrived, he told them Diane had taken LSD during the night, panicked, and gone over the balcony before he could stop her. The media repeated it without question. Art Linkletter believed it completely, and that belief shaped the rest of his life. He became one of the most visible anti-drug crusaders in the country, traveling to schools, churches, and congressional hearings, warning parents and children about the dangers of acid. He made a record with his son urging kids to call home before it was too late. That record won a Grammy. All of it was built on a story told by a single man who had been alone in a room with his daughter.The coroner's toxicology report came back weeks later. It showed no LSD, no marijuana, no alcohol. Nothing at all in Diane's system. She had taken no drugs. The report landed in a file drawer and stayed there while the myth spread. Schools kept teaching it. Preachers kept preaching it. Politicians kept citing her name as proof of what acid could do.Durston's story had shifted in small ways in the days after her death. Details moved. The timeline changed. Police noted the inconsistencies but had no physical evidence to contradict him. The case was ruled an accident. Durston left Los Angeles and moved in wealthy social circles.Sixteen years later, in January 1985, a woman named Carole Wayne, an actress and model best known from appearances on The Tonight Show, disappeared while on a trip to Mexico with Durston. They had argued the night before. She walked to the beach to cool off. Three days later, a fisherman found her body floating in the water. Mexican authorities called it an accidental drowning. Durston said he had last seen her alive hours earlier. He flew home and refused to discuss it. No charges were ever filed.A reporter in Los Angeles recognized the name, pulled the old files, and wrote about both cases side by side. Same man. Same pattern. Two women. Two accidents. Two sets of authorities who asked questions and walked away.Durston died in 2002. Art Linkletter, who spent four decades campaigning against the drug that the toxicology report proved had never touched his daughter, died in 2010. The myth of Diane Linkletter, the girl who jumped on acid, persisted in textbooks, anti-drug pamphlets, and political speeches for years. The file with the true report sat mostly unread.This is the real Diane Linkletter story, including the LSD myth exposed, the coroner report that stayed buried, the man who was never charged, and the second woman who died the same way sixteen years later. If you have ever heard her name used as a drug warning, this is what the file actually said.

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On a Sunday morning in February 1986, a twenty-nine-year-old nurse named Sherri Rasmussen was home alone in her San Fernando Valley house. She had been married three months. Her husband John had just left on a business trip. When he came back, he found her on the living room floor. She had been beaten and shot three times. The house had been gone through, drawers open, a few items missing. It looked like a burglary gone wrong, a stranger who broke in and found someone home. That is what everyone believed. For twenty-three years, that is exactly what everyone believed.Detectives worked the stranger angle. The San Fernando Valley had seen a string of break-ins that year and the theory made sense. John was cooperative and seemed devastated. But two things nagged at investigators. Sherri had fought back hard, long enough to leave marks across the room. And on her arm there was a bite mark, deep and deliberate, the kind that only happens when two people are fighting for their lives. Whoever did this had been close and furious and personal. Still, the stranger theory held. Tips came in and went nowhere. The file went into a cabinet and the world kept moving.Sherri's parents never stopped pushing the LAPD for answers. Detectives kept landing on uncomfortable details about John. His alibi was a business trip, timed just right. He was the one who found her. He knew that house better than anyone. The burglary itself felt wrong in a specific way: the items taken weren't what a panicking stranger grabs. They were chosen carefully, as if someone had thought in advance about what a burglary should look like.There was one other name in the file. Before Sherri, John had dated another woman. When things got serious with Sherri, that relationship ended badly. The ex had shown up at Sherri's workplace once and made things uncomfortable. Investigators looked at her briefly and moved on. A bad breakup, nothing more.In the mid-2000s the LAPD formed a cold case unit and someone pulled Sherri's file again. The bite mark on her arm had been swabbed at the scene in 1986. That swab had been sitting in evidence storage for twenty years. DNA technology could now tell them something it couldn't in 1986.The profile came back with no match in any criminal database. But what the DNA told investigators reframed everything. The staging of that scene, the careful selection of items taken, the way the story had held together for over two decades: this was someone who understood exactly how investigators read a crime scene. Not a panicking stranger. Someone who knew the job from the inside.They went back through every name in the file. The ex-girlfriend kept coming up. She still had no record. She still didn't look right for it. But in 2009, investigators asked her for a DNA sample, told her it was routine, told her they were wrapping up loose ends. They did not tip her off. They went to where she worked and arrested her there, in the building, in front of the people she saw every day.Her name was Stephanie Lazarus. She was a detective with the LAPD. She had spent twenty-three years working inside the same department that was supposed to be hunting Sherri's killer. She didn't know how to stage a crime scene because she studied it. She knew how because it was her job. In 2012, she was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-seven years to life. She is still in prison.The bite mark swab taken in 1986 spent twenty-three years in an evidence envelope. One swab. That was all it took.

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A nine-year-old girl got a pink bike for Christmas and hadn't stopped riding it since. On a January afternoon in 1996, she asked her grandmother if she could ride to the empty parking lot a couple of blocks away. Her grandmother said yes. Eight minutes later, her little brother came home alone. Twenty minutes after that, her grandmother walked to that parking lot and found the pink bike lying on its side. The girl was gone.What happened next would quietly reach into the pocket of every single person in America.Amber Rene Hagerman was taken from an Arlington, Texas parking lot on January 13th, 1996. A neighbor witnessed the entire abduction — a man in a black pickup truck grabbed her in roughly twenty seconds and drove east. Police responded fast. Roadblocks went up within the hour. Local news broadcast her photo. Tips flooded in from across north Texas. None of them led anywhere.Four days later, Amber's body was found near a creek about four miles from where she'd been taken. She was nine years old. Her killer was never identified. The case went cold.Her mother, Donna Whitson, was destroyed — but she refused to stop. She didn't just grieve. She started asking hard questions about why it took so long for word to get out, why there was no coordinated system to alert the public immediately when a child was abducted. In 1996, there was no such thing. Local police did what they could. Local news ran the story at six o'clock. But there was no emergency broadcast that could reach drivers on highways, shoppers in stores, or anyone just going about their day in real time.Donna started meeting with child safety advocates, law enforcement officials, and broadcasters. She traveled to different states and appeared before legislators, connecting Amber's case to a systemic failure she believed could be fixed. She was relentless. She kept showing up. She kept making the case that every minute after a child is taken is critical — that every driver and gas station attendant and passerby could be a potential witness, but only if they knew what to look for.It took years. The framework required buy-in from police departments, broadcasters, state legislatures, and eventually the federal government. Donna was part of that process from the beginning, pushing from the outside while the system was being built from the inside.She died in 2008, twelve years after losing her daughter. Amber's killer was never caught. Donna never got the justice she spent her life fighting for.But by the time she died, the system she helped build was already working. It had already brought hundreds of children home.That jarring, urgent sound that cuts through whatever you're doing — the one that jolts you awake at two in the morning or interrupts dinner or makes your heart jump in the middle of a quiet afternoon — is called an Amber Alert. Named after Amber Rene Hagerman. A nine-year-old girl on a pink bike in Arlington, Texas. Taken January 13th, 1996. Found four days later. Killer never identified.Since the national Amber Alert system was formalized in 2003, it has helped recover over 1,100 children in the United States. Every highway sign, every emergency broadcast, every notification on your phone carries her name.You've heard that sound your whole life. Now you know whose name it carries.
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On the morning of September 1, 2015, Lieutenant Charles Gliniewicz of the Fox Lake Police Department radioed dispatch to report that he was following 3 suspicious men near an abandoned cement plant at the edge of town. He gave descriptions. Then he went silent. Officers found him in the tall grass near the marsh minutes later. He was dead from a gunshot wound.Within hours, one of the largest manhunts in Illinois history was underway. Hundreds of officers, SWAT teams, helicopters with heat sensors, and FBI fugitive task forces flooded the region looking for 3 men: one white, one black, one Hispanic, all on foot, last seen heading into the brush. Schools locked down. Residents were told to stay inside. The story went national by nightfall. A 30-year veteran, beloved mentor, husband, and father of 4, killed in the line of duty while doing his job.The whole town of Fox Lake was devastated. Everyone called him GI Joe. He had run the Explorer Scout program at the department for over 20 years, mentoring hundreds of teenagers who wanted careers in law enforcement. Parents trusted him completely. Money poured into a donation fund for his family from all over the state. Officers from neighboring departments drove in on their days off to help with the search. The funeral drew hundreds of officers in dress uniform. For weeks, the story ran on cable news with the same footage, the same photos, the same 3 descriptions repeated over and over.Nobody questioned the story. Nobody had any reason to.The manhunt ran for 2 full days with no results. No security camera footage anywhere in the region showed 3 men matching those descriptions on the morning of September 1st. No footprints turned up in the wet marsh ground where the suspects should have been moving. Not one credible sighting came in despite weeks of tips and follow-up. The FBI interviewed hundreds of people and found nothing pointing to anyone.Then investigators started going through Gliniewicz's cell phone as standard procedure. What they found had nothing to do with 3 fleeing suspects. There were months of text messages about the Explorer Scout program and money, messages that read like someone managing a problem quietly, someone who did not want certain records examined too closely. Financial records for the program showed that tens of thousands of dollars had moved out over several years with no explanation.The 3 men did not exist. Gliniewicz had been embezzling from the Explorer Scout program for years, stealing money that parents and local businesses had donated to support the teenagers he mentored. When investigators were closing in and discovery was becoming unavoidable, he drove out to that marsh on the morning of September 1st, made the radio call describing 3 fictional suspects, and staged the scene himself. The gunshot wound was self-inflicted. The entire manhunt, the national news coverage, the funeral, the donation fund, all of it was built on a 2-minute radio transmission from a man who had been stealing from children.The Lake County Major Crime Task Force announced the findings in November 2015. Gliniewicz was officially ruled a suicide. His wife Melodie was later charged with money laundering and misuse of charitable funds in connection with the embezzlement. She pleaded guilty and received probation. The Explorer Scout program he had run for 2 decades, the one he was stealing from, the one he used as cover, was shut down.

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In November of 1985, a 67-year-old retired man named Dexter Stefonek was driving home to Wisconsin after spending a few months in Oregon with his son and grandchildren. It was bitter cold across Montana. He had been making good time, driving straight through, stopping only when he had to. Late one night, he pulled into a rest stop along the interstate. By morning, his car was a burned-out shell still smoking in the cold air. And Dexter was gone.His son David had tried to talk him out of making the drive. He told his father the weather was going to be rough and it was a long trip for a man his age. Dexter had lost his wife of 44 years just the year before, on Christmas Day 1984, and David wanted him to stay through the winter so he wouldn't be alone. Dexter waved him off and said he'd be fine. He wanted to be home.A custodian working the rest stop that night had seen the whole thing. He watched a man climb out of Dexter's Mercury with 2 gas cans, soak the car down, and light it on fire. Then the man walked away, got into a white pickup truck with Arizona plates that had come back around, and drove off into the dark.Investigators searched the rest stop and the surrounding area and found nothing. They put out alerts, checked other rest stops along the interstate, and traced the white pickup as far as they could without a plate number. The case went cold. There were no cameras, no digital trail, and almost no way to track a vehicle across state lines in 1985.Five months later, a couple searching a landfill about 20 miles from the rest stop found a wallet on the ground. Inside was Dexter's driver's license and a significant amount of cash. They kept looking. They found a suitcase. Some clothes. And then, under an old mattress, they found what was left of Dexter. He had been there since November, right around the time his car burned at the rest stop.Nothing valuable had been taken. The wallet still had cash. The suitcase had money too. This was not a robbery. Whoever did this did not want Dexter's money or his things. Investigators concluded that Dexter had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, chosen at random by someone who had done this before and knew exactly how to disappear afterward.The case stayed open for years, then decades. The white pickup was never found. The man the custodian saw setting the fire was never identified. David lived with the knowledge that he had tried to stop his father from making that drive, and it had not been enough.Then in 2019, nearly 40 years later, investigators ran Dexter's case through a national DNA database as a matter of routine. It matched a man already in prison for a different murder. When investigators looked at where he had been in the fall of 1985, it was Montana. He had owned a white pickup truck with Arizona plates. He matched the description the custodian had given the night of the fire.His name was Charles Sullivan. He had been doing this for years before Dexter. He had no reason to choose Dexter specifically. He didn't need one. He just needed someone alone on a cold highway at night, and that night it was a 67-year-old man who only wanted to get home.Sullivan has never confessed. He lawyered up the moment investigators came to talk to him and has gone quiet ever since.

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