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.

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