13. Occupational Hazards - Retail and Hospitality Murders
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Hi, Bingers, and welcome back to Binge, your now weekly podcast where we cover multiple cases that are connected not by a common offender, but by a common theme. And

And this week and last, we're looking at occupational hazards when you're a woman working alone in an open, easily accessible business. Last week, we explored the dangers of being a female real estate agent. And this week, it's hospitality and retail. We have four cases where being a woman working by herself in a job that interfaces with the public was a fatal vulnerability for its victims.

And in some of the cases I'll be telling you about on this episode, the victim was male. So just working in a convenience store or a retail store by yourself, regardless of what sex you are, can potentially expose you to deadly violence.

It doesn't happen often, it really doesn't, but it does happen. And that alone is scary. It's the stuff of nightmares. And that's what the I-70 killer was. He was the stuff of nightmares. A stranger who drifted in from out of the blue, killed for no good reason, and then disappeared right back into the void.

So we're starting on the morning of April 8th, 1992, when Robin Fuldauer found herself working her shift at Payless Shoe Store all alone. Robin was one of only two full-time workers at the store, and although she had expected to work that morning with the other one, named Brenda, we'll call her,

Brenda had phoned in sick that morning, so Robin was there all by herself. And it was a slow morning, not many customers, but it was a weekday, a Wednesday, and not really peak shopping, so Robin could totally handle it herself. It was shortly after her lunch break ended at around 1 o'clock that someone entered the store and bought two pairs of shoes.

And then sometime not long after that sale, a man entered the store and forced Robin into the back room where he murdered her and then fled the crime scene. The first indicator to anyone outside the store that something was wrong was when the district manager of Payless called to check in with Robin, but the phone just kept ringing. He called several times over the next 45 minutes and no one ever picked up.

So he called over to the Speedway gas station next door and asked the clerk on duty to walk over to Payless and see if the employee Robin was all right. The Speedway clerk entered the Payless store to find it eerily quiet. She noticed the cash register drawer was open. A chill came over her and she returned to the gas station and phoned the police.

Just as the police showed, a customer entered the store and began browsing up and down the aisles, unaware that the store's sole on-duty employee lay dead in the back room. At first, when they found her body, police weren't sure if Robin had been struck on the head or shot, but the medical examiner was able to resolve that and conclude that she'd been shot twice in the head with a .22 caliber firearm.

Robin was a graduate of Indiana University and the youngest of three sisters, was only 26 years old at the time. A man named Jeff Mayrose, who managed a paint store in the same plaza, had actually seen a suspicious man in the parking lot in the hour leading up to Robin's murder. The man, he said, looked like he'd been sleeping in his clothes. He was carrying a long bag and appeared to maybe be a hitchhiker.

He said he observed the man stop in front of the store, then walk around the building several times before sitting on the curb, staring toward the Payless store while rifling through his bag. All the while, Jeff said the man was talking to himself and giggling. The man then disappeared for a while, and the next time Jeff spotted him, he was hitchhiking his way back north.

And shortly after, Robin would be found dead inside the Payless. In terms of motive for the murder, it looked like it may have just been robbery. The cash register drawer was open and $100 was missing. $100 seemed like such a small reward, though, for such a tremendous cost.

But little did anyone know yet, this was just the beginning of a multi-state murder spree. Just three days later in Wichita, Kansas, nearly 700 miles away, a man named Norman Smith was at home worrying about his wife, Patricia.

She worked as a bridal consultant at a shop called La Bride de l'Elegance. And Norman had last heard from her over two hours earlier when she called to tell him she'd be late getting home because she had just had a last minute customer.

He called the store several times since then and there was no answer. So he got into his car and drove down to the shop. And when he got there, his heart leapt into his throat. There were police cars and cops everywhere. There were television news vans, crime scene tape blocking off the entrance to the shop where his wife worked.

He now found himself in that brief, terrible limbo between seeing all of the indicators that tragedy had descended on his life and having it confirmed. He talked to the police who drove him to St. Joseph's Medical Center, and when he arrived, he learned that his wife had just been pronounced dead. She had been shot to death while working, and so had her boss, Trish Majors.

Both women were found face down on the floor in the back of the store, each with a single gunshot wound to the back of their head. It appeared that robbery may have been a motive, though the amount that was missing from the store was relatively trivial, just like in Indianapolis. And neither victim appeared to have been sexually assaulted.

Investigators reached the conclusion that the two women probably assumed the gunman was a customer they were waiting for, and that's why they unlocked the door to even let him in. Police had first been alerted by an anonymous caller who called from a payphone at around 7:30 p.m. to report that he'd seen a man walking toward the bridal shop with a gun.

The caller refused to identify himself and then hung up. So police were very interested in finding out who this man was. Because for those of you who are well-versed in true crime, you probably know that killers sometimes call in themselves to report their crimes, like BTK and Zodiac.

And sometimes they even pretend to be a witness, like in the case of Lonnie Franklin, the Grim Sleeper. But in this case, investigators didn't have to wait very long. A friend of the anonymous caller went to the police and identified him. And when investigators made contact with the caller, they learned that he was the late coming customer the two slain employees had stayed after to accommodate.

And he himself had entered the shop and was confronted by the gunman who ordered him to the back of the store. But the customer refused and told the man with the gun that he didn't want to get involved. And then he just backed out through the front door and left. So he literally stumbled in on the crime.

He said he was so frightened that he waited an hour to call the police. Now, he realized just how lucky he'd been because had he complied with the gunman's orders to get to the back of the store, he knew that he'd probably be dead along with the two employees.

When police asked the witness what the gunman looked like, the witness described him as about 30 years old, around 5'7 to 5'8 inches tall, medium build with light red hair and stubble. He'd been wearing a brown waist-to-thigh length jacket and dark slacks. A composite sketch was made and released to the local news outlets. Over 400 tips came over the next few weeks.

And by the end of the month, investigators were beginning to consider a possible link between the Payless Shoe Source murder of Robin Fuldauer and the two slayings in Wichita. The same caliber of weapon had been used and the circumstances were very similar.

By May 9th, one month after Robin was killed, four additional killings were linked to what was now appeared to be the work of a serial killer. On April 27th, 40-year-old Michael McCowan had been working in his mother's ceramic store in Terre Haute, Indiana when someone entered the store in the late afternoon, crept up behind McCowan while he was stocking shelves and shot him in the head before taking the victim's wallet and leaving, ignoring money in the register.

Then on May 3rd in St. Charles, Missouri, some customers entered a footwear and Western style clothing shop called Boot Village and found the store's 24-year-old saleswoman, Nancy Kitzmiller, shot in the back of the head and dead on the floor. Nancy had not originally been scheduled to come in that day, but she agreed to work when a coworker needed the day off. And

And again, a modest amount of money was missing from the cash register. An amount that didn't really square with the cost of a human life.

No one heard the gunshot when it rang out, but there was one witness who saw Nancy with a man who appeared to be a customer within minutes of her murder. This witness assisted police in creating another composite sketch. Four days later on May 7th in Raytown, Missouri, which is three hours away from St. Charles, Tim Hickman, owner of the Video Attic Video Store, heard a loud pop in the gift shop next door, which was called Store of Many Colors.

He moved closer to his front window and watched as a man whom he'd just seen enter moments earlier, walked back out and through the parking lot. He went next door to see what had happened, what the noise was. And that's when he found Sarah Blessing, the 37 year old owner of the store, shot down dead in the middle of the day. Now, during the initial investigation, it was learned that other witnesses had seen the same man that Tim Hickman described.

And as at the time of the first murder at the Payless in Indianapolis, the man was mumbling to himself.

A clerk at a grocery store in the same plaza had also seen this man after the murder climbing a hill heading in the direction of I-70. And that was a common thread linking all of the cases beyond just the MO. All of these crimes occurred along the I-70 corridor from Indianapolis all the way to Wichita. That's a distance of 675 miles, about 10 hours of travel time.

The first murder took place in Indianapolis at the easternmost point of the series, and the second murder just three days later occurred at the westernmost point in Wichita. So the killer had traveled that distance at some point during this three-day period, and then over the next month, bounced back and forth from state to state.

This is probably why it was so easy to make the connection that all of these murders happening in the middle of the day to employees at workplaces were connected. But investigators weren't sure what this meant. Sure, the killer may have been a trucker or someone who traveled for work, but it's just as possible that he was driving great distances to complicate the investigation, which would help prevent him from getting caught.

And if so, it worked because as of March 2023, we still have no idea who the I-70 killer is. All these crimes were linked by ballistics. It's for sure that the same gun was used in each of them. There is actually an offer of a $25,000 reward for information leading to the killer's identification.

But then there was a separate series of very similar murders in Texas that some feel may have been connected. So we're going to go over those now. But keep in mind, I-70 killer who killed people while they were at work, still unsolved.

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Let's get back into the episode.

On September 25th, 1993, the owner of a Fort Worth antique shop, Mary Ann Glasscock, was found shot to death while she was working alone in her store. On November 1st, 1993, a 22-year-old dance supply store employee named Amy Vess was shot in the head and face by a robber while she was closing up.

She actually managed to call 911, but she could not speak properly. When officers arrived, they immediately summoned medical assistance, and while they waited, they tried to talk to Amy to find out what happened, but she was barely able to speak. She was able to nod her head, and she confirmed that there had been a robbery, and the suspect was male. She was rushed to the hospital where she underwent surgery and later died. Two

Two months later in Houston, Texas, a woman named Vicki Webb was working alone in the gift shop she owned when a customer came in, made small talk with her, browsed the store, and then walked up to her and shot her in the head. But miraculously, Vicki somehow survived.

And when she was shown the composites from the earlier I-70 killings, Vicky said she believed they resembled the man who shot her. And although the Texas shooter used a 22 caliber gun, ballistics did not match the gun used up in the Midwest. It wasn't the same gun, but that doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't the same man. The MO is the same.

In 2001, some nine years after the I-70 killings, a liquor store clerk named Billy Brossman in Indiana was working by himself when a guy in a windbreaker came in and began shopping for beer. This is in the same place that those murders happened in Indiana, the I-70 murders.

The man had brought a six pack up to the register, put it on the counter and then pulled a gun from his waistband. He pointed the gun at Billy and ordered him to remove the cash tray from the register. Once he took the cash, he ordered Billy to the back of the store where he pumped one bullet into the back of his head and left.

In 2021, the Indiana police shared that they considered the I-70 killer a possible suspect in Billy Brosman's murder, as the liquor store was located only seven blocks from the store where Michael McCowan was murdered in 1992. But what's really significant in the Billy Brosman case is their surveillance video of the entire encounter.

So this literally may be the face of the I-70 killer. And I'm showing that video right now on screen. If you're not watching, you can go check it out on our Instagram @bingedpod. So moving on to another killer now, at the same time, actually in the same area, there was another highway serial killer, sometimes known as the I-65 killer or the Days Inn killer.

And indeed, the early morning hours of May 3rd, 1989 was a deadly sliver of time for Days Inn employees along the I-65 corridor in rural Indiana. I don't know what it is about Indiana and people killing employees while they're at work, but there's something. The first sign of trouble was a flurry of phone calls received by the Jasper County Sheriff's Office just before 7 in the morning. The

The calls were coming in from the Remington Days Inn on US 24 out by I-65. Several guests at the hotel were trying to check out, but the door to the registration office was locked and no employees were around.

Within minutes, another call came in from 20 miles away. This one was placed to the Indiana State Police. The caller was a school bus driver who said that while he was driving on County Road 150, he observed a nude body lying on the roadside. Because there were two different agencies receiving these calls, the dots weren't connected right away.

Shortly before 8 a.m., the general manager of the Remington Days Inn arrived to find sheriff's deputies and customers waiting outside the locked motel lobby, along with the morning shift employee who didn't have keys to the building. When the manager and deputies gained entry, they found the cash drawer had been pried open and was missing about $250.

Inside the side office, an alarm clock set for 5 a.m. was going off and they found night shift employee Jeanne Gilbert's purse, school books and papers and work keys on the desk. She was missing.

And around the same time, Indiana State Police arrived at the scene of where the body had been found. And it was Gianne Gilbert, nude and face down in a frozen ditch off the side of the road, 20 miles from the days in from which she had been abducted while working.

Though she was nude, she still had shoes and socks on her feet. She had been shot three times in the shoulder, in the head, and in the heart, and unceremoniously dumped onto the side of the road by a brazen killer who had made no attempt to hide the body. The investigators suspected that the killer was looking for a place as the sun began rising and people began hitting the road, so he was running out of time.

She'd been shot three times with a .22 caliber gun and abrasions and injuries to her body were consistent with her having been pulled out of a truck or van. Her days in work uniform was never found, leaving some to speculate it may have been kept by her killer as a souvenir. It wasn't until later that day that the two pieces were put together and the body was officially identified as Jeanne Gilbert.

But soon, investigators learned that there was even more pieces to this puzzle. That same night, only two hours earlier, in the town of Merrillville, 50 miles away, at another Days Inn, the motel's 24-year-old night auditor, Petty Gill, had failed to make her scheduled 5 a.m. phone call to her general manager, who she had talked to shortly after midnight.

It was standard procedure for Peggy to call her GM. So when Betty, the GM, woke up and realized she hadn't received the phone call, she tried to get in touch with Peggy, but she wasn't able to. And it was because Peggy was such a conscientious, responsible employee for whom this totally was out of character that Betty knew something was wrong and called the Merrillville police right away to report her missing.

Police arrived at the Days Inn in Merrillville, and when they got there, they found customers standing outside complaining that no one was at the front desk. When the police went inside, they looked for Peggy, and she was nowhere to be found. Her keys and her purse were still behind the front desk, and they initially thought she was probably somewhere else on the property, as it was a very large motel with several wings. But by 6.30 a.m., Peggy still hadn't returned, so police began searching the motel. They

They found that the still cash drawer had been pried open with tremendous force and the manager confirmed that close to $200 was missing. So basically all the circumstances here were identical to what was unfolding 50 miles away at the Days Inn in Remington.

The police began spreading out and searching the motel. They entered a vacant wing on the second floor of the building, and at the far end of the hall near the fire exit, they found the nude body of Peggy Gill.

She'd been sexually assaulted and shot twice in the head, execution style, behind her left ear. Her killer had taken her to the farthest part of the motel from the main office where she was first confronted by him. Her days in uniform was neatly folded beside her body. The front office was dusted for fingerprints, which didn't lead to any matches in any of the databases.

Hotel guest lists were examined as were employee lists. All of these were dead ends. Soon, the two days in murders would be linked to the same .22 caliber handgun and the DNA recovered from both victims matched the same individual. And that DNA also matched a 1990 attack on a days in night auditor in Columbus, Indiana. That

That woman had been robbed and raped, but she was not killed. And she later provided a composite sketch of her attacker who had a distinctive lazy eye.

Decades would then pass and this DNA profile would then be linked to the 1987 rape and murder of Vicki Heath, who was the night clerk for a Super 8 motel in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. So they changed from the Super 8 to the Days Inn. It was also linked to another rape in 1991 and four similar cases all along I-65.

Now, based on the survivor's accounts, his MO was apparently to enter a motel, scope it out and engage with his intended victim. Initially in friendly chat, presenting himself as a truck driver looking for an early morning meal. He'd leave and then return to suddenly overpower and attack the victim, prying open the cash registers and then sexually assaulting the victims in the back office.

And in the cases where the victims died, he would then move them to a separate location and execute them. The case remained cold for three decades. And then in 2022, the DNA profile was uploaded into a genealogical database and the killer was eventually identified as a man who had died in Iowa back in 2013 at the age of 68.

His name was Harry Edward Greenwall, and like many suspects in cold cases who are identified with forensic genealogy, he died without ever facing any kind of justice. He died a free man. Although he did have a criminal record for domestic violence and violating a restraining order, and both these charges were filed in 1989, around the same time that he killed Peggy Gill and Jeanne Gilbert.

He also had served time in prison for robbery and he escaped twice during that sentence. After being released for much of the rest of his life, he worked as a railroad worker, mostly for the Canadian Pacific Railway. And after he retired, his neighbors in the small town where he lived, according to Wikipedia, described him as, quote, a kind and charismatic man noted for his generosity.

His obituary reads, As an employee of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, providing public safety for 30 years, he retired in February 2010.

Harry enjoyed organic gardening, selling his organic produce at the local farmer's market, traveling, reading, wordsmithing, avid college sports fan, and selecting winning thoroughbred horses. And to that list, robbery, rape, and murder. We must add, it pisses me off that people can die without serving time for these crimes and then be remembered like that.

Now, the next case really gets under my skin in a special way. It's creepy for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is that it's an unsolved disappearance. Someone who was taken while working their job. Now, the Imperial Gas Station in Harrisonburg, Virginia, was located on an isolated stretch of Route 11 about a mile south of James Madison University.

Fun fact, I actually competed against the James Madison University dance team in college. Now, in 1982, four of the women who worked there were sisters, including Debbie Parnell, who managed the station, and Kelly Bergdove. Now, Debbie and Kelly often worked what was known as the third shift or the night shift, but rarely together. And this particular gas station had been recently plagued by a problem.

Obscene phone calls. These phone calls most often came in at night when the women were working the third shift alone. I'm working the third shift at the Imperial Gas Station. I just had an obscene phone call. And this guy came in earlier and he was kind of dressed improperly, but I kind of ignored him. I think it was that guy because he just drove to the parking lot a few seconds before I got the call. Could you have somebody kind of keep an eye out on me?

And phone calls weren't all. Sometimes they'd get male customers in the store who would make them uncomfortable, uncomfortable especially to be working alone. But on the night of June 18th, 1982, something about one of these unseemingly male customers made Kelly nervous, nervous enough to call the police not once but twice.

The first call was placed at 2.27 a.m. And then just two minutes later, she called back into police dispatch a second time. This time she sounded nervous. The man had returned to the gas station, she said, and he was calling her from a pay phone just outside saying very obscene things. He was driving a silver Ford, she said.

Then there was a shuffling sound and the sound of the phone snapping, and then the line went dead. Police arrived at the gas station within two minutes of Kelly placing that second call. But when they got there, they found the station empty and unattended. Kelly's purse and keys were behind the counter where she normally keep them. And on top of the counter was the book she'd been reading, her cigarettes, and an ashtray holding a recently smoked cigarette that had burned down to its filter.

There were no signs of any struggle, no signs of robbery. It was as though she just vanished and it had all happened while on phone with the police. Okay, you guys, let me guess. Your medicine cabinet is crammed with stuff that doesn't work. You still aren't sleeping. You still hurt and you're still stressed out.

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Police believe the abductor pulled up to the door, got out and forced Kelly into his car before driving off. It was estimated that the crime possibly took about 15 seconds altogether. It was believed that the abductor was probably armed, which is why the abduction was so efficient and took place without a struggle because Kelly was the kind of person who could have fought back if she could have. And, you know, she had the survival instinct enough to make those two phone calls.

If only the police had shown up to the station within two minutes of that first call and not the second. They probably would have arrested the man for indecent exposure and harassment before he had the opportunity to take Kelly. Also, police initially believed that Kelly had been taken in her own car.

Then they then called Kelly's home, which she shared with her husband of five years named Dale and her four-year-old daughter. Dale picked up the phone and after talking to police, he told them that he'd actually dropped Kelly at the store with his own vehicle around 10 p.m. and stuck around and kept his wife company for about an hour as she began her shift. So at this point, which was over an hour after they first got to the station, they realized they should be looking for something resembling a silver Ford.

By this time, that silver Ford was probably long gone as it had an hour's head start and

Dale Dove, that's her husband, who was a construction worker, got into his truck and sped down to the store. After arriving and talking to police, Dale got back into his truck and drove up and down the darkened tree-lined streets in the area looking for any sign of his wife. And though there were none, he wasn't about to give up. He took the next two weeks off from work and spent all day, every day, driving around and looking for his wife.

looking for silver Fords, gray Fords, and any other vehicle that might remotely fit that description that Kelly had given that night.

Dale and Kelly's other family rented a four-wheel drive and went searching in the mountains. Everyone knew that the more time that passed without a trace of Kelly, the less likely it would be that she would be found alive. The police briefly considered that maybe Kelly disappeared because she wanted to, but it just didn't make sense because of both the circumstances of her disappearance and how close she was with her family, her husband, and her four-year-old daughter.

So her husband had to come to terms with the fact that the odds were not in his missing wife's favor, and he was up in the mountains basically looking for her remains. The police grew to believe that Kelly was dead and probably buried somewhere within a 50-mile radius. Meanwhile, Harrisonburg police detectives had contacted employees at nearby establishments.

There weren't many, and this was a desolate stretch of road, but there was a nearby Hoppin convenience store. And the man working there that night, the night of Kelly's disappearance reported that a man driving a two-tone silver car cruised slowly by the convenience store about three times that night around 2 a.m. Shortly before Kelly first called the police, he told investigators that the same man had exposed himself to a female worker at the convenience store just two weeks earlier.

And that car was the same color as the car Kelly had described in her phone call. The employee described the man as about 20 to 25 years old, thin, around 5 feet 10 inches tall, with 30 shoulder length blonde hair, which is a description that matched half the male student body at the nearby James Madison University.

The worker helped police create a composite sketch. Both the police and Kelly's family embarked on separate intensive searches for matching men with matching vehicles. A $1,000 reward was posted by an anonymous citizen.

A month passed. After a flyer featuring Kelly's picture and the composite of her likely abductor was mass distributed and failed to generate any viable leads, investigators grew increasingly desperate. So much so that they consulted with a psychic. And despite multiple area searches and the involvement of the FBI, investigators continued coming up empty handed.

By January of next year, the case file was 86 pages and counting. And remember all those obscene phone calls that the Imperial gas station had been getting before Kelly's abduction? Well, after her disappearance, they stopped. And the identity of the caller, also probably Kelly's abductor, was as mysterious as Kelly's whereabouts. Hers was the first abduction the Harrisonburg police had ever investigated where they didn't find or recover the victim.

and the most challenging case these investigators had ever worked on. And unfortunately, it has never been solved. In 1989, Kelly Berg Dove was declared legally dead. Her parents settled into the belief that Kelly's kidnapper was a man that she'd gone to high school with, who had a criminal record related to indecent exposure incidents and obscene telephone calls.

However, investigators disagree with the family and believe that her abduction was a random crime of opportunity, a crime that happened while on the phone with police.

They believe this because it's likely he had been cruising the area that night and had exposed himself to an employee at the Hopin convenience store on a previous occasion. So it sounds as though this guy was working himself up to it, waiting for the right mood and moment to escalate from indecent exposure and obscene phone calls to what was likely a murder.

The case was reopened in 2020, and then just last year, the Harrisonburg police announced that they narrowed the case down from four suspects to just one suspect, but they wouldn't name the suspect. But they did reveal that they were having forensics labs assess the evidence for anything that may be worth testing. It's hard to imagine Kelly's case ever being solved, but this does sound promising and may be cause for cautious optimism.

And finally, for the last case we're discussing in today's episode, it was 1982 when Lynn Burdick, who was an 18-year-old senior at McCann Vocational Technical High School in North Adams, Massachusetts, came upon tragedy. Lynn was a quiet girl, polite, a rule follower. Some described her as a homebody. When she wasn't at school, she was taking care of her chronically ill mother, and she also volunteered for charities that provided aid to the disabled.

After graduation, she planned on hanging back for a while and staying at home, continuing to take care of her mother while saving up for college.

She had a part-time job as a clerk at the Barefoot Peddler Country Store, which was a convenience store her cousin owned, located in Florida. Not the state, but the town of Florida, a mountain town just south of the Vermont border. The Barefoot Peddler was convenient for Lynn because it was just 300 yards away from the house where she lived with her parents. Lynn worked at the store with her best friend Carol, this is a pseudonym, and Carol usually worked the night shift with Lynn, who'd worked there for three years.

On the night of April 17th, 1982, Carol couldn't come in, so Lynn found herself working alone, which is the common denominator in all of this episode's stories, right? With the sole exception of the two bridal shop employees killed by the I-70 killer. In every other crime we've touched on today, the employee was working alone.

Lynn's cousin, who owned the store, actually didn't like Lynn working there alone, so on this evening, she phoned the store to check in on Lynn. The cousin was taking care of her sick child, so she couldn't make it over to the store. But she got in touch with Lynn at around 8 o'clock, an hour before closing, and Lynn told her cousin that it was a slow night. She speculated that it was probably because of the rainy weather.

She went on to talk to her cousin for about 10 minutes, and then there was the sound of the shop bell, which the cousin recognized meant a customer had entered the store. I'll call you back after I close, Lynn told her cousin, but she never did. At 8.30 p.m., half an hour before closing, Lynn's mother called the store and got no answer.

Ten minutes later, a customer entered and found the front door ajar, the cash register ransacked, and the store unattended with no sign of an employee.

This customer knew Lynn's family and called them to let them know that the store was empty and Lynn was nowhere to be seen. They then called the police. When the police arrived, they found a half-finished cola and an open book on the counter. $187 was missing from the cash register and Lynn's jacket and purse was missing. There was no sign of a struggle. Investigators were completely stumped, but

But then they heard about an incident that occurred on the Williams College campus about 13 miles away, a little over an hour before Lynn was last heard from. A woman was walking on campus when suddenly a man pulled her into a driveway, blocking her path and tried to force her into his car. She fought him off, bit his fingers and fled. And the man then drove away.

Once a description of this vehicle, a dark Ford sedan, circulated through local law enforcement, one law enforcement officer reported that he thought he'd seen this vehicle on Route 2 driving towards Florida, heading in the direction of the barefoot peddler where Lynn worked, which was also on Route 2. But because the car did not arouse any suspicion at the time the police officer saw it, he had no reason to take down its license plate.

The woman who escaped his abduction attempt, meanwhile, gave police a description of the man and helped them in creating a composite sketch. In the weeks that followed, police and about 125 volunteers combed through the woods and roadsides with all-terrain vehicles and a pair of helicopters did aerial sweeps looking for any trace of missing Lynn. In 1995, 13

years after the disappearance, Lynn's dad received an anonymous letter sent from the Boston area. The author of the letter wrote that Lynn had been abducted and killed by a man who lived in North Adams. The author, while not naming himself, named the suspect. And although the man was thoroughly questioned and investigated, no evidence tying him to Lynn's disappearance has ever been found.

The only thing linking the suspect to Lynn is the anonymous letter whose author police would really like to identify.

It's sad and it's frustrating that of the four stories we covered on this episode, three remain unsolved. And while we may one day learn the identity of the I-70 killer, I totally believe this is possible. It's pretty unlikely we will ever learn the fates or whereabouts of Kelly Dove and Lynn Burdick, nor the identities of the men who abducted them. I'd love to be wrong about this.

If there's anything illustrated by the cases we've covered in these two episodes, it's that there's always some level of risk when you're alone in a place where you might be alone with a stranger. And that's it for this week, bingers. Join me again next Wednesday as we unbox a brand new theme. And hey, stay safe at work. See you next time.