WEBVTT
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Over sixteen years have passed since a ten year old
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girl walked four blocks through a quiet logging town and
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never came home. Sixteen loss years of tips that went nowhere.
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Long before hunters stumbled across the fractured skull of Lindsey
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Baum in the Mountains. The case was characterized by frustration
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as search warrants and polygraphs ultimately became dead ends.
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Hi Cassie, Hi, Caitlin.
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High creepy people, Oh hello hellou. This is PNW Holns
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and Homicides where we chat about true crime, the paranormal,
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and all things spooky in the Pacific Northwest.
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Or the p and W if you're nasty, yees.
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We also do a little Taroor reading at the end
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of every episode for a little bit of deeper insight
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into our topic. PNW Haunts and Homicides is produced independently.
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If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, leave a review,
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and share with a fellow true crime listener.
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McCleary.
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Washington is a small mill town founded as a logging
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camp in Gray's Harbor County, with less than two thousand residents.
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Hey, we know about Gray's Harbor.
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Grays Harbor, with its tiny grid of two dozen streets
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talked amongst vast forests. It's a pretty typical rural community.
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But back in the days of Prohibition, McCleary had a
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reputation for making high quality moonshine whiskey. These days, however,
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with a population so small where one company, the Simpson
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Door Plan, employs over two hundred of its residents, it's
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truly the type of quiet small town where almost everyone
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knows each other. Like ten percent of the population works
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at this single company.
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Wow. Kind of crazy. Yeah.
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In two thousand and nine, Melissa Baum and her two children,
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Joshua and Lindsay, had recently relocated from Tennessee after Melissa's divorce,
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Hoping for a fresh start. Melissa thought McCleary felt like
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a nice, quiet, safe town. Lindsay was a mama's girl
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who hated being out past dark. I'm so precious, a
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girl who'd scribble stories on napkins and dream of filling
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her own bookshelves one day. She loved Harry Potter and
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Twilight in particular. Hell yeah, I know, just a girl
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after our own heart.
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Seriously.
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That summer, the family began to settle in, make new
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friends and plans for the fall and the rest of
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their future. On June twenty sixth, Lindsay spent the afternoon
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at a friends school, swimming and talking about what middle
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school would be like in the fall. She had just
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finished fifth grade and her eleventh birthday was eleven days away.
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Oh spooky, I know there's something about it being her
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eleventh birthday and that it was eleven days away. Ye,
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kind of gives you the chili willies. That evening, Lindsay
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asked if she could sleep over. The girls weren't ready
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for the day to end.
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So cute.
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It's like that like late June, Like it's right before
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the fourth of July. It's like right when like the
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summer weather gets good and you're just having so much fun.
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How yeah, and you've gone yeah, well yeah, June twenty
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six It would be pretty much in any district, I think,
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unless you go to year round schoolw ooh. Even though
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it was a summer Friday night, the answer was no oh.
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Because she and her brother Joshua had argued earlier, he'd
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turned back home, so she set out on the ten
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minute walk home alone, without money, a change of clothes,
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or even her cell phone, which had been accidentally left
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on its charger at home, which is kind of crazy
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because I think it's pretty normal these days for kids
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to have phones. I think, but I'm like, wow, she's
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not even eleven yet and she has a phone.
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Yeah, Like that's wild.
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To me, just because I'm like, I don't think I
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got a phone until I was like almost fourteen. And
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even then it was like like the equivalent of like
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giving a kid a flip phone. Now, yeah, it's one
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of those Nokia like touchpad bed Bully's.
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Mine was definitely a flip phone. I was like, yeah,
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I feel like I was sixteen. I don't know, I
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could have been fifteen.
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Yeah, so cool.
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She was last seen around nine to fifteen pm by
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a neighbor walking along Maple Street between fifth and sixth Street.
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When Lindsay didn't come home, Melissa called her friend's house.
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The mother said she hadn't seen Lindsay in over an hour.
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Oh.
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Melissa called nine one one, stating her daughter was not
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the kind of kid who wandered off. She would have
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hurried home as the sun was going down to avoid
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being alone in the dark in a place where she
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was only just getting her bearings. I can't even imagine
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for a kid that already is afraid of the dark.
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And you know it's still like a new.
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Town to you.
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Yeah, they hadn't been living there very long.
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I have to walk home without your phone. Yeah.
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In the days before she vanished, Lindsay told her mother
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she believed a man in a white car had been
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following her.
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Well, shit, that's not good. No, And the night.
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Before she disappeared, she told her mom she had a
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feeling something bad was going to happen to her. These
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details suggest she may have been watched or targeted in
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the days prior to her disappearance. Lindsay's disappearance was taken
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seriously from the start. From the beginning, her mother, Melissa,
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was certain that her daughter had not wandered off or
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run away. By Saturday afternoon, officials agreed. Sheriff Rick Scott
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stated this young girl didn't simply run off on her own.
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There was no evidence to support that. On Sunday, the
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FBI's Seattle Field office arrived and began working the case.
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Soon dozens of agents were assisting, along with hundreds of
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police officers and searchers. Which was like, pretty freaking quick
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your kid to go missing Friday night and the FBI
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is on the scene by Sunday. I mean, that's got
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to make you at least feel good that they're doing
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everything that they can. In the months that followed, Lindsay's
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case went national. Her photo appeared on the cover of
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People magazine in twenty ten.
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Wow. I didn't know they did stuff like that.
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I you know, People magazine, honestly, will it can be
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anything that ends up making the.
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Cover anyone who's a person, I mean, yeah, pretty much. Yeah.
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In the aftermath of Lindsay's disappearance, scrutiny fell on the
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family too, of course. Yeah, I mean it's a sad reality.
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The weight of it eventually forced Melissa and Joshua to
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leave McCleary entirely, moving to a nearby town to escape
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what it become unbearable. Years later, Melissa would reflect on
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what that cost them. I just kind of died inside.
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It was as if I was in a coma, just numb.
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It destroyed us, especially Joshua. And he didn't just lose
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his sister, he lost the mom he knew.
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That is just so sad hard.
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I mean, it's got to be so so hard. I mean,
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the heartbreak of having a missing child and then trying
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to figure out how you function as a mom to
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your remaining child. I don't know how you do that,
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I really don't.
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I'm sure they both have like the survivor's guilt going on,
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because he'd gotten an argument with her and left early
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or whatever had happened.
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And so they were actually both supposed to be going
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to this friend's house and hanging out at the pool
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that day, but they got in a fight as they
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were leaving the house, and so Josh turned back. Oh
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so he never even went to the friend's house. He
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basically just turned back and was like, fuck it, I'm
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going to stay home.
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You know, maybe in.
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Slightly less colorful language, but forget it.
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I'm going home. Forget you, forget you.
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In May twenty ten, the Sheriff's Office released surveillance footage
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from a Shell gas station showing a white truck and
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a man who entered the store on the night of
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Lindsay's disappearance. The man had previously told investigators he was
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not in McCleary that evening. The footage contradicted that account.
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Investigators identified and interviewed him, as well as two sisters
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from the McCleary area who were briefly seen speaking with
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him in the video, but no arrests or charges have
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ever resulted from those interviews. None of those people are
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super clearly identified in the source material that I was
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looking at. That's always interesting because and I'm about to
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get into it, but there are quite a lot of
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very specifically named people related to the case that I
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will talk about. And it's like, so, why are we
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naming some people and not others? It's kind of interesting
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to me. Huh, yeah, I don't know. I think in
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a lot of cases it's just people are able to
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determine the names. It's not necessarily that, like the police
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have released specific names. But that's always interesting to me.
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In a small town like this, I could see where
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it's like people are like, uh, yeah, no, we know
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who that was because we all saw him there. Yeah,
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so we know exactly who you're talking about. Like anyway,
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over the years, more than forty individuals drew the attention
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of investigators, more than twenty search warrants were executed, and
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nearly forty polygraph tests were administered.
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I feel like that's a lot. Seems like a lot, right,
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I don't know the standard, but ye, for a small town.
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I guess it's seems like a lot.
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Seems like a lot. Yeah, like half the town is
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being used a murder.
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Basically, and still no arrest. Of those forty individuals. A
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few surfaced repeatedly, individuals whose connection to that night or
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to McCleary itself kept investigators coming back. None have been charged,
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and each maintains their innocence, and what follows is simply
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what the public record shows. Private investigator Rose Winquist has
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worked with Lindsay's case for nearly a decade. Her conclusion
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is pointed, I think this person was and still is
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a local. The person either knew Lindsay or was familiar
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with her in some way. This person was sort of
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profiling her. She believes the perpetrator was likely a male
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in his twenties at the time, someone who had been
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watching Lindsay, who knew her habits, and who coaxed her
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into a vehicle.
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It's interesting to me that you would do that in
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like your small town that you live in.
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Right, You're like, there's only so many people that they
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can point to. You're not worried that just statistically your
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name might come up. Everybody knows everybody.
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And I feel like everybody's watching always. Huh. Yeah, not
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that you shouldn't like hurt people anywhere.
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But well, right, but it just seems like particularly unwise. First,
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there was an unnamed forty seven year old man who
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had provided quote inconsistent statements to investigators, just pretty much
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the number one way of getting on their radar. His
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home was searched in October two thousand and nine, just
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months after Lindsay disappeared, but didn't result in an arrest
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or us knowing exactly who he was.
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Damn it. Yeah, yeah, we loss he's innocent.
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Yeah, I mean, and maybe they figured that whatever connection
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they initially thought existed was so tenuous that like it
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wasn't wise to publicly out this person, because you know
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how that can go. I mean, especially in a small town.
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It's like that person can just become completely ostracized, and
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it's like the police like talked to them once and
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decided they weren't even a good potential suspect. And now
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it's like you're ruining their life for nothing. Yeah, So
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I don't know, it's so hard, I know. Next there
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was Tim Hartman, a local jeweler and volunteer firefighter. In
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twenty eleven investigators searched his home, but it was until
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February twenty twelve that the results of the search were
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publicly released, and though Hartman was listed as a person
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of interest, he was also never arrested or charged. Hartman's shop,
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Hartman's Jewelry and Repair, on Fourth Street, is on the
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route that Lindsay would have taken to get back home
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the night she disappeared. He initially told police he was
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not in McCleary at the time, but surveillance video placed
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him at a convenience store at nine to nineteen pm,
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four minutes after Lindsay was last seen.
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Hmm, why would you say you're not there if you're there.
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It's possible that like the timeline for him just was
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a little bit like I yeah, because actually so he'd
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claimed he'd been at a class in Belfair that ended
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at nine pm, but the FBI determined that the class
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actually ended at eight fifteen. So you're talking about like
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a difference of like forty five minutes. Maybe this maybe
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the class was scheduled to go until nine and it
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ended early, and like, I don't know, it does kind
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of obviously it raises suspicion because that's I mean, it
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puts him literally right there, smacked up.
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You know. Yeah, it's just weird. It is. It's weird.
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It may mean nothing, you know, could be correlation, not causation.
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But the October twenty eleven search of Hartman's home, car,