The Sunday Read: ‘Podcasters Took Up Her Sister’s Murder Investigation. Then They Turned on Her’

[0] True crime is as old as storytelling.

[1] The cultural obsession, it's nothing new.

[2] One thing that true crime kind of excels at, though, is it adapts to new technology and media formats really well.

[3] From the printing press to podcasts and Facebook.

[4] And with this, we've seen the development of what some people call the true crime industrial complex.

[5] It's a huge business, and it can also be an emotional, minefield for victims' families.

[6] My name's Sarah Boreen, and I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and I used to live in Lubbock, Texas, where this week's Sunday read takes place.

[7] It's a piece I wrote for the magazine about a woman named Liz Flat, whose sister, Deborah Sue Williamson, or Debbie, was murdered almost 50 years ago, when Debbie was 18, and Liz was just eight.

[8] My story follows Liz's efforts to solve her sister's murder and how in the process she became a target of some of the very people who also wanted to see her sister's murder solved.

[9] So the trouble for Liz begins in 2021.

[10] Decades had passed since her sister's killing.

[11] From Liz's perspective, the police weren't really making any progress on the case, and Liz had already tried a bunch of other avenues, appearing on podcasts, talking to journalists, working with a nonprofit that focused on cold cases.

[12] She was even part of a true crime documentary on Netflix.

[13] Increasingly desperate, she finds herself at CrimeCon, which is the biggest true crime conference in the United States, possibly even in the world.

[14] And there she meets these two independent investigators slash podcasters.

[15] One is also a journalist, and the other, an adjunct professor at a university.

[16] They're interested in helping Liz solve her sister's case with crowdsourcing.

[17] It's not a new idea, crowdsourcing, but it's relatively new to the world of true crime.

[18] The idea is this.

[19] If you get a group of people together who are interested in solving a crime, you'll have more manpower and expertise that could help you find clues and potentially identify suspects.

[20] Liz agrees to let the investigators take on her sister's case.

[21] and they set up a Facebook page dedicated to building a community of people who would help crowdsource the case.

[22] But soon, it all goes completely south.

[23] First, Liz and the investigators argue over sensitive documents related to her sister's murder.

[24] And then Liz herself becomes part of the gossip of the crowdsourcing community.

[25] It snowballs into a deeper disagreement over a question that I think is central to this story.

[26] Are there times when our collective desire to solve the mystery or to catch the criminal actually does more harm than good?

[27] So here's my article, read by Samantha Dez.

[28] Our audio producer today is Adrienne Hurst.

[29] The original music was written and performed by Aaron Esposito.

[30] Liz Flatt drove to Austin mostly out of desperation.

[31] She had tried talking with the police.

[32] She had tried working with a former FBI profiler who, who ran a nonprofit dedicated to solving unsolved murders.

[33] She had been interviewed by journalists and at least one podcaster.

[34] She had been featured on a Netflix documentary series about a man who falsely confessed to hundreds of killings.

[35] Although she didn't know it at the time, Flat was out of crossroads and what she had taken to calling her journey.

[36] A path embarked on after a prayer -born decision five years earlier to try and find who killed her sister, Deborah Sue Williamson, or Debbie, in 1975.

[37] It was now 2021.

[38] Flat was middle -aged and coming out of one of the darkest moments of her life.

[39] Her mother had died, quite suddenly, two years earlier, and the grief from her death almost destroyed Flat.

[40] Her father was gone, too, dead from a heart attack after years of fighting for the police to reinvestigate Debbie's killing, and her older brother, Ricky, who was once a suspect in the murder, took his own life five years before that.

[41] She had come to Austin for a conference, CrimeCon, which formed around the same time that flat began her quest, at a moment now seen as an inflection point in the long history of true crime.

[42] A genre as old as storytelling, but one that adapts quickly to new technologies.

[43] From the printing press, to social media.

[44] The gathering was smaller in 2021 because of the pandemic, but Nancy Grace, Queen of True Crime's TV era, still showed up, as did Dr. Phil.

[45] On podcast row, Flat wandered among booths for cults, crimes, and cabernet, and murderish, for True Crime Garage and Die -A -Log, less a fan of the genre, which she never liked that much, than a scout unassert.

[46] She ran into a podcaster who covered Debbie's story a couple of years before, a man who goes by the name Vincent Strange, and she commiserated with a woman whose mother's murder also remained unsolved.

[47] Then, at another booth, Flat met a woman who would later put her in touch with two investigators who presented at the conference that year, George Jared and Jennifer Buchholz.

[48] They were podcasters, but Jared was also adjourned.

[49] and Bukholtz, an adjunct professor of forensics and criminal justice at the for -profit American Military University.

[50] Their presentation was on another cold case, the murder of Rebecca Gould in 2004, whose killer they claimed to have helped find using a technique that has quickly become a signature of the changing landscape of true crime.

[51] Crowdsourcing.

[52] To crowdsource a crime means to call on the public at large, but especially any experts among us to aid in the search for clues, in considering suspects, in offering theories and possibly in helping with an eventual arrest.

[53] The idea is that the more people involved in seeking justice, the better, and that all of us should have stakes and murders being solved, not only the police or bereaved family members like flat.

[54] Bukholtz and Jared claimed the appropriate was crucial to their success investigating Gould's murder, and now they were looking for another cold case.

[55] Debbie's sounded like the perfect one.

[56] Flat was eight when her sister was killed.

[57] Debbie had just turned 18, and she was Flatt's whole world.

[58] This was August, 1975, and Debbie was newly married, living with her husband, Doug Williamson, in a small brick house with clabbard siding and what was then a rural part of Lubbock, Texas.

[59] That night, a Sunday, was the birthday of Flats' father, and her parents picked up Debbie and took her with them to celebrate at the nearby pizza inn, where Doug was working the dinner shift.

[60] Their family was what we now call a blended one.

[61] Flats' parents had each been married before, and while her father's two children, Paula and Steve, mostly lived in Minnesota with their mother, Flat grew up alongside the three children from her mother's first marriage, half -siblings who felt like full ones, Pam, Debbie, and their older brother, Ricky.

[62] Debbie was the one, though, who became like a surrogate mother.

[63] She was older and kind, but also goofy.

[64] So unlike Flats' stricter, less demonstrative parents, but also unlike Pam, who was embroiled in teenage angst at the time, and Ricky, who was already out of the house, and everyone said, on drugs.

[65] Flat, Debbie, and her parents ate pizza that night, and then dropped Debbie back home around 8 .30.

[66] Flat remembers that she asked to stay over at Debbie's house, something she did a number of times that summer, and that her mom said no. She remembers Debbie getting out of the car, how pretty she was, her blonde hair still in the feathered Farah Fawcett cut she got for her wedding, and then watching her disappear inside.

[67] That night, Doug came home from the Pizza Inn around 1 a .m. to find Debbie dead in the carport, stabbed 17 times.

[68] Hours later, Flatt's father, Bob Lemons, woke her and Pam and told them their sister was gone.

[69] Flat was baptized soon after Debbie's funeral.

[70] Her parents worried that if something happened to her, she wouldn't go to heaven the way everyone assumed Debbie had.

[71] But Flats' fear in the weeks and months that followed was not about heaven or hell.

[72] It was that she was somehow responsible for Debbie's death.

[73] If only she had found a way to stay over that night, she thought, she might have somehow prevented it.

[74] The news of Debbie's killing riveted the Lubbock community in a way that none of the other murders, there were at least 19 in the city alone that year, did.

[75] A reporter who worked at the Lubbock Avalanche Journal and wrote much of the early coverage, Pat Remick, told me that her editor promised to run an article on the front page of the paper every day about Debbie's murder until her killer was found, a commitment he kept for almost three months.

[76] There were articles about a hair sent off for testing, but never the results, about the search for a murder weapon that couldn't be found, about the opinions of a psychic, and eventually about accusations that the police mishandled the crime scene.

[77] There were suspects from the start, but no arrests.

[78] Doug sat for at least two polygraph tests but was never charged.

[79] His alibi of being at work during the murder was hard to contest.

[80] Ricky was also interviewed by the police, But Flats said he had an alibi as well, and she thinks now that he was scrutinized so intensely at the time because of his drug use, not because he ever could have killed his own sister.

[81] Six months after Debbie was found dead outside her house, a reporter named Howard Swindle wrote a long article in the avalanche journal claiming that her killing, and also those of a number of women in the Lubbock area in the 1970s, were the work of the lesbian leader of a devil -worshipping cult.

[82] His article, based on anonymous sources, was interspersed with quotes from what Swindle said was the book of Satan.

[83] The only charges in the murder, however, came nearly ten years later in 1984.

[84] The police called Flats' father and said they had found the man who killed Debbie.

[85] Henry Lee Lucas, often described as a one -eyed drifter in newspapers at the time, had confessed to killing her, along with hundreds of others, mostly women in Texas in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

[86] Local law enforcement agencies and the Texas Rangers largely accepted Lucas's at times outrageous confessions.

[87] But within a couple of years, the Texas Attorney General's office released a report calling a majority of them a hoax and criticizing the police for using Lucas to clear cold cases.

[88] Debbie's murder investigation was reopened, at least on paper, but decades passed without any movement.

[89] It had, as they say in the world of true crime, gone cold.

[90] A journey implies leaving your home, traveling somewhere new and a change in the landscape.

[91] But often also a change in the traveler herself.

[92] When Flats started on her journey in 2016, she was 49 and living with her husband and her mother, Joyce Lemons, in a large suburban house in Fort Worth.

[93] She had three grown children, and her husband, Cliff, had grown children of his own.

[94] She worked as a practice manager at a pediatric clinic and knew very little about the world she was about to enter, which was not only the world of law enforcement and criminal justice, but also the increasingly monetized universe of true crime.

[95] Flatt had been praying when, as she put it, something was put heavy on my heart, telling her to find her sister's killer.

[96] She is not an overly religious person, at least not by her own standards, but she has a knack for paying attention to signs.

[97] From God, she said, but perhaps also from her own intuition.

[98] It's a personality trait she attributes to the early days after her sister's murder.

[99] When, amid the chaos of mourning, she felt herself slipping into the background, watching others, her mother and father in particular, trying to make sense of the sea change.

[100] Flat knew the road ahead would be difficult, and she thought she knew why.

[101] After that prayer -born sign, she spent months practicing ways of feeling less emotionally attached to the subject at hand, which was the reality that Debbie had been killed.

[102] She worried about her mom, who moved in with her the year before after breaking a hip, and about buoying her hopes after decades without answers.

[103] She also worried about herself, specifically about looking at the evidence, including portions of the case file, which her parents obtained in the 1980s and stored in a secret location for years.

[104] It's relatively rare for a family to be given the police file from an unsolved murder, at least if that case is still considered open, which Debbie's was.

[105] Flatt appreciated that, but it didn't make looking through the file any easier.

[106] The first document she read was a report by the officer who arrived at the scene.

[107] Flat read the description of what he found.

[108] Debbie's body, a broken window, an unlocked porch door.

[109] She read the autopsy report detailing each stab wound and the list of collected evidence.

[110] And, though she put it off, she eventually looked at the...

[111] crime scene photos as well.

[112] After Flat had read the entirety of the file, she picked up the phone and began making calls.

[113] She reached out to the Lubbock Police first, and she eventually also talked to Debbie's husband, Doug, now remarried and living in Missouri.

[114] She tracked down a contact for the nonprofit, The Cold Case Foundation, and she gave an interview to the Avalanche Journal.

[115] She talked to Strange, whose podcast.

[116] features unsolved murders and missing person cases in Texas.

[117] And she reached out to Remick, the former Lubbock reporter, as well as to another reporter from Lubbock, Philip Hamilton, whom her parents grew close to during what Flat now calls the Lucas years.

[118] Somewhere in the midst of all those calls, two filmmakers contacted Flatt.

[119] They were working on a documentary series about Henry Lee Lucas, called The Confession Killer.

[120] that would eventually air on Netflix, and they wanted to speak with Joyce about the role she and Bob played in exposing Lucas's hoax, something flat learned about only years after the fact.

[121] They were among the first relatives of a murder victim to publicly doubt Lucas's confessions.

[122] He had said that he raped Debbie, when there were no signs of sexual assault, and that he stabbed her inside the house when all evidence indicated that she would, killed in the carport.

[123] When the police largely ignored their concerns, they began investigating Lucas's confession themselves, traveling across the country to interview Lucas' family members and racking up hours of phone bills, all in an effort to get Debbie's case reopened.

[124] Flat and her mother sat for interviews with the filmmakers in September 2017 in their Fort Worth home.

[125] Joyce is thin and poised in a chair near a curtained window in the clips the documentarians used.

[126] Her voice wavering but clear as she tells the story of her daughter's murder, and almost a decade later, the investigative work she and her husband did to prove that Lucas didn't kill her.

[127] They were mad, she says, that the police thought they would accept a confession that was clearly wrong.

[128] In Flatt's interviews, both at her home and during a subsequent trip to Lubbock, she is pensive and sometimes teary -eyed but similarly resolute.

[129] Her voice growing angry only when she talks about taking over her parents' quest to see Debbie's murder solved, and the resistance she said she had been getting from the Lubbock police.

[130] Flat hoped the exposure of the documentary would force the police's hand.

[131] She wanted her mother to have that hope.

[132] hope too.

[133] But in 2019, while they were still waiting for the documentary to air, Joyce took her own life.

[134] The police later told Flat that they found a copy of Flat's first interview, the one from the Avalanche Journal in 2017, on the bed beside her mother, as if she had been looking at it before she killed herself.

[135] It was the first time Flat's faith in God wavered, but just as was the case when Debbie died, she was mostly angry with herself.

[136] I felt like I had let God down, she said.

[137] During one of several times, we talked about the weight of her mother's sudden death.

[138] On that morning that she took her life, I was being told to stay home.

[139] I didn't listen.

[140] The confession killer came out six months later.

[141] Flat had planned to give a series of interviews after the release, but she sat for only two before realizing she couldn't.

[142] I just didn't have the mental strength, she says.

[143] I tried, but I just wasn't able to hold it together.

[144] The following year was dark.

[145] Another year passed, and Flat and her husband moved out of the house they had shared with her mom.

[146] With the move, Flat finally began to mourn.

[147] It was during that period that she drove to Austin for CrimeCon, and once she was back home, that she talked for the first time to Bukoltz and Jared.

[148] She told them about Debbie's murder and her efforts to identify her killer, and they explained their approach to investigating cold cases, including their use of crowdsourcing techniques.

[149] Flat agreed to share her sister's case file with them, though she said she said She set up some stipulations for how they should manage it, and she and Buchholz agreed to set up a Facebook group dedicated to Debbie's case, where, as an administrator, Buchholz began posting about Debbie and encouraging others to join her and Jared in their investigation.

[150] She uploaded early newspaper coverage of Debbie's killing, from when much of Lubbock was obsessed with solving it, and shared information that hadn't been previously released, a list of evidence collected.

[151] by the police, a map of houses canvassed after the murder, a diagram of the crime scene.

[152] I am so glad her murder case has been resurrected.

[153] A new member wrote in the early weeks of that Facebook group.

[154] It went cold right away and needs investigating.

[155] On the anniversary of Debbie's death in August, Flat returned to Lubbock, and Buchholz and Jared drove in from Colorado and Arkansas to join her.

[156] They stayed a week.

[157] and on one of their first nights in town, Jared told me, he had a long conversation with Flat about what working with him and Buchholz might entail.

[158] I was very honest with her from the beginning, Jared said.

[159] If you can just generate a lot of media attention, it will force the hand of law enforcement.

[160] But here's the side effect of that.

[161] You are going to lose control of what said about this case.

[162] His focus, in that conversation at least, was on using crowdsourcing to bring greater awareness to the crime itself.

[163] But Bukholtz, who declined an interview but did answer some questions via email, said that crowdsourcing also potentially ferries more resources to an investigation and allows those who are hesitant to talk with the police a safer option for sharing what they might know.

[164] Though police tried to dedicate ample time to murder investigations when they happen, she wrote, the power of several people re -investigating all the facts with fresh eyes and different skills cannot be underestimated.

[165] During Bucholts and Jared's trip to Lubbock, much of which was either cataloged on Facebook or recorded for future podcast episodes, they surveyed the house and carport where Debbie was murdered and placed flowers on her grave.

[166] They met with residents interested in the killing, contacted people who knew Debbie and Doug in the 1970s, and sat for an interview with a local news station, whose reporter noted that the duo recently helped uncover a tip that led to an arrest in a cold case in Arkansas, and that they're confident that they could do the same here.

[167] Bukholtz also tagged along on Flats' annual visit, to talk with the police, which left her more hopeful than in the past.

[168] Flat met a new officer, Sergeant Justin Anderson, who she said seemed genuine in his desire to reinvestigate Debbie's case.

[169] Summer slipped into fall, and membership in Debbie's Facebook group continued to rise.

[170] Buchholz posted every few days and shared links to brief articles she wrote about the investigation and to each new episode of her podcast, Break the Case, which was hosted at and sponsored by American Military University, her employer.

[171] She also responded to questions or theories posted by others in the group, no matter how outlandish.

[172] In a self -published book she and Jared later released about Debbie's murder, the two investigators outline a number of social media tactics they use to get others invested and actively participating in their Facebook groups, including, in a previous case, planting a heel, a wrestling term for someone who plays the villain within the group.

[173] Our heels would pose provocative questions at our behest, they write.

[174] This frequently resulted in the person we'd hoped to connect with, sending us a private message expressing their outrage.

[175] In turn, this allowed us to start.

[176] start a dialogue with those people, which was our primary goal.

[177] Information continued to flow.

[178] Another byproduct of Buchholz's efforts was the slow building of community.

[179] As more people began participating in the group, more of them also seemed to take ownership of the task at hand.

[180] Suddenly, it was not only flat who wanted answers in her sister's murder.

[181] There were dozens of others pushing for a resolution.

[182] as well, then hundreds, and eventually, more than a thousand.

[183] In November 2021, five months after the Facebook group was started, Bukholtz announced some movement in the case.

[184] The Lubbock Police had agreed to work with a new cold case unit at the Texas Attorney General's office.

[185] This means more investigators are now on board to find Debbie's killer, and her case has been designated their top priority.

[186] Buchholz posted.

[187] Then, presumably addressing the murderer, she added, You ran for 46 years, but you can no longer hide.

[188] By that point, Flats says she felt that she and Bukholtz had become friends.

[189] They talked regularly, mostly about the investigation, but sometimes, at least in her memory of those conversations, about personal things, Flats' kids or Bukoltz's marriage.

[190] But then, in December, Bukholt started getting testy with her, flat says, and her reading of their relationship.

[191] She wondered if the change had something to do with Bukholtz and Jared's announcement that they would be helping CrimeCon in one of its newest ventures.

[192] The company's online subscription service, CrimeHQ, was starting a series called Cold Case Club, which would stream live and recorded Zoom presentations about murder and investigations, and they wanted a multi -part series on Debbie's case, led by Bucolz and Jared.

[193] Bucolz told me via email that she had hoped participating in the Cold Case Club would bring more attention to Debbie's murder.

[194] In the process of preparing for those Zoom presentations, though, she agreed to share Debbie's case file with a producer with the company.

[195] When Flatt found out, in a conversation with Buchholz less than a week before her own Zoom interview, she was upset.

[196] Their agreement, Flatt told me, had been that Buchholz would not share the file with anyone without her permission, in part because Flat worried that releasing too much information might hurt a potential future arrest.

[197] But Buchholz characterized their arrangement differently.

[198] I did verbally say I would not publicize the file, meaning I would not put it online where anyone and everyone could access it.

[199] She wrote in an email.

[200] I did not agree to never share it with anyone else.

[201] Flat recorded the conversation she and Bukholtz had about the case file in late January 2022.

[202] And listening to it, it seems clear that Bukholt's new flat wouldn't be happy about her sharing the file, but also that she believed it was the right decision.

[203] if they wanted Debbie's case to progress, as she phrases it.

[204] I'm not saying there aren't things you need to share, Flatt says at one point.

[205] I just want to know ahead of time, so I'm okay with it.

[206] You would have said no, Bukholtz responds, and I wouldn't be able to do this for Debbie.

[207] Please understand, we're doing everything that needs to be done to find this killer.

[208] She adds later in that same conversation, That is the goal, correct?

[209] Not controlling everything?

[210] Do you want us to find him or not?

[211] Oh, Jen, Flatt responds.

[212] I feel like you're manipulating this.

[213] And I just need to stop and think without saying something I regret or that's inappropriate or that I'm just acting off emotions.

[214] So I just need to kind of step back for a moment and let's just talk later.

[215] Bukolt says that Flatt needs to trust her.

[216] You said you would trust me, she repeats, almost pleading.

[217] I did trust you, Flat says.

[218] The fallout after that was quick.

[219] Jared wrote Flat a long email explaining how much work he and Buchholz had already put into the case and why she was wrong to be upset.

[220] He asked whether she planned to appear on the upcoming Zoom presentation for the Cold Case Club, or if he and Bukholtz should use their backup plan.

[221] Flat wrote that they should use that plan.

[222] But after trying and failing to set up a time to talk over the disagreement with Bukholtz, Flat changed her mind.

[223] On the day of the scheduled Zoom session, she asked to join after all.

[224] Bucolz and Jared said no. Bucolz told me in an email that they were unsure how Flat would act or what she would say.

[225] The session was titled A Sisters Fight for Answers, and had been advertised as being about Flat's search to find Debbie's killer.

[226] So when Flat learned she wouldn't be participating, she decided to join as an audience member instead.

[227] Bukholtz later claimed that Flat was extremely disruptive in the chat during that hour -long session, a characterization Flat disputes.

[228] There is no available record of the Zoom chat.

[229] When the presentation ended around 8 p .m., Bukholtz logged on to Facebook and removed Flatt as both an administrator and a member of her sister's group.

[230] Flatt said she was shocked when she received the removal email from Facebook, and around that time she began encouraging others, dug and representatives from the Cold Case Foundation, to pull out from their scheduled Zoom interviews as well.

[231] When they agreed, CrimeCon ended the series on Debbie's murder early, citing significant discord between a member of Debbie's family and the two case investigators.

[232] Around that same time, Jared released a new episode of his podcast, Diamond State, Murder Board, with Buchholz as a guest.

[233] The episode was titled Family Matters, and the opening description read, sometimes the closest people to the case are the biggest obstacles to the truth.

[234] Flat was in her backyard with her two dogs when she heard it.

[235] She listened as Jared criticized her actions over the previous weeks, and then as Buchholz agreed that Flat had seriously disrupted their investigation.

[236] In military speak, said Buchholz, who was also a former counterintelligence agent in the army, this is an attempt at sabotage.

[237] What started flat crying, however, was what she heard next.

[238] And here's the thing.

[239] She's not sabotaging you or me, Jared said.

[240] She's sabotaging the case.

[241] Yeah, Bukoltz responded.

[242] Her sister, her murdered sister.

[243] And what goes through my head is, how would Debbie feel about this?

[244] And I don't think she'd be very happy.

[245] A couple of months later, in April, Flatt gave an interview to a Lubbock News station, in which she outlined some seemingly positive developments in Debbie's case, namely that Sergeant Anderson had agreed to send evidence out for advanced DNA testing to a private lab, but also critiques of Jared and Buchholz, including that they had removed her from her sister's Facebook group.

[246] Bukoltz took to the group that same day.

[247] I know this is circulating around, so I'm just going to post it.

[248] She wrote, before linking to Flats' interview, If anyone on this group is in agreement with Liz's point of view on us, please see yourself out of the group right now.

[249] Some members left or were removed, but those who remained seemed to have found the villain they had been searching for.

[250] Flat.

[251] What a miserable person she is.

[252] One of those members wrote in one of dozens.

[253] of posts or comments in that group about Flat.

[254] She wants all focus on her, not solving the murder.

[255] This case, I hope, won't go cold again, but we will see.

[256] If it does go cold again, Bukoltz responded, there's only one person to blame.

[257] Does Liz actually know who the killer is?

[258] Someone else asked.

[259] I thought the same thing.

[260] Another member of the group responded.

[261] Who's she protecting?

[262] Last November, I flew to Dallas to meet with Flat, and a woman named Tiffany Ballard Moore, the sister of Rebecca Gould, whose killer Bucholds and Jared claimed to have helped find.

[263] Vincent Strange, the Texas True Crime podcaster, came as well.

[264] He and Flat have become friends over the years.

[265] She first reached out to him around the same time she and I got in touch in 2017.

[266] I lived in Lubbock around that time.

[267] and had become fascinated by the story of Debbie's murder investigation, both the way it was initially mishandled by the police and the frenzy detention it garnered in subsequent years.

[268] I had been following Flatt's story, checking in with her about once a year for the past five years.

[269] Now we were meeting outside a Panera Brad just off a highway in Denton on a morning blanketed by rain clouds.

[270] Flat arrived in an SUV.

[271] In the back of which she had two tubs, one with a case file, which I had asked to look at, and the other with fake flowers and brushes, for when she visited her mother's grave the following day.

[272] Moore walked toward us while we were talking, in jeans and bright white tennis shoes, her long brown hair slick straight.

[273] She and flat hugged.

[274] It was their first time meeting in person.

[275] They found each other only a few months earlier, soon after they realized how, how much they had in common.

[276] Moore was in her 20s when her sister was killed in 2004.

[277] They had been living together in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where Gould was enrolled in a local community college.

[278] One weekend, Gould drove to nearby Melbourne, and she never returned.

[279] Her body was found a week later on a hillside off a highway in Arkansas.

[280] And although the police had suspects, her case went unsolved for more than 50, years.

[281] What eventually brought wider attention to the murder was a podcast called Hell and Gone, which debuted in 2018 and proposes that Gould's boyfriend may have killed her.

[282] Soon after that, Bukholtz got interested in the mystery too, and she teamed up with Jared, who had covered the murder as a cub reporter in Arkansas.

[283] Both zeroed in eventually on Gould's boyfriend as their primary suspect as well, and And chatter about him was common in the Facebook group Bukholt set up in Gould's name in 2019.

[284] But another occasional target in that group is Moore, who refused to go on air with the Helen Gone host, Catherine Townsend, or later with Bukholtz.

[285] Moore also criticized them and Jared online for casting suspicion on Gould's boyfriend, who was interviewed by the police but never charged.

[286] Members of Bukholtz's Facebook group wrote that Moore didn't actually want to see her sister's murder solved.

[287] They wrote that she had obstructed justice, and at least one of them called her a bag of trash.

[288] People think it's a movie, Moore said, once we all had coffee and pastries and had found a table inside.

[289] I don't think people think logically when they get into those groups.

[290] They think the absolute worst.

[291] Before she met flat, Moore said she rarely talked with others about the Facebook group.

[292] She worried that people wouldn't believe her.

[293] Even after it turned out, she had been right to defend her sister's boyfriend.

[294] In 2020, the police arrested a man named William Miller for Rebecca Gould's murder.

[295] Afterward, Buchholz and Jared and also Townsend claimed that their efforts had helped the police close the case, either by putting pressure on them to investigate or, in the case of Buchholz and Jared, by realizing that Miller was a member of Gould's Facebook group.

[296] But the officer who identified and arrested Miller, special agent Mike McNeil, told me that just isn't true.

[297] He was assigned Gould's case after the former detective on it announced his retirement, he said, and he found Miller through his own process of elimination.

[298] Moore and Flatt found each other two years later.

[299] Soon after, Bukholtz and Jared made that podcast about the difficulties of working with families of victims.

[300] The podcast mentions Moore as well, just not by name.

[301] Flatt said sometimes Moore would call her up and sound at peace.

[302] Miller had pleaded guilty to her sister's murder, and Moore attended his sentencing hearing earlier that fall.

[303] He apologized for what he did.

[304] and is now in prison sentenced to 40 years.

[305] Flat felt as if Moore had everything that she still sought.

[306] Closure, justice, and an end to her search.

[307] But other times, Moore would call Flat distraught, and it was always about something that happened with Buchholz and Jared, who also attended Miller's sentencing hearing and who wrote and posted and released podcasts about it online.

[308] In the Facebook group, they and others still suspected Gould's boyfriend of playing some part in the murder.

[309] Miller was his cousin, even though McNeil has made it clear that the boyfriend had nothing to do with it.

[310] They have continued to criticize more as well, for her appearance on a Dateline episode about Gould more recently, and during Miller's sentencing, for not putting flowers on her sister's grave, as Buchholz and Jared did that day.

[311] The reason she didn't, Moore told us that morning, was because she had taken her younger sister Danielle to the hearing, and Danielle was on her fourth round of chemotherapy at the time and needed to go home and rest.

[312] Danielle died this year.

[313] It's so frustrating, Moore said.

[314] And honestly, that type of stuff is what gets me going and makes me where I'm like, like they're not going to stop, Flatt said, as Moore searched for words.

[315] The two women said they feel as if the stories being spun about them and the crowds that have built up around their sisters won't disappear anytime soon.

[316] Debbie's husband, Doug, would later tell me that he has tried to avoid talking with his adult daughter about Debbie's murder because he supports Flatt, whom he can still remember as an eight -year -old, and his daughter is a member of Debbie's Facebook group and has been impressed by much of Buchholz and Jared's investigation.

[317] Moore's father, from whom she is estranged, supports Buchholz and Jared as well, and details of their strained family dynamics, Moore's parents divorced when she was young, have also been at times part of the chatter on Gould's Facebook group.

[318] I shouldn't care about what people think about me, but I do.

[319] Moore told me in a quiet voice at one point.

[320] I think that's why the things that they say hurt.

[321] On Facebook, meanwhile, Bukholtz and Jared have argued that Moore started the fight by criticizing their investigation publicly, and that flat has been going after them, not the other way around.

[322] Bukoltz has also made the case that no family member can or should control a murder investigation, and that the general public, too, has stakes in a murders being solved.

[323] Flat and Moore talked at the Panera Bread for more than three hours that morning, as it rained off and on.

[324] They traded ideas for how to address their shared problem, including defamation lawsuits and signing contracts with podcasters or private investigators about what information can or cannot be released.

[325] But they also talked about their sisters, who they were and what they were like when they were still a part of this world.

[326] Flatt brought out photos of Debbie, along with letters her parents had written during their search to see her murder solved.

[327] Moore told us about her and ghoul's silly fights over clothes, and mid -sentence, she began to cry.

[328] You've already gone through trauma, and then they put you through more trauma.

[329] More reassured Flatt at one point, after Flatt confessed that sometimes she feels like giving up.

[330] And you shouldn't have to go through that.

[331] Nobody should have to go through anything like that.

[332] I just pray and it's like, God, what am I supposed to do?

[333] Flat said.

[334] What am I supposed to do?

[335] Debbie, talk to me and direct me. What am I supposed to do?

[336] What she eventually did was push the police to test any final evidence in Debbie's case.

[337] And six months after we all met up in Denton, Flatt returned to where this story began, Lubbock, Texas, to witness the exhumation of her sister's remains.

[338] I flew out to join her, and at sunrise on a Wednesday in May, I was at the cemetery where Debbie was buried nearly 50 years earlier.

[339] Flat and her son Matt Bentley picked me up at the funeral home in his white pickup truck.

[340] and we drove together to the grave site.

[341] The plan, she told me earlier, was to unearth Debbie's coffin in search of viable DNA samples, her own, and also potentially, those of whoever killed her.

[342] Debbie's grave was staked off already when we parked amid a line of mostly unmarked police cars at the grass's edge.

[343] We stood along the cemetery lawn, watching a backhoe pull earth from the ground.

[344] Then we waited into the grave, yard toward Debbie's headstone.

[345] Flatt told me she slept restlessly the night before, as much out of concern for what would happen today, was it right to dig up her sister's body, she kept asking herself, would that bring her the answers she sought?

[346] As out of fear about what those from the Facebook group would do or say once they learned that Debbie had been exhumed.

[347] The backhoe shuddered to a stop, and two workers from the funeral home jumped into the grave with shovels to dig out the rest of the earth by hand.

[348] Flat held on to her son's arm and watched them, while her other hand trembled almost imperceptibly.

[349] A couple of weeks earlier, Flat's older sister Paula Chasse, from her father's side of the family, told me that the main hope she had now was not that Debbie's case would one day be solved, a goal that feels less and less realistic, but that Flat would be able to live.

[350] let it go.

[351] Liz has been torn apart, she said.

[352] I feel bad for her, but I wish she could just walk away.

[353] Bentley told me that he urged his mom the night before to accept that she had done what she could for her sister.

[354] He was convinced that she heard him, and that this would be her last attempt to see Debbie's case solved.

[355] It was also, from what I gathered, talking to a forensic anthropologist present at the exhumation, one containing only the slimest chance that any useful evidence would be found.

[356] And weeks later, Flatt would also learn that the answers from the DNA analysis, if they come, could take much longer than she expected, possibly years, though the police say hopefully months.

[357] That morning in Lubbock, though, flat felt that at least something was being done.

[358] She stood in the sun beside Bentley and the dozen or so police officers, including Sergeant Anderson, and a couple of victims' advocates.

[359] And we watched as the funeral homeworkers laid their shovels aside and began to rest Debbie's vault from the ground.

[360] We watched as they hauled that vault onto a tractor bed and drove it to a drafty warehouse nearby, where it was pried open to reveal Debbie's coffin, pale green with emblazoned silver flowers, And then, as that coffin, its latch rusted shut, had to be pride opened as well.

[361] We watched as a forensic specialist placed samples from Debbie's body, her hair, her fingernails, part of a bone, into individually labeled envelopes on a wooden table beside the coffin, spilling rainwater onto a concrete floor.

[362] Then all of us, except for one officer and flat sun, stepped out of the warehouse, to give flat time to say goodbye, once more, to her sister Debbie.

[363] It was a decision flat would later tell me she regretted.

[364] She said goodbye to Debbie at that cemetery when she was eight.

[365] The body at rest in her coffin was no longer her sister.

[366] She knew that.

[367] And facing her remains only showed her how much time had passed.

[368] How long that dirt had been settled.

[369] How impossible return really is.

[370] is.

[371] No matter if this particular mystery is one day solved or not.