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Lydia: Correct. While Bristal and I can both speak about what we ourselves witnessed, we can only surmise about what went down in Henley thirty years ago.

Bristal: But our surmises are totally right.

Lydia: We’ll start with Denise Halverson, a name that everyone in Henley—and now, most of the nation—knows. Denise was a foster child with a tough background, who came here with her fists drawn and her back up, ready to face what her past had taught her to prepare for. But Paul and Erin Hendrix offered her a real home—something she’d never known and didn’t know how to respond to.

Bristal: Sometime on June 11, 1994, Denise ran away from home, climbing out of her bedroom window and meeting up with my uncle Dover Jamison.

Lydia: And my dad, Brent Chass, at the Sweet Corn Festival.

Bristal: We don’t have to say allegedly about that part because we have photographic evidence.

Lydia: Dover and Denise went to Randall Boggs’s house, and Dover beat Boggs until he gave up the location of his often-bragged-about family treasure—which, as Bristal revealed in her earlier episode, he believed to be an 1864 Indian Princess penny. Once the pair had it, Dover shot Boggs in the back of the head.

Bristal: Allegedly. And I’m not just saying that because he’s my uncle. We don’t want to get sued.

Lydia: At this point, Denise panicked, and—frightened that his partner in crime might give him away—Dover offered the girl a joint that he had laced with rat poison. Aware that something was wrong, but too late to save herself, Denise ran out of the trailer and into the cornfields surrounding Randall Boggs’s trailer. It was Dover’s turn to panic.

Bristal: He called Lydia’s dad, who he believed owed him for taking his place behind the driver’s wheel after a car crash. Brent Chass complied and drove out to Far Cry Road, unaware of what he was looking for—until a bloodied girl ran into the road, choking on her own breath, and foaming blood from her mouth and nose.

Lydia: We don’t need to linger on the gory details—

Bristal: Brent Chass smothered her while Dover Jamison held her wrists, and the two buried her in a shallow grave in a copse of birches. Allegedly.

Lydia: Where she would remain for thirty years, a forgotten footnote to the infamous long stretch of bad days in Henley, Ohio.

Bristal: Until Lydia spotted a discrepancy in the number of missing people in the reporting from the Hometown Henley Headlines, and ran that shit down.

Lydia: We’ll be covering the breakdown of our research and how we put together the pieces in future episodes.

Bristal: But all you people who friended Denise Chivington on Facebook might want to unfriend her, real fast. It’s actually Lydia’s dad. Do I have to say allegedly after that one?

Lydia: I’m not sure.

Bristal: My uncle called her dad from prison after we went to visit him for an interview about the tornado and let Brent know that we were onto them.

Lydia: And the fake Facebook profile worked. I stopped looking for Denise and started working on the flash flood episode for this podcast—which will be airing at a later date.

Bristal: We’ve kind of had a lot going on.

Lydia: It was through a conversation with Linda Chance, the Markham County dog warden, and a misprinted neuter-and-spay flyer that cracked everything wide open.

Bristal: Lydia’s big on details—and she promises there will be more later—but mostly what it boils down to is her dad might be smart, but he doesn’t really know how to use Facebook and she caught his ass in the cookie jar.

Lydia: It’s “caught him with his hand in the cookie jar.” Or you could use “caught him red-handed.”

Bristal: She caught his red ass in the cookie jar.

Lydia: Oh, boy. Okay—regardless, Bristal and I were able to deduce where Denise was buried and went to discover for ourselves if we were right.

Bristal: But her dad was onto us, and we ended up in a real knockdown drag-out.

Lydia: Well, Bristal and my dad did. I mostly just laid in the mud after you broke my fingers.

Bristal: That was an accident. Also—toughen up.

Lydia: A struggle ensued. I ended up holding the gun and ultimately had to choose between the two.

Bristal: And Lydia shot her dad. Patches available on Etsy.