January 30, 2023 • 33 mins
Brooke Henson disappears from her home in Travelers Rest, South Carolina. No one can find her. She’s presumed dead. Then, seven years later, police receive a startling tip.
Subscribe to Pushkin+ to hear all of Deep Cover Season 3 right now. Find Pushkin+ on the Deep Cover showpage in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin.fm/plus using this link: bit.ly/3HeCERO.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. This is a story about a young woman who
ran away from home. At least that's how it all started.
I think people think that I had this master plan
and I went out and did it, and like, you know,
like it's not fun, right, You're constantly scared. You have
(00:35):
no support, you have no one to talk to, which
is part of the reason it got so carried away.
Like if I had just talked to somebody, they would
have been like this is crazy. Along the way, there
were plenty of moments where she could have stopped running,
but she didn't. Sort of like I got on a
(00:56):
train track. There was clearly the wrong train track, and
like my train is running away, and at some point
you're not thinking crap, how do we get off this
train track, or just thinking crap, how do I stop
this train from going off the rails? You know, just
kept making a horrible decision after horrible decision after horrible decision,
just trying to keep the train from crashing and killing me.
(01:18):
At that point, we're going to come back to this
woman and go deep into her story, so you'll hear
more about all that, but not just yet, because this
is actually a story about not one, but two young
women who vanished at about the same time. The two
(01:39):
of them were roughly the same age, but in so
many other ways they could not have been more different.
One grew up in rural Montana, where she was raised
in a sheltered, devoutly religious home. She was shy and
kind of a nerd. The other was a kind hearted
free spirit from South Carolina. She partied often and sometimes
(02:01):
hung out with a rough crowd. They both disappeared in
nineteen ninety nine. Their families searched for them but didn't
find many clues, and then improbably their stories collided when
a lone investigator got involved and quickly became obsessed. I
think of a situation as a sweater. So sometimes you
(02:23):
have a loose thread and you pull the thread and
you get a knot. And sometimes you pull a thread
and it just keeps unraveling and you just keep falling
invulnent bulling. This investigator was convinced that the fates of
these two young women, the free spirit and the nerd,
were linked, and that by solving one of their cases
(02:45):
he might also solve the other. Not just that he
suspected that one of them was a master of deception,
a highly trained chameleon who conned her way into the
ivy leagues. He began an investigation that ultimately drew in
the Secret Service, the US Marshals, and the Justice Department.
The media soon got wind of this, Allegations of murder, fraud,
(03:08):
and spaje swirled. Eventually, a nationwide manhunt got underway, all
because of this one investigator and his hunch. Now, given
the gigantic scope of all this, you might think that
our investigator worked for some big city police department or
a fancy federal agency, or maybe even an international outfit
(03:30):
like Interpoll. Nope, he was a small town cop who'd
just become a detective. He didn't have a partner, or
for a while even a computer. But he was doggedly stubborn,
almost perversely. So I just pulled a thread and it
just kept going and going and going to the whole
thing unraveled. I get it. I love pulling on threads.
(03:54):
As a journalist. I've done this so many times, pulled
and pulled until I've lost track of what I was
originally looking for or whether it was worth it. And
sometimes most of the time, in fact, it's not. But
every once in a while there's a set of facts.
It's so irresistibly curious that I just can't let go.
(04:17):
And I suppose it doesn't matter whether you're a journalist,
or a detective or just a nosy neighbor. So many
of us believe that great mysteries lurk in the periphery
of our lives. So when we find an especially curious thread,
we keep pulling because we won't be satisfied until we've
(04:37):
unraveled at all. I'm Jake Albern and this is deep Cover,
Season three, Never Seen Again, Episode one, The Dark Corner.
(05:31):
The detective that I told you about. His name is
John Campbell, and he's just about the friendliest guy I've
ever met. He has whispy brown hair and a boyish grin.
He wears a pair of those wraparound sunglasses that dads
always wear a little league practice. He's also got this
goofy and totally lovable laugh that he breaks into all
(05:51):
the time. So not an old timey lawman. In fact,
one of the first things that he tells me is
that he doesn't care for guns. When I retire, I
can't wait to put this in a drawer. I mean,
this is this is a this is the thing I
banged my elbow on all the time. So it's not
about carrying a gun. I carry gun because we have to.
I'd rather be like Andy Griffith and just be shared
(06:13):
without a gun. I met John Dunnan Traveler's Rest, South Carolina,
where he lives. This, by the way, it was also
the hometown of the free spirited young woman that I
told you about, one of the two that went missing
back in the early two thousands, when our story really starts.
John was the town's loan detective. I asked him what
(06:33):
this was like. He told me that back then this
was truly a sleepy backwater. Traveler's Rest was almost a
dry town. We had one bar and one liquor store,
and the liquor store closed I think at eight or
nine o'clock at night. The bar closed at midnight, and
we rolled up the streets and the only problems we
(06:53):
ever had was at the bar, and so we shut
the bar down two or three times, took their license.
Outside of town, well, that was a different story. The
thickly wooded slopes quickly rose of the peaks of the
Blue Ridge Mountains. The land was steep and craggy. Some
(07:14):
called it the Dark Corner. For generations, it was known
as a place where Mountain folk brewed moonshine and lived
by their own rules Mountain Justice. By the nineteen nineties
that had begun to change. Newcomers were arriving, retirees and
the like, but the Dark Corner remained a place where
(07:35):
it wasn't wise to venture at night or turned down
a road you didn't know. I talked to one local
who told me he once found a great big log
blocking the road with a stack of dog skulls on it,
and then he just knew better turn around. John says
(07:57):
that occasionally the Mountain folks would just show up at
John's office. Here, this roar of a truck would come in,
and people would pile out, and they'd say, we're looking
for the law, you know, And Mountain Justice had fail
and they had to come to into town to find
some law enforcement for the police and Traveler's Rest. The
key was basically to secure the town's perimeter. So I
(08:20):
called Traveler's Rest of the circle of wagons. So we
had seven square miles that was like a circle of
wagons in our little town, and we kept all the
crime out of our little circle out into the county
bushed it out. Wait, so your job was basically just
like make sure that the criminals stayed out of the circle. Yeah,
pretty much. Did you ever like like tell guys like
(08:40):
not in here your other Oh yeah, what did you say?
This is our town out? Take that up the mountains.
John says this strategy it worked. Not much happened in
the way of major crime in Traveler's Rest. But then
one day, something rather sinister happened in this small town,
(09:03):
something that broke the humdrum rhythm of daily life. A
twenty year old girl went missing. Her name was Brooke Henson.
She vanished from within the town's limits, inside the circle
of wagons, and her disappearance would ultimately send John Campbell
on an epic quest. It would become a huge case,
(09:25):
a national case, and John, the small town detective who
hated carrying a gun, would be at the center of
it all. The day before Brooke Henson went missing, John
Campbell says he saw her on the street totally by chance.
(09:45):
It was July of nineteen ninety nine. John wasn't a
detective at the time, he was still just a patrolman
making the rounds. He remembers that day crisply, and he
recounted it to me while we were driving around town
together in his truck. When I saw Brooke. She was
walking down this street here, close to her house, and
(10:09):
she turned around and looked at me right about right here.
It was where I saw her. And so that's her
house where that sign is, it's your driveway. The street
that we're on, where Brooke used to live, is shrouded
in thick, tangled vegetation. The woods thrum with the buzz
of cicadas. We pull up to Brook's old house. This
(10:30):
is the front of the house as you can. You
can't see it. I mean, it's completely over her own.
Was it always this overgrown? The front was grown up,
but it was no You could see the house and everything,
but you can't even tell there's a house in there. Yeah,
I mean it looks like like Radley's house from To
Kill a Mockingbird. It's almost abandoned looking now. John didn't
(10:52):
really know Brooke, but other people who did described her
to me as easygoing, kind, free spirited. She shopped at
thrift stores, wore Doc Martins and flannels. She was a
huge fan of Nirvana. She dropped out of high school
and in the summer of nineteen ninety nine, she was
still living at home with her parents. Now I've gone
(11:15):
through a bunch of accounts of what happened the night
she went missing, including the original police report, which was
basically a statement from Brooke's mom, But there's not a
whole lot that we know for sure. What we do
know is that she disappeared early on the morning of
July fourth. There'd been a party at Brooke's house that night.
(11:35):
Her boyfriend, a guy named Ricky Sewn Shirley, was there,
and apparently the two of them were fighting. According to
the police report. At two forty three am, Brooke told
her mother, quote, I'm getting out of here. Her mom
told her it was too late to wander about. Brooke replied, quote,
(11:56):
I'm not going anywhere. I'm just seeing what he'll do.
I'm messing with Sean. Brooke then left the house. She
set off into the night. She never came home. In
the morning, Brook's mother found a note on her bed.
It was intended for Sean, her boyfriend. It read, I'm
(12:16):
walking follow me if you care. The million dollar question,
of course, is this where did she go? And there
are a lot of theories about this. But the theory
that I heard most was that she was headed to
(12:37):
a nearby store. Apparently Brooke went there from time to
time to get cigarettes. This is the store where she
was headed, by the way, the store right here behind
us gas station. Yeah, to get cigarettes. Like, why would
she go to the store. She would have known the
store was closed because it was like two thirty in
the morning, so that store was not open at that time. Well,
(12:59):
she would have known the store was closed. Also, I
mean those roads, it's it's dark here that night. Yeah,
and especially back then, we rolled the streets up at
nine o'clock and travel's rest. I mean, there was nothing
going on at night in this town. The whole thing
(13:28):
was more than a little mystifying. How does a young
woman vanish off a small town street in the dead
of night en route to a store that's not even open.
Even the note that she left was enigmatic. Follow me
if you care. Brooks's parents are both deceased now, so
(13:49):
I couldn't talk with them. Instead, I had to rely
on what few clues I could glean. Brooke's mom did
file a report with the police the day after she
went missing, but at first the police didn't do much.
Seems like no one did. A few missing posters went up,
that's about it. No one was sounding alarms. I spoke
(14:11):
with Brooks's cousin, Holly Henson about what she remembers from
this time. I was staying out a friend's house in Marietta,
just above Traveler's Drest, and her mom took us to
the gas station and I saw a missing poster with
Brooks picture and name on it. So I told my
dad and brooks family had never told us that she
(14:35):
was missing, but she had just went missing. Kind of odd, right,
This is how she learns about her cousin's disappearance, But
cousin Holly says that her family and Brooks had kind
of grown apart in the years leading up to her disappearance.
Holly's mother told me that she disapproved of brooks parents
(14:55):
of the way that they raised their children, allowing them
to drink and party and come and go as they pleased,
like there were no rules. She did not want that
for her own kids. But when they learned that Brooke
had gone missing, they rushed over. Everyone went cousin Holly,
her sister, Patty, their mom. They wanted to show solidarity
(15:17):
to help if they could. When they showed up, the
scene at Brooks house was somber. We were just all
sitting in the livenary and it was just the whole
thing was just weird. It was quiet, nobody was really
saying anything. That's Brook's other cousin, Patty. She and Holly
both remember the silence. Some of Brooks friends were present,
(15:40):
sitting there mutely. Brooke's mother was on the sofa just crying.
From the way they described it, it was like a
vigil for someone who died. The odd part was that
Brooke had just gone missing. It wasn't all that unusual
for Brooke to just go off and disappear for a
few days, visiting friends or whatever. Here's cousin Holly again.
(16:01):
Brooke was allowed to come and go as she pleased.
She could be gone for two or three days. And
you know, there wasn't cell phones back the end, and
her parents wouldn't really know where she was. But when
Brooke went missing, her mama was very, very upset, as
if she knew Brooke wasn't coming home. The whole gathering
(16:24):
at the Henson House left a chilling impression on Holly
and Patty's mother mary Anne Henson. She was Brook's aunt.
It was very eerie. It was something I don't want
to ever experience again. According to Aunt Mary Anne, the
only person who seemed to be doing much of anything
was this one guy that someone had invited. He was
(16:47):
walking through the house, going through Brooks possessions. Who ever
got him? I'm not even sure. And I don't think
he was really an investigator. I mean, they said he was,
but he was an odd person. He was an older man, creepy,
but they said he was kind of like a psychic too.
(17:09):
He would just like pick her things up. I remember
him picking up the hairbrush, and I mean, it was
like a bad movie. Becausin. Patty was also confused about
the whole thing. I feel like, why weren't the police there?
Are they? I don't understand why the police weren't there.
It was the whole thing was weird. That night, when
(17:32):
she got home, she says she had a dream. It
was one of those dreams that was so vivid and
life like that it felt like it was really happening.
I was getting up to go to the bathroom and
the shower curtain was cracked, and I kind of looked
and did a second look, and it looked like muddy
water and the bathtub. And then I got down on
(17:58):
my knees and Brooke was coming up from the water
and she was grabbing my arms like she was scratching
my arms. And then I said, who did this to you?
And she said, Sean Charlotte his first name and his
last name, Sean Shirley. That was Brooke's boyfriend, the guy
(18:20):
who she left the note for. They'd been having a
fight the night the Brook disappeared, and apparently their relationship
was a turbulent one. According to cousin Patty, he'd hit
Brooke on a few occasions, and there are other accounts
that he was violent. Three days after Brooke went missing,
Sean was actually arrested on a separate matter. He was
(18:42):
charged with criminal sexual conduct in the third degree. He
eventually pled down to lesser charges. The one time that
the cousins met him, they didn't get a good feeling
from him, so cousin Patty's dream it felt spot on,
like it just confirmed her worst fears. In the coming weeks,
(19:03):
as Brooke remained missing, rumors began to circulate. One of
them was that on the night of her disappearance. Brooke
had gone to a party in the mountains in the
Dark Corner. Aunt mary Anne told me that her husband
Patrick was determined to have a look checked this place out.
After all, he was Brooke's uncle and he felt he
(19:24):
should be doing something. Before going, he visited Brooks parents
to see if they might help. Apparently they didn't want
to come. Brooks daddy said, happy hunting. I mean, this
is my family, and I'm about to cry because that
that's very odd. Happy honey. And I can't even imagine
(19:48):
not hunting from my shore friends. I talked with Uncle Patrick.
He told me that he went up to the Dark
Corner anyway to have a look. Eventually he found the
place where the parties supposedly happened, a cabin back in
the woods. A man answered the door. He was shirtless
and had nipple pierce. The man said that Brooke was
(20:11):
at the beach. Uncle Patrick didn't believe it. He kept searching,
but he didn't find her, not even a trace. It
would be just one of many dead ends in this case.
No one could find Brooke, not her family or the
Traveler's rest police or that creepy psychic investigator. She was gone.
(20:39):
It was roughly two years later, two years after Brooke
Henson's disappearance, that John Campbell was promoted from patrolman to detective.
It was at this point, in two thousand and one,
that he became the principal investigator in the case. By then,
the case was cold. John says he reviewed the files,
(20:59):
but many of the witness statements, which were handwritten, were
actually illegible. John spoke with people who had partied with
Brooke the night she went missing, but their stories were
often convoluted and conflicting. John suspected that Brooke had been murdered,
but without a body, it was difficult to build a case.
(21:20):
He surmised that her boyfriend, Sean Shirley played a role
in all of this. The Travelers Rest police did bring
Sean in and interview him, but he was never charged.
There's no detailed records of what was said, but apparently
Sean offered no useful information. At one point, John thought
he almost had the evidence to prove Sean's guilt. It
(21:44):
came from an informant who gave him a tip. One
guy came to me and said, I saw a confession
written by Sean Shirley in a box in a wall
behind a brick. That's right. This guy who knew Sean
Shirley claimed that he'd been in Sean's house poking around
when he'd found this note. Here's what the informant told John.
(22:07):
I was looking for drugs. I knew he kept his
drugs in the basement. I went down there, I pulled
the brick out. There was a little box. I opened
the box. There was a folded up note in there,
and it was basically a confession saying that he killed Broke.
Sound far fetched maybe, and John was never able to
get to the bottom of it. The problem was the
tip from this informant was cold. The informant had waited
(22:32):
too long to tell the police about what he'd seen,
so when John went before a magistrate to ask for
a search warrant, the judge nixed it, said too much
time had passed. That's the most frustrating thing in the
world to think there is a confession in a box
in behind a brick in the wall, and I can't
(22:53):
get the legal permission to go in there and get it.
I mean, as part of you wonder if that's still
behind that brick, the house in there anymore? So the
house is burned down, so it's not there anymore. And
that's kind of how it went with this case. There
were these missing moments, but they never seemed to pan out.
(23:13):
There were times when John got these tips that Brooke
actually was alive. There were sightings, people who claimed they'd
seen her. After all, Brooke's face was on a whole
bunch of missing posters. It was always some kind of
vague sighting that, you know, I saw her at a
phone booth in at the Outer Banks or something like that.
You know, how do you follow up on something like that.
(23:35):
There's nobody there now. But it was just enough to
give the family a spark of hope, and it would
give just enough question as to whether or not she
was actually dead. And then one day, in June of
two thousand and six, almost seven years after Brooke Henson
had vanished, John got a big break. It was a
(23:56):
phone call from a state law enforcement official. He said,
I think I found your girl, and she's alive. She's
in New York. And I said, really more on that
after the break. Okay, so it's two thousand and six.
(24:22):
John gets his big break, a call saying Brooke Henson
is alive. And the state law enforcement official, the one
who called John here's the deal with him. He was
a point of contact in this case, worked for the
state of South Carolina, and his name in a phone number.
It was on one of the Brook Henson missing posters.
Someone had seen this poster online and called in a lead,
(24:46):
a very promising lead. The callers said that Brooke Henson
was now living in New York City in Manhattan, where
she was a student at Columbia University. The caller provided
Brooks home address, an apartment on West one hundred and
eighth Street, and said that the Brook who lived there
had the same date of birth as the Brook from
(25:07):
South Carolina, that she also looked like the Brook and
the missing poster. John couldn't wrap his head around any
of this. It didn't make sense. Brooke Henson had dropped
out of high school and vanished in the hills of
South Carolina seven years ago. How is she now a
student at Columbia University in Manhattan. The only thing that
(25:29):
John could think of was that this was some kind
of elaborate stunt, and that when he tracked down this woman,
this Columbia student, she'd explain everything. Eventually, John got in
touch with a cop, and the NYPD who agreed to
help him out, said he would find this Brooke Henson
character and see what the deal was. So anyway, the
(25:49):
NYPD cop figures out who she is, intercepts her between
classes and asked her who she is, you know, if
she's really Brooke Henson. She said, I am Brooke. I
am a victim of domestic violence, and I'm just hiding
out here and I don't want anybody to know. Don't
(26:12):
tell my family. So the NYPD caused and he says, yep,
she's broke. You can clear your case. So much of
it added up, the name, the date of birth, the
general likeness of the photo, even the fact that she
was fleeing domestic violence. It was a little hard to fathom.
(26:32):
But wasn't it possible that when Brooke Henson walked out
the door that night, away from Sean Shirley and her
life in Traveler's Rest, that she just kept on going.
Did what Americans have done from the very beginning, reinvent themselves,
defy everyone's expectations, start anew. Sure, says John, that's reasonable enough.
(26:53):
He sees how another cop might have accepted this and
let it go at that if it hadn't been me
who had been with the police appartment since ninety nine
and knew the case as well as I knew. If
you've been somebody that just been hired, you know, we
had a lot of turnover and everything. Someone said, oh yeah,
we found her case closed, And honestly, this could have
(27:14):
been the end of the story right here. But in
a way, John had been waiting his whole life for
this moment. Let me explain you see. John loves mysteries
and spy novels too, the weirder the better. He's a
huge fan of The X Files, the show starring David
Duchovny that tells us the truth is out there. John
(27:35):
loves stories about aliens, paranormal activity, and vast government conspiracies,
and he's looking for them pretty much always. He told me,
back in the nineteen nineties, everyone was looking for the Unibomber,
you know, the mysterious madman who wrote a manifesto and
sent bombs in the mail. John studied the case obsessively,
(27:56):
and eventually he became convinced that he had found the Unibomber.
He even called the FBI. They didn't take him seriously,
and it turns out John was wrong. Then, in nineteen
ninety five, a domestic terrorist blew up a federal office
building in Oklahoma City. It was huge news. The authorities
(28:17):
found their suspect, Timothy McVeigh. John claims that he found
an accomplice tracked him down. Again. He called the FBI,
but again they didn't take him seriously. And to this day,
John questions how the FBI handled this, Like, what were
they hiding? Look? John is the first to acknowledge that
(28:40):
conspiracy theories are seductive, sometimes dangerously. So I've known people
who are absolutely consumed by a conspiracy theory and you
can look at them, I'm like, that guy's nuts, you know, John,
Some people might think that about you. Yeah, all they do,
So you get the picture. John was not the type
(29:03):
of guy who was going to walk away from an
unsolved mystery. Sure, maybe he'd watched one many episodes of
The X Files, but something about this Brooke Henson situation
in New York City just didn't feel right to him.
So he decided that he wanted to create a test
to see if this really was Brooke Henson. He consulted
(29:25):
with someone in the Henson family and came up with
a set of questions that only Brooke would know. The
answers too, like what is your late uncle's name and
what is your brother's best friend's name. He asked the
NYPD to contact Brooke and pose these questions. They agreed.
A short while later, John says the detective called back
(29:46):
and basically said, Yep, she answered most of the questions correctly.
Seems to be her. So I said, I'm not happy
with that. I want DNA DNA. I mean, you got
to hand it to him. That's ballsy. He's a small
town detective from South Carolina. He's got evidence of plenty
(30:06):
that this is Brooke Henson, and he's telling the ny NAH,
I don want DNA. Kind of amazingly, the NYPD agrees.
I don't fully understand why exactly they did, but they did.
The NYPD says they'll reach out to her, try to
make arrangements to get some DNA. The woman Brooke agrees,
(30:28):
They set a date, and then she simply vanishes. When
she didn't show up to give DNA, she was in
the wind. She never went back to the apartment that
she was living in. She never showed back up to class.
She was gone, and at that point we had no
idea who she was, no idea, and that right there
(30:50):
was the thread dangling like an invitation of sorts. But
what to do with it? Well, for starters, what was
this exactly a missing person's case? Or was it two
missing people? Or was it a case of stolen identity?
Or was it a murder case with a mysterious spect
who was now on the run? Impossible to say. As
(31:13):
a detective, John knew that these categories were important, but
this case didn't fit neatly into any of them. So
what was John supposed to do? He didn't work for
the FBI or the US Marshals. He was just a
small town detective from the mountains of South Carolina. He
says he had a travel budget of about a thousand bucks.
(31:33):
His official jurisdiction was just a few miles in diameter.
This case was way out of the circle of wagons.
But that hadn't really stopped him before, had it. I mean,
he'd gone after the unibomber and the Oklahoma City bomber too,
but that he'd done on his own, almost as a hobby.
(31:53):
He had a real claim to this one. This was
his case, his thread, and damned if he wasn't going
to pull on it. Coming up this season a deep Cover.
I said, I'm calling about a girl you might know
(32:13):
named Brooke Henson, and he said, I wondered when you
were gonna call. When my son brought her home, I
knew she was troubled Natalie. I knew her as Natalie.
She introduced herself as as a professional chess player. There
are a lot of people stealing names, but something dealing
with espionage spies, that was a fascinating, fascinating development. We
(32:37):
were chasing her around the country and you know, we
would look at each other said, how are we not
finding this young girl who could grief? Guys, we're the
federal government here. We gotta be able to do that.
I think I got a message from Columbia Security saying
they wanted to talk to me, and I was like,
oh shit. Deep Cover is produced by Amy Gaines and
(33:22):
Jacob Smith. It's edited by Karen Shakurgee mastering by Jake Gorski.
Our show art was designed by Sean Karney. Original scoring
at our theme was composed by Luis Gara, fact checking
by Arthur Gompert's Special thanks to Mia Lobell, Greta Cone,
and Jacob Weissberg. I'm Jake Albern
Pushkin. This is a story about a young woman who
ran away from home. At least that's how it all started.
I think people think that I had this master plan
and I went out and did it, and like, you know,
like it's not fun, right, You're constantly scared. You have
(00:35):
no support, you have no one to talk to, which
is part of the reason it got so carried away.
Like if I had just talked to somebody, they would
have been like this is crazy. Along the way, there
were plenty of moments where she could have stopped running,
but she didn't. Sort of like I got on a
(00:56):
train track. There was clearly the wrong train track, and
like my train is running away, and at some point
you're not thinking crap, how do we get off this
train track, or just thinking crap, how do I stop
this train from going off the rails? You know, just
kept making a horrible decision after horrible decision after horrible decision,
just trying to keep the train from crashing and killing me.
(01:18):
At that point, we're going to come back to this
woman and go deep into her story, so you'll hear
more about all that, but not just yet, because this
is actually a story about not one, but two young
women who vanished at about the same time. The two
(01:39):
of them were roughly the same age, but in so
many other ways they could not have been more different.
One grew up in rural Montana, where she was raised
in a sheltered, devoutly religious home. She was shy and
kind of a nerd. The other was a kind hearted
free spirit from South Carolina. She partied often and sometimes
(02:01):
hung out with a rough crowd. They both disappeared in
nineteen ninety nine. Their families searched for them but didn't
find many clues, and then improbably their stories collided when
a lone investigator got involved and quickly became obsessed. I
think of a situation as a sweater. So sometimes you
(02:23):
have a loose thread and you pull the thread and
you get a knot. And sometimes you pull a thread
and it just keeps unraveling and you just keep falling
invulnent bulling. This investigator was convinced that the fates of
these two young women, the free spirit and the nerd,
were linked, and that by solving one of their cases
(02:45):
he might also solve the other. Not just that he
suspected that one of them was a master of deception,
a highly trained chameleon who conned her way into the
ivy leagues. He began an investigation that ultimately drew in
the Secret Service, the US Marshals, and the Justice Department.
The media soon got wind of this, Allegations of murder, fraud,
(03:08):
and spaje swirled. Eventually, a nationwide manhunt got underway, all
because of this one investigator and his hunch. Now, given
the gigantic scope of all this, you might think that
our investigator worked for some big city police department or
a fancy federal agency, or maybe even an international outfit
(03:30):
like Interpoll. Nope, he was a small town cop who'd
just become a detective. He didn't have a partner, or
for a while even a computer. But he was doggedly stubborn,
almost perversely. So I just pulled a thread and it
just kept going and going and going to the whole
thing unraveled. I get it. I love pulling on threads.
(03:54):
As a journalist. I've done this so many times, pulled
and pulled until I've lost track of what I was
originally looking for or whether it was worth it. And
sometimes most of the time, in fact, it's not. But
every once in a while there's a set of facts.
It's so irresistibly curious that I just can't let go.
(04:17):
And I suppose it doesn't matter whether you're a journalist,
or a detective or just a nosy neighbor. So many
of us believe that great mysteries lurk in the periphery
of our lives. So when we find an especially curious thread,
we keep pulling because we won't be satisfied until we've
(04:37):
unraveled at all. I'm Jake Albern and this is deep Cover,
Season three, Never Seen Again, Episode one, The Dark Corner.
(05:31):
The detective that I told you about. His name is
John Campbell, and he's just about the friendliest guy I've
ever met. He has whispy brown hair and a boyish grin.
He wears a pair of those wraparound sunglasses that dads
always wear a little league practice. He's also got this
goofy and totally lovable laugh that he breaks into all
(05:51):
the time. So not an old timey lawman. In fact,
one of the first things that he tells me is
that he doesn't care for guns. When I retire, I
can't wait to put this in a drawer. I mean,
this is this is a this is the thing I
banged my elbow on all the time. So it's not
about carrying a gun. I carry gun because we have to.
I'd rather be like Andy Griffith and just be shared
(06:13):
without a gun. I met John Dunnan Traveler's Rest, South Carolina,
where he lives. This, by the way, it was also
the hometown of the free spirited young woman that I
told you about, one of the two that went missing
back in the early two thousands, when our story really starts.
John was the town's loan detective. I asked him what
(06:33):
this was like. He told me that back then this
was truly a sleepy backwater. Traveler's Rest was almost a
dry town. We had one bar and one liquor store,
and the liquor store closed I think at eight or
nine o'clock at night. The bar closed at midnight, and
we rolled up the streets and the only problems we
(06:53):
ever had was at the bar, and so we shut
the bar down two or three times, took their license.
Outside of town, well, that was a different story. The
thickly wooded slopes quickly rose of the peaks of the
Blue Ridge Mountains. The land was steep and craggy. Some
(07:14):
called it the Dark Corner. For generations, it was known
as a place where Mountain folk brewed moonshine and lived
by their own rules Mountain Justice. By the nineteen nineties
that had begun to change. Newcomers were arriving, retirees and
the like, but the Dark Corner remained a place where
(07:35):
it wasn't wise to venture at night or turned down
a road you didn't know. I talked to one local
who told me he once found a great big log
blocking the road with a stack of dog skulls on it,
and then he just knew better turn around. John says
(07:57):
that occasionally the Mountain folks would just show up at
John's office. Here, this roar of a truck would come in,
and people would pile out, and they'd say, we're looking
for the law, you know, And Mountain Justice had fail
and they had to come to into town to find
some law enforcement for the police and Traveler's Rest. The
key was basically to secure the town's perimeter. So I
(08:20):
called Traveler's Rest of the circle of wagons. So we
had seven square miles that was like a circle of
wagons in our little town, and we kept all the
crime out of our little circle out into the county
bushed it out. Wait, so your job was basically just
like make sure that the criminals stayed out of the circle. Yeah,
pretty much. Did you ever like like tell guys like
(08:40):
not in here your other Oh yeah, what did you say?
This is our town out? Take that up the mountains.
John says this strategy it worked. Not much happened in
the way of major crime in Traveler's Rest. But then
one day, something rather sinister happened in this small town,
(09:03):
something that broke the humdrum rhythm of daily life. A
twenty year old girl went missing. Her name was Brooke Henson.
She vanished from within the town's limits, inside the circle
of wagons, and her disappearance would ultimately send John Campbell
on an epic quest. It would become a huge case,
(09:25):
a national case, and John, the small town detective who
hated carrying a gun, would be at the center of
it all. The day before Brooke Henson went missing, John
Campbell says he saw her on the street totally by chance.
(09:45):
It was July of nineteen ninety nine. John wasn't a
detective at the time, he was still just a patrolman
making the rounds. He remembers that day crisply, and he
recounted it to me while we were driving around town
together in his truck. When I saw Brooke. She was
walking down this street here, close to her house, and
(10:09):
she turned around and looked at me right about right here.
It was where I saw her. And so that's her
house where that sign is, it's your driveway. The street
that we're on, where Brooke used to live, is shrouded
in thick, tangled vegetation. The woods thrum with the buzz
of cicadas. We pull up to Brook's old house. This
(10:30):
is the front of the house as you can. You
can't see it. I mean, it's completely over her own.
Was it always this overgrown? The front was grown up,
but it was no You could see the house and everything,
but you can't even tell there's a house in there. Yeah,
I mean it looks like like Radley's house from To
Kill a Mockingbird. It's almost abandoned looking now. John didn't
(10:52):
really know Brooke, but other people who did described her
to me as easygoing, kind, free spirited. She shopped at
thrift stores, wore Doc Martins and flannels. She was a
huge fan of Nirvana. She dropped out of high school
and in the summer of nineteen ninety nine, she was
still living at home with her parents. Now I've gone
(11:15):
through a bunch of accounts of what happened the night
she went missing, including the original police report, which was
basically a statement from Brooke's mom, But there's not a
whole lot that we know for sure. What we do
know is that she disappeared early on the morning of
July fourth. There'd been a party at Brooke's house that night.
(11:35):
Her boyfriend, a guy named Ricky Sewn Shirley, was there,
and apparently the two of them were fighting. According to
the police report. At two forty three am, Brooke told
her mother, quote, I'm getting out of here. Her mom
told her it was too late to wander about. Brooke replied, quote,
(11:56):
I'm not going anywhere. I'm just seeing what he'll do.
I'm messing with Sean. Brooke then left the house. She
set off into the night. She never came home. In
the morning, Brook's mother found a note on her bed.
It was intended for Sean, her boyfriend. It read, I'm
(12:16):
walking follow me if you care. The million dollar question,
of course, is this where did she go? And there
are a lot of theories about this. But the theory
that I heard most was that she was headed to
(12:37):
a nearby store. Apparently Brooke went there from time to
time to get cigarettes. This is the store where she
was headed, by the way, the store right here behind
us gas station. Yeah, to get cigarettes. Like, why would
she go to the store. She would have known the
store was closed because it was like two thirty in
the morning, so that store was not open at that time. Well,
(12:59):
she would have known the store was closed. Also, I
mean those roads, it's it's dark here that night. Yeah,
and especially back then, we rolled the streets up at
nine o'clock and travel's rest. I mean, there was nothing
going on at night in this town. The whole thing
(13:28):
was more than a little mystifying. How does a young
woman vanish off a small town street in the dead
of night en route to a store that's not even open.
Even the note that she left was enigmatic. Follow me
if you care. Brooks's parents are both deceased now, so
(13:49):
I couldn't talk with them. Instead, I had to rely
on what few clues I could glean. Brooke's mom did
file a report with the police the day after she
went missing, but at first the police didn't do much.
Seems like no one did. A few missing posters went up,
that's about it. No one was sounding alarms. I spoke
(14:11):
with Brooks's cousin, Holly Henson about what she remembers from
this time. I was staying out a friend's house in Marietta,
just above Traveler's Drest, and her mom took us to
the gas station and I saw a missing poster with
Brooks picture and name on it. So I told my
dad and brooks family had never told us that she
(14:35):
was missing, but she had just went missing. Kind of odd, right,
This is how she learns about her cousin's disappearance, But
cousin Holly says that her family and Brooks had kind
of grown apart in the years leading up to her disappearance.
Holly's mother told me that she disapproved of brooks parents
(14:55):
of the way that they raised their children, allowing them
to drink and party and come and go as they pleased,
like there were no rules. She did not want that
for her own kids. But when they learned that Brooke
had gone missing, they rushed over. Everyone went cousin Holly,
her sister, Patty, their mom. They wanted to show solidarity
(15:17):
to help if they could. When they showed up, the
scene at Brooks house was somber. We were just all
sitting in the livenary and it was just the whole
thing was just weird. It was quiet, nobody was really
saying anything. That's Brook's other cousin, Patty. She and Holly
both remember the silence. Some of Brooks friends were present,
(15:40):
sitting there mutely. Brooke's mother was on the sofa just crying.
From the way they described it, it was like a
vigil for someone who died. The odd part was that
Brooke had just gone missing. It wasn't all that unusual
for Brooke to just go off and disappear for a
few days, visiting friends or whatever. Here's cousin Holly again.
(16:01):
Brooke was allowed to come and go as she pleased.
She could be gone for two or three days. And
you know, there wasn't cell phones back the end, and
her parents wouldn't really know where she was. But when
Brooke went missing, her mama was very, very upset, as
if she knew Brooke wasn't coming home. The whole gathering
(16:24):
at the Henson House left a chilling impression on Holly
and Patty's mother mary Anne Henson. She was Brook's aunt.
It was very eerie. It was something I don't want
to ever experience again. According to Aunt Mary Anne, the
only person who seemed to be doing much of anything
was this one guy that someone had invited. He was
(16:47):
walking through the house, going through Brooks possessions. Who ever
got him? I'm not even sure. And I don't think
he was really an investigator. I mean, they said he was,
but he was an odd person. He was an older man, creepy,
but they said he was kind of like a psychic too.
(17:09):
He would just like pick her things up. I remember
him picking up the hairbrush, and I mean, it was
like a bad movie. Becausin. Patty was also confused about
the whole thing. I feel like, why weren't the police there?
Are they? I don't understand why the police weren't there.
It was the whole thing was weird. That night, when
(17:32):
she got home, she says she had a dream. It
was one of those dreams that was so vivid and
life like that it felt like it was really happening.
I was getting up to go to the bathroom and
the shower curtain was cracked, and I kind of looked
and did a second look, and it looked like muddy
water and the bathtub. And then I got down on
(17:58):
my knees and Brooke was coming up from the water
and she was grabbing my arms like she was scratching
my arms. And then I said, who did this to you?
And she said, Sean Charlotte his first name and his
last name, Sean Shirley. That was Brooke's boyfriend, the guy
(18:20):
who she left the note for. They'd been having a
fight the night the Brook disappeared, and apparently their relationship
was a turbulent one. According to cousin Patty, he'd hit
Brooke on a few occasions, and there are other accounts
that he was violent. Three days after Brooke went missing,
Sean was actually arrested on a separate matter. He was
(18:42):
charged with criminal sexual conduct in the third degree. He
eventually pled down to lesser charges. The one time that
the cousins met him, they didn't get a good feeling
from him, so cousin Patty's dream it felt spot on,
like it just confirmed her worst fears. In the coming weeks,
(19:03):
as Brooke remained missing, rumors began to circulate. One of
them was that on the night of her disappearance. Brooke
had gone to a party in the mountains in the
Dark Corner. Aunt mary Anne told me that her husband
Patrick was determined to have a look checked this place out.
After all, he was Brooke's uncle and he felt he
(19:24):
should be doing something. Before going, he visited Brooks parents
to see if they might help. Apparently they didn't want
to come. Brooks daddy said, happy hunting. I mean, this
is my family, and I'm about to cry because that
that's very odd. Happy honey. And I can't even imagine
(19:48):
not hunting from my shore friends. I talked with Uncle Patrick.
He told me that he went up to the Dark
Corner anyway to have a look. Eventually he found the
place where the parties supposedly happened, a cabin back in
the woods. A man answered the door. He was shirtless
and had nipple pierce. The man said that Brooke was
(20:11):
at the beach. Uncle Patrick didn't believe it. He kept searching,
but he didn't find her, not even a trace. It
would be just one of many dead ends in this case.
No one could find Brooke, not her family or the
Traveler's rest police or that creepy psychic investigator. She was gone.
(20:39):
It was roughly two years later, two years after Brooke
Henson's disappearance, that John Campbell was promoted from patrolman to detective.
It was at this point, in two thousand and one,
that he became the principal investigator in the case. By then,
the case was cold. John says he reviewed the files,
(20:59):
but many of the witness statements, which were handwritten, were
actually illegible. John spoke with people who had partied with
Brooke the night she went missing, but their stories were
often convoluted and conflicting. John suspected that Brooke had been murdered,
but without a body, it was difficult to build a case.
(21:20):
He surmised that her boyfriend, Sean Shirley played a role
in all of this. The Travelers Rest police did bring
Sean in and interview him, but he was never charged.
There's no detailed records of what was said, but apparently
Sean offered no useful information. At one point, John thought
he almost had the evidence to prove Sean's guilt. It
(21:44):
came from an informant who gave him a tip. One
guy came to me and said, I saw a confession
written by Sean Shirley in a box in a wall
behind a brick. That's right. This guy who knew Sean
Shirley claimed that he'd been in Sean's house poking around
when he'd found this note. Here's what the informant told John.
(22:07):
I was looking for drugs. I knew he kept his
drugs in the basement. I went down there, I pulled
the brick out. There was a little box. I opened
the box. There was a folded up note in there,
and it was basically a confession saying that he killed Broke.
Sound far fetched maybe, and John was never able to
get to the bottom of it. The problem was the
tip from this informant was cold. The informant had waited
(22:32):
too long to tell the police about what he'd seen,
so when John went before a magistrate to ask for
a search warrant, the judge nixed it, said too much
time had passed. That's the most frustrating thing in the
world to think there is a confession in a box
in behind a brick in the wall, and I can't
(22:53):
get the legal permission to go in there and get it.
I mean, as part of you wonder if that's still
behind that brick, the house in there anymore? So the
house is burned down, so it's not there anymore. And
that's kind of how it went with this case. There
were these missing moments, but they never seemed to pan out.
(23:13):
There were times when John got these tips that Brooke
actually was alive. There were sightings, people who claimed they'd
seen her. After all, Brooke's face was on a whole
bunch of missing posters. It was always some kind of
vague sighting that, you know, I saw her at a
phone booth in at the Outer Banks or something like that.
You know, how do you follow up on something like that.
(23:35):
There's nobody there now. But it was just enough to
give the family a spark of hope, and it would
give just enough question as to whether or not she
was actually dead. And then one day, in June of
two thousand and six, almost seven years after Brooke Henson
had vanished, John got a big break. It was a
(23:56):
phone call from a state law enforcement official. He said,
I think I found your girl, and she's alive. She's
in New York. And I said, really more on that
after the break. Okay, so it's two thousand and six.
(24:22):
John gets his big break, a call saying Brooke Henson
is alive. And the state law enforcement official, the one
who called John here's the deal with him. He was
a point of contact in this case, worked for the
state of South Carolina, and his name in a phone number.
It was on one of the Brook Henson missing posters.
Someone had seen this poster online and called in a lead,
(24:46):
a very promising lead. The callers said that Brooke Henson
was now living in New York City in Manhattan, where
she was a student at Columbia University. The caller provided
Brooks home address, an apartment on West one hundred and
eighth Street, and said that the Brook who lived there
had the same date of birth as the Brook from
(25:07):
South Carolina, that she also looked like the Brook and
the missing poster. John couldn't wrap his head around any
of this. It didn't make sense. Brooke Henson had dropped
out of high school and vanished in the hills of
South Carolina seven years ago. How is she now a
student at Columbia University in Manhattan. The only thing that
(25:29):
John could think of was that this was some kind
of elaborate stunt, and that when he tracked down this woman,
this Columbia student, she'd explain everything. Eventually, John got in
touch with a cop, and the NYPD who agreed to
help him out, said he would find this Brooke Henson
character and see what the deal was. So anyway, the
(25:49):
NYPD cop figures out who she is, intercepts her between
classes and asked her who she is, you know, if
she's really Brooke Henson. She said, I am Brooke. I
am a victim of domestic violence, and I'm just hiding
out here and I don't want anybody to know. Don't
(26:12):
tell my family. So the NYPD caused and he says, yep,
she's broke. You can clear your case. So much of
it added up, the name, the date of birth, the
general likeness of the photo, even the fact that she
was fleeing domestic violence. It was a little hard to fathom.
(26:32):
But wasn't it possible that when Brooke Henson walked out
the door that night, away from Sean Shirley and her
life in Traveler's Rest, that she just kept on going.
Did what Americans have done from the very beginning, reinvent themselves,
defy everyone's expectations, start anew. Sure, says John, that's reasonable enough.
(26:53):
He sees how another cop might have accepted this and
let it go at that if it hadn't been me
who had been with the police appartment since ninety nine
and knew the case as well as I knew. If
you've been somebody that just been hired, you know, we
had a lot of turnover and everything. Someone said, oh yeah,
we found her case closed, And honestly, this could have
(27:14):
been the end of the story right here. But in
a way, John had been waiting his whole life for
this moment. Let me explain you see. John loves mysteries
and spy novels too, the weirder the better. He's a
huge fan of The X Files, the show starring David
Duchovny that tells us the truth is out there. John
(27:35):
loves stories about aliens, paranormal activity, and vast government conspiracies,
and he's looking for them pretty much always. He told me,
back in the nineteen nineties, everyone was looking for the Unibomber,
you know, the mysterious madman who wrote a manifesto and
sent bombs in the mail. John studied the case obsessively,
(27:56):
and eventually he became convinced that he had found the Unibomber.
He even called the FBI. They didn't take him seriously,
and it turns out John was wrong. Then, in nineteen
ninety five, a domestic terrorist blew up a federal office
building in Oklahoma City. It was huge news. The authorities
(28:17):
found their suspect, Timothy McVeigh. John claims that he found
an accomplice tracked him down. Again. He called the FBI,
but again they didn't take him seriously. And to this day,
John questions how the FBI handled this, Like, what were
they hiding? Look? John is the first to acknowledge that
(28:40):
conspiracy theories are seductive, sometimes dangerously. So I've known people
who are absolutely consumed by a conspiracy theory and you
can look at them, I'm like, that guy's nuts, you know, John,
Some people might think that about you. Yeah, all they do,
So you get the picture. John was not the type
(29:03):
of guy who was going to walk away from an
unsolved mystery. Sure, maybe he'd watched one many episodes of
The X Files, but something about this Brooke Henson situation
in New York City just didn't feel right to him.
So he decided that he wanted to create a test
to see if this really was Brooke Henson. He consulted
(29:25):
with someone in the Henson family and came up with
a set of questions that only Brooke would know. The
answers too, like what is your late uncle's name and
what is your brother's best friend's name. He asked the
NYPD to contact Brooke and pose these questions. They agreed.
A short while later, John says the detective called back
(29:46):
and basically said, Yep, she answered most of the questions correctly.
Seems to be her. So I said, I'm not happy
with that. I want DNA DNA. I mean, you got
to hand it to him. That's ballsy. He's a small
town detective from South Carolina. He's got evidence of plenty
(30:06):
that this is Brooke Henson, and he's telling the ny NAH,
I don want DNA. Kind of amazingly, the NYPD agrees.
I don't fully understand why exactly they did, but they did.
The NYPD says they'll reach out to her, try to
make arrangements to get some DNA. The woman Brooke agrees,
(30:28):
They set a date, and then she simply vanishes. When
she didn't show up to give DNA, she was in
the wind. She never went back to the apartment that
she was living in. She never showed back up to class.
She was gone, and at that point we had no
idea who she was, no idea, and that right there
(30:50):
was the thread dangling like an invitation of sorts. But
what to do with it? Well, for starters, what was
this exactly a missing person's case? Or was it two
missing people? Or was it a case of stolen identity?
Or was it a murder case with a mysterious spect
who was now on the run? Impossible to say. As
(31:13):
a detective, John knew that these categories were important, but
this case didn't fit neatly into any of them. So
what was John supposed to do? He didn't work for
the FBI or the US Marshals. He was just a
small town detective from the mountains of South Carolina. He
says he had a travel budget of about a thousand bucks.
(31:33):
His official jurisdiction was just a few miles in diameter.
This case was way out of the circle of wagons.
But that hadn't really stopped him before, had it. I mean,
he'd gone after the unibomber and the Oklahoma City bomber too,
but that he'd done on his own, almost as a hobby.
(31:53):
He had a real claim to this one. This was
his case, his thread, and damned if he wasn't going
to pull on it. Coming up this season a deep Cover.
I said, I'm calling about a girl you might know
(32:13):
named Brooke Henson, and he said, I wondered when you
were gonna call. When my son brought her home, I
knew she was troubled Natalie. I knew her as Natalie.
She introduced herself as as a professional chess player. There
are a lot of people stealing names, but something dealing
with espionage spies, that was a fascinating, fascinating development. We
(32:37):
were chasing her around the country and you know, we
would look at each other said, how are we not
finding this young girl who could grief? Guys, we're the
federal government here. We gotta be able to do that.
I think I got a message from Columbia Security saying
they wanted to talk to me, and I was like,
oh shit. Deep Cover is produced by Amy Gaines and
(33:22):
Jacob Smith. It's edited by Karen Shakurgee mastering by Jake Gorski.
Our show art was designed by Sean Karney. Original scoring
at our theme was composed by Luis Gara, fact checking
by Arthur Gompert's Special thanks to Mia Lobell, Greta Cone,
and Jacob Weissberg. I'm Jake Albern
Host
Jake Halpern
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.