0:15

Pushkin. Hey,

0:20

it's Jacob Goldstein. I'm one of the executive

0:22

producers of Hot Money, and I'm

0:24

here today with the preview of another Pushkin

0:27

show called deep Cover. In the

0:29

new season of deep Cover, we hear the

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story of two young women living

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on opposite sides of the country who

0:35

went missing at almost the exact

0:38

same time. Seven years

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later, one of the young women resurfaced

0:42

and she was posing as the other

0:44

one. Here's a preview of

0:46

the show. I hope you'll like it. This

0:50

is a story about a young woman who ran

0:52

away from home. At least

0:55

that's how it all started. I think

0:57

people think that I had this master plan and I went out

0:59

and did it, and like, you know, like it's

1:01

not fun, right,

1:04

You're constantly scared, you have no support,

1:06

you have no one to talk to, which is part

1:08

of the reason got so carried

1:10

away. Like if I had just talked to somebody,

1:14

they would have been like this is crazy. Along

1:17

the way, there were plenty of moments where

1:20

she could have stopped running, but

1:22

she didn't. Sort

1:25

of like I got on a train track. There

1:28

was clearly the wrong train track, and like

1:30

my train is running away, and at

1:32

some point you're not thinking crap,

1:35

how do we get off this train track? You're just thinking, crap,

1:37

how do I stop this train from like going

1:39

off the rails? You know, I just

1:41

kept making a horrible decision after horrible decision

1:44

after horrible decision, just

1:46

trying to keep the train from crashing and killing

1:48

me. At that point, we're

1:54

going to come back to this woman and go deep

1:56

into her story, so you'll hear

1:58

more about all of that, But not

2:00

just yet, because this is actually

2:02

a story about not one,

2:05

but two young women who vanished

2:07

at about the same time. The

2:09

two of them were roughly at the same age, but

2:12

in so many other ways they could

2:14

not have been more different. One

2:16

grew up in rural Montana, where

2:18

she was raised in a sheltered, devoutly

2:20

religious home. She was shy

2:23

and kind of a nerd. The

2:25

other was a kind hearted, free spirit

2:27

from South Carolina. She partied

2:30

often and sometimes hung out with a

2:32

rough crowd. They both

2:34

disappeared in nineteen ninety nine.

2:37

Their families searched for them but didn't

2:39

find many clues, and then

2:41

improbably their stories collided

2:44

when a lone investigator got involved

2:46

and quickly became obsessed. I

2:49

think of a situation as a sweater. So

2:53

sometimes you have a loose thread

2:55

and you pull the thread and you get a naught. And

2:57

sometimes you pull a thread and it just keeps

3:00

unraveling, and you just keep falling

3:02

and falling and bulling. This investigator

3:05

was convinced that the fates of these

3:07

two young women, the free Spirit

3:09

and the nerd, were linked, and

3:12

that by solving one of their cases,

3:15

he might also solve the other. Not

3:17

just that, he suspected that one

3:19

of them was a master of deception,

3:22

a highly trained chameleon who

3:24

conned her way into the ivy leagues. He

3:26

began an investigation that ultimately drew

3:29

in the Secret Service, the US

3:31

Marshals, and the Justice Department. The

3:34

media soon got wind of this. Allegations

3:36

of murder, fraud, and espionage

3:39

swirled. Eventually, a

3:41

nationwide manhunt got underway, all

3:44

because of this one investigator and

3:47

his hunch. Now,

3:49

given the gigantic scope of all

3:51

this, you might think that our investigator

3:54

worked for some big city police department

3:56

or a fancy federal agency, or

3:58

maybe even an international outfit like Interpol.

4:02

Nope, he was a small town

4:04

cop who'd just become a detective.

4:07

He didn't have a partner, or for a while

4:09

even a computer. But he was

4:11

doggedly stubborn, almost

4:13

perversely. So I

4:16

just pulled a thread and it just kept

4:18

going and going and going to the whole thing unraveled.

4:21

I get it. I love pulling on threads.

4:24

As a journalist. I've done this so many times,

4:27

pulled and pulled until I have lost

4:29

track of what I was originally looking for

4:32

or whether it was worth it. And sometimes

4:35

most of the time, in fact, it's not.

4:38

But every once in a while

4:40

there's a set of facts it's so irresistibly

4:43

curious that I just can't let

4:45

go. And

4:47

I suppose it doesn't matter whether you're

4:50

a journalist or a detective or

4:52

just a nosy neighbor. So

4:54

many of us believe that great mysteries

4:57

lurk in the periphery of our lives. So

5:00

when we find an especially curious thread,

5:03

we keep pulling because we won't

5:05

be satisfied until we've unraveled

5:08

at all. I'm

5:24

Jake Alburn, and this is

5:26

deep Cover Season three,

5:29

Never Seen Again, Episode

5:53

one, The Dark Corner.

6:01

The detective that I told you about. His

6:03

name is John Campbell, and he's

6:06

just about the friendliest guy I've ever met. He

6:08

has whispy brown hair and a boyish

6:10

grin. He wears a pair of those wraparound

6:12

sunglasses that dads always wear a

6:14

little league practice. He's also

6:17

got this goofy and totally lovable

6:19

laugh that he breaks into all

6:21

the time. So not an old

6:23

timey lawman. In fact, one

6:25

of the first things that he tells me is that he

6:28

doesn't care for guns. When I retire,

6:30

I can't wait to put this in a drawer. I mean, this is

6:32

a this is the thing I banged my elbow

6:34

on all the time. So

6:37

it's not about carrying a gun. I carry gun because

6:39

we have to. I'd rather be like Andy Griffiths and

6:42

just be sharing for that a gun. I

6:44

met John Donnan Traveler's Rest, South

6:46

Carolina, where he lives. This,

6:48

by the way, was also the hometown of the

6:50

free spirited young woman that I told you about,

6:53

one of the two that went missing back

6:56

in the early two thousands, when our story

6:58

really starts. John was the

7:00

town's loan detective. I

7:03

asked him what this was like. He told

7:05

me that back then this was truly

7:07

a sleepy backwater. Travel's

7:10

Rest was almost a dry town. We

7:12

had one bar and one liquor store,

7:15

and the liquor store closed I think at eight

7:17

or nine o'clock at night. The bar closed

7:19

at midnight, and we rolled up the

7:21

streets and the only problems we ever

7:24

had was at the bar, and so

7:27

we could shut the bar down two or three times. Took their

7:29

license. Outside of town, well,

7:32

that was a different story. The

7:36

thickly wooded slopes quickly rose

7:38

into the peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

7:41

The land was steep and craggy. Some

7:44

called it the Dark Corner. For

7:48

generations it was known as a place where

7:50

mountain folk brewed moonshine and

7:52

lived by their own rules mountain

7:55

justice. By the

7:57

nineteen nineties, that had begun to change.

7:59

Newcomers were arriving, retirees

8:01

and the like, but the Dark Corner

8:04

remained a place where it wasn't wise to venture

8:06

at night or turned down a road you didn't

8:08

know. I talked

8:10

to one local who told me he once

8:13

found a great big log blocking the road

8:15

with a stack of dog skulls on it,

8:18

and then he just knew better

8:20

turn around. John

8:27

says that occasionally the mountain folks

8:29

would just show up at John's

8:31

office and hear this roar of a truck would

8:33

come in and people would pile out, and they'd say,

8:35

we're looking for the law, you know, and Mountain

8:38

Justice had failed and they had to come to

8:40

into town to find some

8:42

law enforcement. For the police and

8:44

Traveler's Rest. The key was

8:47

basically to secure the town's perimeter.

8:50

So I called Travelers Rest of the circle of

8:52

Wagons. So we had seven square miles

8:54

that was like a circle of wagons in our little

8:56

town, and we kept all the crime out of our

8:58

little circle out into the county,

9:00

bushed it out. Wait, so your job was basically

9:03

just like make sure that the criminals

9:05

stayed out of the circle. Yeah, pretty

9:07

much. Did you ever like like tell

9:10

guys like not in here, you're on the yea what

9:12

you say? This is our town? Oh?

9:15

Take that up to the mountains. John says,

9:17

this strategy it worked. Not

9:20

much happened in the way of major crime in

9:22

Traveler's Rest. But then

9:25

one day something rather

9:27

sinister happened in this small town,

9:33

something that broke the humdrum rhythm

9:35

of daily life. A twenty

9:37

year old girl went missing. Her

9:40

name was Brooke Henson. She

9:42

vanished from within the town's limits,

9:44

inside the circle of Wagons and

9:47

her disappearance would ultimately send

9:49

John Campbell on an epic

9:51

quest. It would

9:53

become a huge case, a national

9:55

case, and John, the

9:58

small town detective who hated

10:00

carrying a gun, would be at

10:02

the center of it all.