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Amazon presents Laura vs Fruit Flies Swarming your fruit and terrorizing your kitchen, these little freaks multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit say yo, Chill. But Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray, countertop wipes and fly traps. Hey fruit flies. Your baby boom ends here. Save the everyday with Amazon. TaxAct knows every small business owner has different tax filing needs. With TaxAct, you can file yourself with the help of an expert, or TaxAct can do it all for you. You're the boss, the head honcho, the top banana. And TaxAct is like your loyal, trusty tax aide, ready to pounce on any tax needs you might have. TaxAct is dying to pounce on some small business tax needs. TaxAct. Let's get them over with. Hi park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia d', Ambra and the case I'm going to tell you about today takes place near Land between the Lakes National Recreation Area close to the Tennessee Kentucky border. This region is more commonly known as lbl and it's a destination with a reputation for having lots of recreational activities. It spans 170,000 acres of wetlands, open lands and undeveloped forests, which I don't know about you sounds like a dream to me. Annually, around 1.5 million visitors come here to fish camp, picnic, bird watch, go boating and hike. There are more than 500 miles of trails which are open all year long, weather permitting. If you drive about 45 to 50 minutes southeast of the Park Central Visitor center, you'll end up in the city of Dover, which is located in Stewart County, Tennessee. And it's there in the fall of 1980 that a baffling crime happened that would change a number of people's lives forever. Two half sisters playing hooky from school vanish without a trace. Weeks later, their bodies would be found miles from home in the lbl. But to this day, the truth about what really happened to them and who came across their path remains unsolved. But that could be changing. Because you see, I'm not the only journalist who's become obsessed with this case. There's an entire investigative series podcast about this story called Murder at Land between the Lakes, which is hosted by Amelia Courtney and Laney Sullivan. If you want to go even deeper into this case, check out their podcast because it's super in depth. Amelia is very close with the victim's surviving family members and she, she was immensely helpful in bringing me up to speed so that I could complete my own coverage of this case. And let me tell you, even though there's limits to what you can find out about this crime on the Internet, I'm told there are plenty of people in Tennessee and Kentucky who are still talking about it. And maybe, just maybe, you, the listener, might hold that one detail or tidbit of information that law enforcement needs to take this story from being a cold case to a solved case. This is Park Predators. On Wednesday evening, September 17, 1980, 22 year old Trish Gordon was at work in Henry County, Tennessee when she got a call from her 17 year old brother Roger, who asking if she'd spoken with or seen their teenage sisters, Vicki Stout and Carla Atkins. Trish replied that she hadn't seen the girls that day and asked her brother to explain what was going on. Roger told her that a few hours earlier, around 3:15pm Vicki and Carla had walked to a convenience store right up the street from their house in Dover, Tennessee. They'd gone to buy cigarettes but hadn't come home. He wanted to know if maybe they were at Trish's house or with friends where the family used to live in Paris, which was only about a half hour away. At the time, Trish was married and living in Paris, but Roger and the girls still lived at home with their mom in a trailer off of Route 2, along with their older brother Randy, who was in his early 20s, and younger brothers Brian and Joel, who were children. The family was a bit of a blended one with lots of kids who were different ages. Trish, Randy, Roger, 16 year old Vicki and another one of their siblings named Deborah all shared the same dad and mom. But after their father died when Trish was about 6 years old, their mom Margie had remarried a guy named William with whom she'd had 14 year old Carla and the Younger boys, Joel and Brian. So in relation to Trish, Vicki was her biological sister and Carla was her half sister. In September 1980, Trish and Deborah were both married and living with their spouses in neighboring Henry County. But sometimes Carla and Vicki would visit Trish or their friends where they'd all previously lived in Paris. But on that particular afternoon, the girls seemingly hadn't left over. By nightfall, they were still not home, so Margie dialed the Stewart County Sheriff's Office to report them missing. Trish told me during our interview that deputies from that agency didn't immediately take a missing persons report for the girls or dispatch units to look for them. It was only after their mom called back the next morning that the Sheriff's office finally got on the ball and sent the sheriff and a youth services officer out to Vicki and carla's house around 10am or so. The youth services officer had interacted with the girls on prior occasions, most notably for reports of them skipping school. You see, Carla and Vicki had developed a habit of playing hooky from class. And in fact, on the day they vanished, they'd arranged to skip out on school once again. Their sister Trish and Amelia Courtney, one of the hosts for Murder at Land between the Lakes podcast, told me that in June or July of 1980, so a few months prior to the girls going missing, Randy, their older brother and Vicky's boyfriend at the time, a guy named Randall, had gotten in trouble for a cannabis related offense. On September 17, the boys were due back in court for that charge and planned to turn themselves over to authorities, which they did. I'm told they served about two weeks in jail in relation to that offense. And so the girls had decided that day they'd wanted to spend as much time as they could with the guys before Randall and Randy headed to jail. According to what Amelia told me, Vicky in particular was super upset to see them go because she suspected she might have been pregnant with Randall's child. That turned out not to be the case. But Randall, who was about five or six years older than Vicki, later told Amelia that when he last saw Vicky and Carla before walking into court, he was under the impression he was gonna have a kid with Vicky because that's what she'd told him when they'd parted ways that Wednesday. Anyway, I don't know if the girl's hanging out with Randall and Randy was information law enforcement knew about or took into account in terms of their overall timeline for that day. But from speaking with the girl's mother and siblings, investigators learned that they'd left their home around 3:15pm and headed in the direction of a convenience store called the Furnace. They planned to buy cigarettes and presumably come right back. Now, the Furnace was more than just your average mini mart, according to Trish, it was a place where a lot of young people and teenagers in Stewart county would hang out. You could buy snacks, cigarettes, play pool and just be with other kids around the same age. Vicki and Carla had both been to this spot numerous times in the past, so so making the trip there on that Wednesday afternoon wasn't out of the ordinary for them. The girls were super close and were pretty much together all the time. They were sandwiched between brothers of varying ages and didn't have their older sisters Deborah and Trish at home to gravitate towards. So to me, I can totally see why they stuck together all the time. Anyway, when the Youth services officer went to the Furnace and interviewed the owner, he claimed that the girls had left the store around 3:30pm Walking down Highway 79 in the direction of where they lived. When authorities spoke with a woman whose house was close to the store, she said that she'd seen Vicki and Carla speaking with someone in, or possibly getting into an older model blue pickup truck. She said that truck had a rifle rack on the back and claimed that the vehicle was being driven by a young white man, which wasn't the most detailed description, but it was at least a start. Authorities brought in a sketch artist to create a composite sketch based on the witness's description, but it wasn't very helpful. The description of the driver was that he was white with brown hair and possibly a tan complexion. He was 25 to 30 years old and weighed between 165 and 170 pounds. The description was, like I said, kind of vague because it favored a number of young men residing in Dover at that time. According to Trish, the way in which authorities distributed the sketch and information to the public was also unhelpful. She told me that her family wasn't even made aware that a sketch was done and when they did find out about it later in the investigation, they learned it had only been circulated in Henry county, not Stewart County. Which was puzzling because where Vicki and Carla lived and disappeared from was in Stewart County. Amelia Courtney told me during our interview that a tip she and her co host received while producing their podcast resulted in them being directed to a local district attorney who pulled a never before seen case file from a local judge's home which contained a law enforcement report about a second witness sighting of the mystery man in the blue truck. She said that, according to that document, A man who'd been driving behind the blue pickup said he'd seen Carla and Vicki get into that vehicle. And because he'd been in closer proximity to the mystery man, he was able to provide authorities with a much better description of the driver. That information, though, was never reflected in news coverage or flyers distributed back in 1980. But the fact that the girls had a history of skipping school and had seemingly jumped into a stranger's truck made authorities begin to wonder if maybe they'd just run off with a friend. Amelia Courtney told me that, based on her work, she assumed that the sheriff's office's date theory early on was that the girls were, in fact, runaways. And that was a theory news coverage about this case also reported. So the sense of urgency to find the pair wasn't all that high for law enforcement right after they vanished. But to their immediate family, Vicki and Carla's absence was extremely concerning. Trish told me she and her siblings questioned everyone they knew to figure out if anyone had seen the girls or heard if they were planning to run away. And, of course, no one had. What exactly law enforcement did in the first few days of the investigation is unclear. News coverage from September 1980 is limited. But according to one article I read, by the end of September, nearly 10 days after Carla and Vicki were reported missing, deputies were reportedly actively looking for them. However, from their sister Tricia's perspective, it didn't seem like deputies were really doing all that much. She told me that initially, her family assumed authorities had organized a formal search party after the girls were reported missing. But she was later informed that wasn't the case. To her knowledge, Stewart county deputies didn't put up any roadblocks or dispatch deputies to check areas surrounding the furnace. In the years since, Trish has not been able to find a single person who can confirm they were ever part of a formal search party for Vicki and Carla in those critical first few few days, which makes her think that an organized effort by the sheriff's office never actually happened. The only thing we know for sure, or that was at least documented, was that at some point, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation was called in to help Stewart County. The special agent put in charge of the investigation was a local man named Jack Charlton. Trish told me she definitely remembers Jack because he visited her family in person at least one time after the girls disappeared, and he remained a key figure in the case for several years. But even with additional resources coming in, there were some unique challenges. Facing investigators. For one thing, people would often get the girls confused. Even though Carla was younger, by about two years, she was taller and bigger boned than Vicki. Trish told me that Vicki's father was a small framed man and Vicki took after him. So when people saw her next to Carla, they often assumed Carla was 16 and Vicki was 14. But it was actually the opposite. When they'd last been seen. Vicky was described as weighing about 90 pounds with brown hair and blue eyes. She was wearing a blouse, flip flops with dark jeans, a yellowish gold chain necklace and stood about 5ft 2 inches tall. Carla was said to be about 5ft 5 inches tall, 130 pounds and had brown hair and blue eyes. She'd last been seen wearing a red checked shirt, blue jeans and blue track shoes. For 18 long days, their whereabouts were unknown, no one in their family saw them and their names faded from newspaper headlines. But then, on the afternoon of October 5, 1980, everything changed. Look, starting something new, especially a business, can be intimidating. You have to wear multiple hats and the number of tasks you have to juggle can get overwhelming pretty fast. Fortunately, we live in the day and age of Shopify. The platform acts as your built in business partner and simplifies all your tasks. It also acts as your own personal marketing team, creating email and social campaigns to reach customers wherever they're scrolling. Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide, driving 10% of US E. Commerce from household names like the Audio Chuck Shop to creators just getting started. So start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com parkpredators go to shopify.com parkpredators that's shopify.com parkpredators. On Sunday evening, October 5th, Trish got a phone call from one of her aunts with an update about Vicki and Carla, and the news was grim. Her aunt informed her that shortly before 4pm a husband and wife who'd been hiking in land between the Lakes National Recreation Area just northwest of Dover had come across the decomposed bodies of her teenage sisters after noticing a bad smell. When Trish heard this news, she got ahold of her other sister, Deborah, and together they drove to the scene to meet up with their 17 year old brother, Roger. You see, not long after the hikers had called authorities, Stewart County Sheriff and TBI agent Jack Charlton had visited the family's house in Dover and summoned Roger to come with them to confirm Vicki and Carla's identities. Because their Remains were so decomposed, Roger had only been able to tentatively ID his sisters from the clothing that had been found with them. Where the girls were discovered was in an area known as Lost Creek, which was where a lot of people would go to party. Trish described it to me as kind of off the beaten path and a spot that folks would frequently visit to drink, smoke cannabis, and swim. Roger told Trish that when he'd arrived with the sheriff and TBI agent Jack Charlton, Carla was the first one they'd come across. She'd been left near the edge of the roadway and appeared to have been shot in the face at close range with a shotgun. About 75ft away from her, down a nearby hill, was Vicki. Her remains indicated she'd been shot in the back of her head with a shotgun and fallen face down. Both girls skeletonized bodies were situated between logs and appeared to have been covered with leaves. Roger said that along with the girl's remains, Jack Charlton and the sheriff collected several shotgun shells, as well as a shotgun ammo wad, a soft drink bottle, a cigarette pack, and cigarette butts. There was also a light blue stain on a tree that investigators determined was at the right height where it might have come from a vehicle. Roger told Trish that all the evidence was bagged up and placed into the back of the TBI agent's car. He and the investigators also saw tire track marks near the bodies. But according to Trish, Roger said the sheriff and Jack Charlton had driven their vehicles through those tracks in order to navigate the rugged terrain. So that evidence, if it was related to what happened to the girls, was obliterated almost immediately. By the following day, the girls remains were removed from the scene and transported to Memphis for autopsies. Based on the deteriorated state of their bodies, dental records were used to formally identify them, and the ME Estimated that they'd likely been killed the same day they vanished. Their autopsy reports state that they'd both died from shotgun wounds to the head and their manners of death were homicide. The pathologist who examined their bodies recovered several shotgun pellets from their hair and skulls. But further analysis of that evidence would likely be limited because shotgun ammunition is notoriously difficult to do. Ballistics testing on the clothing and items found with Carla's remains included a blue tennis shoe, blue jean like pants, a pair of underwear, a sock, a pink comb, a belt, a bra, and a red checked shirt. The clothing and personal items found with Vicki included a blouse, underwear, blue jean type pants, and a gold and mint green necklace that was still around her Neck. Additional notes in the autopsy report indicate some hair fragments were found scattered around Karla and those were sent to the lab for testing. But what the results were is unclear. The autopsy reports were difficult to interpret, but based on what I saw, it seems that testing might have been done on both girls underwear to determine the presence of semen. However, the word negative and the phrase no work performed is typed next to some of the samples for both girls. So I'm not 100% sure what, if any, actual testing was done. But Amelia Courtney, co host of the Murder at Land between the Lakes podcast, told me that she later learned some semen was found on the back of Carla's bra and the back of her shirt. But who the semen belonged to, when it got there or when that information was discovered is not something I can corroborate with the source material I could find. So whether either victim was sexually assaulted or not remains a bit of a question mark in this case. Interestingly, towards the end of Carla's autopsy report, there's a short handwritten note that states TBI agent Jack Charlton told the ME that Carla's boyfriend had given her a silver necklace recently and that she hadn't taken it off her neck since he gave it to her. Now, when Trish and Amelia first read that note years after the murders, they were completely baffled for a couple of different reasons. One, no one in Trish's family knew about this silver necklace, so they couldn't understand how Jack Charlton did. And two, at the time of the girl's abduction and murders, Carla reportedly wasn't dating anyone. Now, I guess it's possible the necklace may have come from a prior boyfriend, but as far as Carla and Vicky's family was aware, she wasn't in a relationship at the time of her death. In fact, it was kind of the opposite. Amelia Courtney interviewed her best friend from back in the day, a woman named Ivana, and she said that Carla didn't have a boyfriend in September 1980. So seems to me that kind of contradicts what official records say, or at least what Jack Charlton provided the ME but regardless of Carla's relationship status at the time, what troubled Amelia and Trish so much about this necklace detail was that the official paperwork denotes Jack Charlton as providing the info about the necklace being missing to the Emmy, which seems to indicate he knew it was missing from Carla's body. But the question Amelia and Trish kept asking themselves was, how would he know that had he seen it himself? That didn't seem likely because Trish told me that Jack didn't even know their family. He was an older man and didn't regularly interact with Margie and the kids. So the only alternative was that maybe he'd spoken with someone who told him about the necklace. And that opened up a whole new set of questions for Trish and Amelia. Because, you see, they've learned in recent years that Jack Charlton wasn't just the lead TBI agent over the case. He was also associated with a young man who'd previously harassed Carla and Vicki. The girl's mom, Margie, told Commercial Appeal reporter Charles Crouch that prior to moving to Dover, the family had lived about 40 minutes away in Paris, Tennessee, in a neighborhood that was kind of rough and not a desirable place to raise kids. So in an effort to get out of that situation, Margie had uprooted and moved everyone to Dover. However, about six weeks before moving into the trailer that Vicki and Carla lived in at the time of their disappearance, Margie and her kids had lived in another trailer behind a local drive in restaurant in Dover called the Dairy Dip. That establishment was a place that people would gather to party on a regular basis, and oftentimes those activities would spill over into the family's front yard. Randy, the girl's older brother, was a bit of a partier himself and seemingly irregular at the Dairy Dip. And so sometimes he'd invite people over and keep the good times rolling. Well, one night, not too long before the girls disappeared, Vicki and Carla were home when a young man in his early 20s who I'll call Dean, showed up outside their trailer hollering and cussing at them to come outside. The situation was so alarming that law enforcement was called and showed up to speak with Dean. Instead of arresting him, though, the responding officer just wrote Dean a complaint card and then left. But not long after that, when Margie moved the family to the trailer the girls lived in at the time of their disappearance, Dean did the same thing. He showed up randomly and yelled at the girls. Trish told me she never got a clear story about why Deen was so mad or what his deal was. But she heard two different rumors that he might have either dated Carla at one point or was possibly tied up with some drug stuff the girl's older brother Randy, was associated with. She doesn't know for sure, but what she and Amelia did confirm is that at the time of the second incident, the police officer who responded and dealt with Dean later told Trish and Amelia in an interview that he wrote Dean another complaint card for his actions. However, that officer regrets not arresting him at that point because of what would later happen to Carla and Vicky. And you want to know something else, Wild? The complaint cards about Dean's two incidents with the girls are not in any of the case files. As far as Trish and Amelia are aware of, they just, poof, vanished with time. What's even wilder is that, according to Trish, her family later learned that all the physical evidence that was found with the girl's remains, you know, the shotgun shells, wadding cigarette packs, cigarette butts, and so forth. Well, allegedly, all that stuff mysteriously vanished from TBI agent Jack Charlton's car before it ever made it to the TBI's crime lab. Trish said that Jack later claimed the items had been stolen. And to this day, no one knows for sure what really happened to the stuff. For years, Trish's family had no idea what was going on with Vicki and Carla's case. Tennessee's governor in 1980 announced the creation of a $2,500 reward for information. But no one came forward to claim that money, and the case languished. Trish told me she remembers Stewart county sheriff and the Youth Services officer who first worked the murders came by once just to tell her they were still investigating. But after that, it was pretty much radio silence. In 1993, the Sheriff's Office announced it was looking into a convicted felon from Benton County, Tennessee, who was part of a known family of criminals as a possible suspect because he was suspected in several murders during the 80s, but. But he wasn't formally charged in the girl's case. However, that guy reportedly drove a blue pickup truck in 1980 and lived near Paris when Carla and Vicki were killed. Trish told me that the man's name stayed on a list of possible suspects for a number of years, but investigators later seemingly lost interest or eliminated him entirely. A former Stewart county deputy named John Vinson, who became the sheriff in 1996, told Tennessean reporter Paul Oldham that Stewart county had handed over its entire case file to the TBI by then. His personal theory about what happened to the girls was that maybe Carla or Vicki were shot in some sort of accident gone wrong. Vinson surmised that the suspect had likely shot the first victim unintentionally, but her death caused the other teen to panic, and so she ran, prompting the killer to then take her out so she couldn't alert authorities. Vincent explained his theory like this quote. The girls were picked up by someone they knew, one man. As they walked back toward home that fateful day. Whoever they met, enticed them to ride with him to the secluded spa. Maybe they were enticed with a promise of drugs, money, cigarettes, tapes, or something that interested one or both of the girls. Once he had the girls at the secluded spot, for some reason the murderer had a shotgun and for some reason had the gun trained on one of the girls, end quote. It was also possible two people might have been involved in the crime. And if that were the case, then the shooter's accomplice would be the key to solving the murders. Regarding this theory, Vinson remarked, quote, if only one person is involved without a witness, it will be hard to ever solve. If more than one person was involved, one of them may eventually tell on the other, end quote. And according to what Trish, Amelia Courtney and her co host Lainey have dug up, Vincent's prediction seemingly came true. Oh no. My coffee. Bronnie here. New brawny 3 ply is now more absorbent. Wow.