Transcript
Narrator/Advertiser (0:00)
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Sarah Reid (0:32)
It's April 1980 in Manchester, New Hampshire. Manchester is a mill city stitched together by the Merrimack River. The red brick factories stretch long and low against a gray sky. It's the kind of place where the river air clings to your clothes, and the buildings seem to hum with the memories of machines that haven't run in years, brick and mortar and river air, old mill blocks carved into apartments, windows that rattle in the wind. On the west side of town, just a few blocks from the river, the buildings sit close together, like they're huddling against the cold. The building at 289 Merrimack street is one of them, a modest three story New England style multifamily home with white clapboard siding. And inside it's quiet. Not silent, just muffled pipes ticking, a refrigerator humming. The building seems to be waiting. Around 1:15am Headlights sweep across the building as a car eases into a parking space. Judith Raun and her boyfriend step out and head toward the front door of the building. The stairwell is dark. Not dim, completely dark. They climb the stairs anyway, feeling their way up toward the third floor. Investigators would later discover that all of the light bulbs in the stairwell had been unscrewed, and before they even step foot inside the apartment, she can feel it. Something is off. The front door opens easily, too easily. Inside, the air feels wrong, shifted. The back door is wide open, and in the bedroom there's a girl asleep in her daughter's bed, a friend who had been over earlier that night. But her daughter is not there. No sound from the kitchen or the bathroom. No jacket grabbed in a rush, no note on the table. Just an open space where her daughter should be. Her name is Laureen Ron. She's 14 years old, and whatever happened here happened fast. I'm Sarah Reid, and this is sequestered season four. The year is 1980. We're in South Central New Hampshire, and this is the disappearance of Loreen Ron. Do you know any 14 year olds, or do you at least remember being 14, because I do 14. Is that funny in between age where you're not a little kid anymore, but. But you're also not free. You're old enough to want the whole world and yet you're still living under someone else's rules. Laureen Rahn lived with her mom, Judith Rohn, in Manchester, N.H. she went to Parkside Junior High. She got good grades, but she was the kind of kid who can look totally fine at school and still have a whole private world going on underneath. She loved singing and dancing. She dreamed of becoming an actress. For Laureen, it was that kind of dream that isn't just about success. It was about being noticed, being seen. The night she disappeared wasn't supposed to be a night where anything bad happened. It was the first Saturday of her spring break. Judith, her mom was out of town for the day, watching her boyfriend compete in a tennis tournament one town over. Laureen usually went with them, but this time she asked to stay home and Judith said yes. So it's that kind of night. A normal Saturday night. A teenager at home with a little more freedom than usual. And it's not long before a couple of friends stop by. There's drinking beer and wine. The kind of risky, ordinary decisions teens have been making forever. And I want to sit in that for a second because it matters. This case isn't born out of a dramatic final scene. It starts in the small stuff. An apartment, a spring night. Kids passing time like they're adults, assuming tomorrow is guaranteed. Back then, there was no digital trail, no texts or location pings. Instead, Laureen's last hours live in a handful of memories and a handful of details. And those details are about to become everything. Because inside that apartment was nearly everything investigators would ever know and almost nothing they could prove.
