The Vanishing of Janis Rose | 1. Like a Ghost

Summary

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The Vanishing of Janis Rose | Episode 1: “Like a Ghost”

Podcast: The Binge Crimes: The Vanishing of Janis Rose
Host: Larison Campbell (Sony Music Entertainment)
Release Date: September 2, 2025
Episode: 1 – “Like a Ghost”

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Episode Overview

The premiere episode of “The Vanishing of Janis Rose” peers into the unexplained disappearance of Janis Rose Bullock, a young mother of four from small-town Mississippi, who vanished in the 1970s. Host Larison Campbell delves into the social dynamics and secrets of Columbia, MS, unraveling a four-decade-old mystery that spans multiple states, marriages, and brushes with the criminal underworld. Through interviews, personal reflection, and archival research, Campbell introduces Janis’s world, the circumstances of her disappearance, and the enduring consequences for her family and community.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Enigma of Janis Rose (01:01–05:40)

• Campbell opens with reflections on the unknowability of people, quoting Oscar Wilde:

  “The final mystery is oneself. ... Because of course, if we never know ourselves, how can anyone else?” (01:24)

• Janis’s move to Columbia in summer 1970 coincides with a literal and metaphorical storm, suggesting her disappearance may have been foreshadowed by chaos.
• In 1970s Columbia, social norms are strict—stores close midweek, premarital sex is taboo, and everyone knows everyone else.
• Janis’s sudden absence shocks the community; local gossip fills the void as years pass with no answers.

Social Context & Host’s Personal Connection (05:40–06:31)

• The case’s personal resonance for Campbell is clear—she too is from a small Mississippi town, familiar with secrets hidden in plain sight:

  “I know better than most how easy it is to hide darkness where no one is looking for it.” (05:32)

• The search for Janis spans “three states ... two families ... even onto the trail of the most prolific serial killer in history.” (05:51)
• Early narrative teases include possible fraud, identity theft, and serial murder.

The Day Janis Disappeared (06:31–13:32)

• Janis’s best friend since eighth grade, Kathy Ford, recounts the day she received a confusing phone call from Janis’s sister and the unsettling realization:

  “I didn’t think she would have left her children.” (08:42)

• Kathy and Janis’s family become worried when it’s revealed Glenn, Janis’s husband, has all four children, but Janis is gone.
• Various rumors and “ghost stories” emerge—a supposed sighting in a Jackson café where Janis denies her identity (12:12–12:44), sightings of her in a red car, or with a truck driver, adding to the confusion and pain:

  “These encounters sound like ghost stories. And maybe that’s how Janis was starting to seem too. Like a ghost.” (13:19)

Family & Small-Town Dynamics (13:32–15:35)

• Janis’s large, well-known family in Columbia makes her disappearance an especially public and painful affair.
• Eventually, Kathy and Janis’s mother resign themselves to the worst:

  “Somebody had murdered her. ... And her mother said someone must have killed her.” (15:23)

Suspicion Falls on Glenn (15:35–19:34)

• Glenn, Janis’s high school sweetheart and eventual husband, rapidly remarries after Janis’s disappearance—specifically to a much younger woman, possibly the family babysitter:

  “He divorced her for desertion and then he married the babysitter.” (17:30)

• Kathy and others retrospectively analyze Glenn and Janis’s relationship, piecing together his perceived emotional distance and Janis’s lively personality.

Janis’s Attempt to Leave (20:32–23:27)

• Janis once left Glenn and moved into her own apartment, taking some of the children.

  “She’s like, nothing. I’m like, has he hit you? No. Are you sure? I, I’m sure. Does he drink? No. I just don’t want to be married anymore.” (23:03)

• Kathy is shocked; such moves were unheard of in 1970s Mississippi, where legal and social norms heavily favored men.

  “Glen had the upper hand. And from where Kathy was sitting, he intended to keep it.” (24:04)

Community Judgment, Rumors, and Aftermath (24:24–27:00)

• Janis ultimately returns to Glenn for a while, but happiness is evasive. Eventually, Glenn gets custody of the children.
• Glenn never calls Janis’s friends looking for her. Kathy is left convinced Glenn didn’t want Janis found, fueling rumors of foul play:

  “I thought he was glad she was gone and left the children. And I thought if he killed her, it’s because he didn’t want her to take the children.” (26:21)

• Third of women murdered in the U.S. are killed by intimate partners—an ominous statistic.

A New Lead Decades Later (27:00–30:19)

• In 2017, a message from an amateur sleuth revives the investigation. The case is handed to Major Mark Ogden at the Pearl River County Sheriff’s Department.
• Ogden’s investigation reveals that the original disappearance was barely documented—no missing persons report until 2017.

Major Mark Ogden’s Investigation (30:19–35:23)

• Ogden starts his inquiry by interviewing Janis’s daughters—now adults still searching for answers:

  “She said, you know, I don’t know if she’s alive or dead. I want to know. I said, we’ll try.” (30:19)

• Society columns and court filings reconstruct Janis’s life; her last public mention is a 1974 classified ad about divorce proceedings.
• Ultimately, her trail ends in bureaucracy—a lingering custody hearing she never attends.

Eliminating Glenn as a Suspect (33:10–33:59)

• Ogden interviews Glenn and finds “absolutely nothing there that said he did anything other than the right thing.” (Major Mark Ogden, 33:41)
• Ogden is left without suspects and with more questions.

Chilling Discoveries (34:30–35:23)

• Further investigation reveals Janis’s Social Security number hasn’t surfaced since the 1970s—a sign she may have died.

  “No bank account. That means no tax form. ... No use, no nothing. ... I thought we were going to find a headstone if we're lucky.” (34:30)

• Hints emerge of another man in Janis’s life—a murderer—suggesting the story is just beginning.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Identity and the Unknown:

  “Maybe the real self is more elusive. Of all the great Oscar Wilde quotes, there’s this one—‘the final mystery is oneself.’”
  — Larison Campbell (01:08)

• Kathy on Janis Leaving:

  “I didn’t think she would have left her children.” (08:42)

• On Small-Town Life:

  “If you didn’t know Janis, you probably knew one of her sisters, a cousin, or her mom who worked down at the hardware store.”
  — Larison Campbell (10:50)

• Kathy After Decades of Mystery:

  “Somebody had murdered her. ... Her mother said someone must have killed her.” (15:23)

• Major Mark Ogden on Glenn:

  “Absolutely nothing there that said he did anything other than the right thing. ... I did not feel like he had anything to do with it.” (33:41)

• Chilling New Evidence:

  “The Social Security number ... had been used since the seventies. ... No use, no nothing. ... I thought we were going to find a headstone if we’re lucky.”
  — Major Mark Ogden (34:30)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Opening/Theme Framing: 01:01–05:40
• The Disappearance & Initial Reactions: 06:31–13:32
• Community Rumors & Ghost Stories: 13:32–15:35
• Suspicions About Glenn: 15:35–19:34
• Janis’s Attempted Separation & Return: 20:32–25:08
• Town Judgment and Aftermath: 25:08–27:00
• The Revival of the Cold Case: 27:00–30:19
• Major Ogden’s Case Review: 30:19–33:59
• Ogden’s Chilling Discovery: 34:30–35:23

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Tone and Style

The episode is investigative yet intimate, mixing methodical unraveling of clues with deep empathy for its subjects. Larison Campbell’s narration is thoughtful, sometimes tinged with melancholy and Southern familiarity.

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Summary Takeaways

• Janis Rose’s disappearance is a haunting mystery, intertwining family secrets, small-town dynamics, shifting social expectations, and unresolved grief.
• The narrative explores both the facts and emotional consequences of Janis’s vanishing, placing her daughters, friends, and even skeptical law enforcement at the heart of the investigation.
• As the investigation picks up decades later, rumors and records lead only to more difficult questions—and a final twist points toward possible entanglement with a known murderer.

This first episode lays a rich groundwork for a story filled with emotional complexity, surprising twists, and a search for truth that spans generations.

Transcript

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[Larison Campbell]

Listen to all episodes of the Vanishing of Janice Rose ad free right now by subscribing to the Binge. Visit the Binge channel on Apple Podcast and hit subscribe at the top of the page or visit getthebinge.com to get access. Wherever you listen the Binge feed your true crime obsession.

[Kathy Ford]

The Binge.

[Larison Campbell]

What is it that makes us feel like we know someone? Is it their laugh? Their favorite swear words? How they show up for us? Or is all that just window dressing that changes with the seasons of our lives? Maybe the real self is more elusive. Of all the great Oscar Wilde quotes, there's this one the final mystery is oneself. It's an interesting and kind of terrifying idea. Because of course, if we never know ourselves, how can anyone else? And it's that idea, that mystery, that sucked me into this story. When I first heard about Janice Rose Bullock, I had to find out what had happened to her and why it had all gone so wrong. It's the summer of 1970, South Mississippi. Janice Rose Bullock is a young mom. She and her husband and their four daughters are moving into a new house nestled in a grove of pine trees outside of a tiny town called Columbia. That same summer, a rare cold front moved in on the county. On a Saturday in July, the heavens opened up. Hurricane force winds snapped pine trees like toothpicks and ripped billboards off their posts. South of town, a dust storm blanketed the streets. And then the storm passed. Business owners repaired their signs. Residents turned the felled trees into firewood because this was Columbia, a picture perfect community, and things had this way of working out. Until they didn't. Outside, it might have been the 1970s with long haired men, protest, and feminism, but in downtown Columbia, stores still closed at noon on Wednesday so people could go fishing. Women didn't need the pill because you didn't have sex until marriage. And after marriage, well, children are a blessing. If you saw Janice in downtown Columbia, at the drugstore or the beauty parlor, you'd probably think she was made for this mold. A gorgeous woman who'd married her handsome high school sweetheart. Or maybe that was just window dressing. And the storm that coincided with Janice's arrival wasn't a brief aberration, but an omen. Because after the storm, Janice would disappear, and it would be four decades before anyone began to learn what happened. All the town knew was that one day she was there playing with her kids on the floor. The next, she was gone. Four girls were left without a mom, and the local gossips were left with plenty of theories. Over time, clues would emerge, but no answers. And most importantly, no Janice. I've become fascinated with this mystery. You could probably even say obsessed. And I have my reasons. Like Janice, I'm also from small town Mississippi. I know what it's like to spend your childhood with the same tiny cluster of kids. To run into your doctor at the supermarket and the church and then a dinner party. I know the social dynamics and expectations. And I also know better than most how easy it is to hide darkness where no one is looking for it. And in those unseen corners where secrets are kept, lies, deception and murder run rampant. And yet, nothing prepared me for this. The search for Janice Rose Bullock. It's a mystery that has taken me across three states. It did have the state of Louisiana on it, though. And into two families.

[Major Mark Ogden]

His daughters wanted to find their mom.

[Larison Campbell]

Even onto the trail of the most prolific serial killer in history.

[Kathy Ford]

She needed to get away because she was afraid of him.

[Larison Campbell]

The search for Janice sucked me into a world built on fraud and stolen identities.

[Major Mark Ogden]

It feels like I was on one of them TV shows, Unsolved Mysteries. It just dead end after dead end.

[Larison Campbell]

And just when it seemed like it couldn't get any weirder, it did. You just can't go one day and.

[Jonathan Van Ness]

Come back with a baby. Did she steal him?

[Kathy Ford]

Did she. She buy him, get a room, get.

[Major Mark Ogden]

Him some alcohol, and then go kill at night?

[Kathy Ford]

He knew that people thought that he killed her.

[Larison Campbell]

I don't even know what to call.

[Kathy Ford]

Him, to be honest. I don't know.

[Larison Campbell]

Cause it's twisted.

[Kathy Ford]

Trust me.

[Larison Campbell]

From Sony Music Entertainment and Wild Night Media, you're listening to the Vanishing of Janice Rose. This is episode one, Like a Ghost. I'm Larison Campbell. It's the middle of the afternoon when Kathy Ford's phone starts ringing. She just got her daughter down for a nap, so she dashes down the hallway to get it, jogging over her quintessential 70s gold shag carpet, past the harvest gold striped wallpaper. And she reaches for her matching harvest gold rotary phone on the wall. Kathy rips the receiver off the hook. Hello, It's Janice's sister on the line. She's calm, but her question is strange.

[Kathy Ford]

Have you heard from Janice? And I'm like, no, Kathy Is probably.

[Larison Campbell]

One of the first people Janice's family reaches out to. They were best friends, had been so since eighth grade. No, Kathy says she hasn't heard from Janice, but that's not that weird. Janice and Kathy don't check in every day. They're young moms. Routine is more of a theory than a practice, especially for Janice. Which is why Kathy's first thought is that maybe Janice took her girls on a last minute trip.

[Kathy Ford]

I said, maybe she went to New Orleans or something with the kids.

[Larison Campbell]

Janice has family down there and her husband Glen works long hours during the week, so that's probably where they went.

[Kathy Ford]

She said, no. She said, the kids are with Glen. I said, the little one? She said, no, all four of the kids are with Glen.

[Larison Campbell]

Janice isn't with her girls. Okay, Now Kathy's concerned. She stretches out the phone's extra long cord and drops into a stool at their bar. Janice is gone and no one seems to be able to find her.

[Kathy Ford]

And then I was worried because I didn't think she would have left her children.

[Larison Campbell]

And she surely would have told her best friend if she was leaving on a big trip, right?

[Kathy Ford]

Why wouldn't she call me? You know, I would have expected her.

[Larison Campbell]

To call me, Especially if she planned to leave her kids behind.

[Kathy Ford]

I said, yeah, you know, she would not leave those kids.

[Larison Campbell]

But Janice's kids were at home with their dad, all four of them, and Janice wasn't. And that could only mean one thing to Kathy. Something had to have happened to Janice. Kathy still remembers the way the conversation shifted as they realized Janice's disappearance wasn't just weird. Weird, it was bad. But what Kathy didn't know then was just how bad it would get. At least one of her family members say they went to the police, told them she was gone, filed a report. As one story goes, Janice put her daughters on the school bus one day and she was never seen again. I've also heard she took the kids to a neighbor's and then disappeared. Either way, they don't see her again. It's the kind of story that never made sense to Janice's best friend. She remembers her as this laid back mom.

[Kathy Ford]

They were well behaved and they played good with my daughter. And I was there one time and they wanted to finger paint my child. And her three sat on the kitchen floor. There was paint on the floor everywhere. I was just like, oh my God. But Janice, you know, to her it was just like no big thing, you know, if their toys were out, it's no big thing. They're you know, that didn't stress her.

[Larison Campbell]

There's always a chance Janice left on her own, and maybe she'd planned to come back or she got caught up in something she couldn't get out of. But even if Janice had left on her own, they still needed to find her, right? A mother of four was missing. The current police file on Janice's disappearance totals 300 pages, but every single note in that case file comes from decades after Janice went missing. Her family says they reported her missing, but the police either didn't take it seriously or not seriously enough to keep investigating or keep track of their records for a while. The only real updates are via town gossip. Janice comes from a big family in Columbia, Mississippi. She's the baby of six kids. If you didn't know Janice, you probably knew one of her sisters, a cousin, or her mom who worked down at the hardware store. Her high school was small, some 20 kids to a class. So when word got out that she was missing, people weren't just saying Janice, but Glenn Bullock's wife, Becky's sister, Minnie's daughter. Then one day, Kathy gets another shocking call. An old friend was passing through Jackson A, about an hour and a half.

[Kathy Ford]

From their hometown, and they went to a cafe for lunch.

[Larison Campbell]

He looks over at a table and has to do a double take, because sitting right before his eyes is a face he knows well.

[Kathy Ford]

He said a group of people looked like secretaries sitting at a table, eating chit, chatting. And he said, that was Janice.

[Larison Campbell]

Janice.

[Kathy Ford]

She was well dressed. She looked good. And so he walked over and he said, janice. And she said, I don't know you. And he's like, yeah, Janice, you know, Janice Swayze. She said, I don't know who you're talking about.

[Larison Campbell]

So now he's mad.

[Kathy Ford]

He was angry at her for leaving the kids, so he persisted. No, no, no. I know you. You know me. And she got up and. And walked out and left, and he tried to follow her out.

[Larison Campbell]

Kathy sits there hearing the story and can't quite believe it. Like, what if he's right? That he had just for a second, stepped into a portal where Janice was alive and well? I mean, they'd all ridden the same school bus.

[Kathy Ford]

You're together every single day, morning and evening. And. And they went to. Both went to Pineberg Baptist Church, you know, and he dated Janice. I dated him. I mean, it was a small. So he knew her well.

[Larison Campbell]

Yeah, he would, wouldn't he? But this story wouldn't solve the mystery. It would only deepen it. What would make Janice leave Maybe Kathy was the one who didn't know her best friend. Was she just out there living life as a secretary? Some kind of break with reality, amnesia? And then there were other Janice sightings. Like this guy who said he saw her driving by, honking and waving from a red car. Some of the other rumors stretch the bounds of credibility. In one, a relative gets a call from a young woman claiming that Janice might be on the road with a truck driver. When she goes to the address just a town or so over to check out the rumor, a woman living there has a picture of Janice, but no Janice. Janice isn't there. These encounters sound like ghost stories. And maybe that's how Janice was starting to seem too. Like a ghost. You'll catch sight of her, but as soon as you're close enough to touch her, you realize it's just smoke. If Janice were close by, wouldn't she reach out? Janice's longtime best friend, Kathy chalks up all this gossip and speculation to just that. Talk. Wishful thinking. The way after a loved one dies, you'll think you'll glimpse them in a crowd. Because by now, Kathy has accepted that there is one real possibility.

[Kathy Ford]

Somebody had murdered her. I went to visit her mother. Maybe that's what made me see that. And her mother said someone must have killed her.

[Larison Campbell]

And as much as Kathy didn't want to admit it, this one possibility, it had one likely suspect. The husband, Glenn.

[Kathy Ford]

I know he knew that people thought that he killed her.

[Jonathan Van Ness]

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[Larison Campbell]

The longer Janice was missing, the more the people of Columbia, Mississippi, began to whisper about the man she'd married in high school. Glenn. Janice's best friend. Kathy says despite sharing four daughters, Glenn didn't appear to be anxiously waiting for Janice's return. In fact, not long after, he moves a much younger maternal figure into the house. Ten years younger than him, I guess.

[Kathy Ford]

He divorced her for desertion and then he married the babysitter.

[Larison Campbell]

Yeah, not the best look, by the way. I wasn't able to find another source confirming she was an actual babysitter, but she was 18 at the time, so definitely babysitter aged. Glen didn't want to participate in an interview, but Kathy, she'd been observing Glen and Janice's relationship since high school. It had started, typically enough. Acute flirtation on the basketball bus while traveling to a weight game.

[Kathy Ford]

And our bus didn't have a starter, so we pushed the bus off. And when they popped the clutch and started, we'd all run and get in in a hurry. The girls sat on one side, the boys on the other. Across the aisle there was Glenn.

[Larison Campbell]

Textbook handsome, strong jaw, full lips, a heavy brow that you could describe as brooding. And Janice, beautiful, popular, involved in every school club, always a class favorite, homecoming court.

[Kathy Ford]

All the guys wanted her to be.

[Larison Campbell]

Their girlfriend, and she picks Glenn. But it wasn't like a quarterback dating the cheerleader situation. While Janice was throwing parties at the Lake Pavilion, dancing to Motown, Glenn was quiet, kind of in the background.

[Kathy Ford]

Glen was always more serious and Janice was just playful. He wasn't as, I don't know how to explain, as connected, as bonded with the other in their class like they were the others in our class and the class above us, going to swim holes and do they. We did a lot together, but Glenn did not. For Janice, there was that total acceptance. For him, you know, he had not dated anyone else that I know of. He loved her.

[Larison Campbell]

Did she love him too?

[Kathy Ford]

Yeah.

[Larison Campbell]

Neither were scrutinizing their long term compatibility or red flags. Looking to the future in high school meant counting down the days until the weekend when they get together and double date to the drive in and then the driveway.

[Kathy Ford]

Her mother would let us sit out in the car a little longer, you know, and kiss. Yeah.

[Larison Campbell]

At the time, this all seemed sweet, like Janice was breaking Glen out of his uptight shell. But once Janice disappears, people like Kathy begin scrutinizing anything they'd ever noticed about the two. Glen and Janice get married when they're still in high school and start having kids. A daughter. Then Twin daughters, then another daughter. All of a sudden, Janice is a 20 year old mom. For four kids, she'd barely had time to learn how to be a mom to one. Life is coming at them fast.

[Kathy Ford]

I think things really started to turn when they built the house by his mom.

[Larison Campbell]

This is the house they lived in way out in the country on Glenn's family property. They move in and Glenn's working as a house painter. It's backbreaking physical labor and long hours, but it's what he's got to do to support his big family.

[Kathy Ford]

He worked out of town and she's there by herself with new babies and a toddler.

[Larison Campbell]

And when he's off work, from Kathy's point of view, well, he seemed to just want to decompress.

[Kathy Ford]

He was always hunting or fishing. So he's gone all week and then he's hunting and fishing.

[Larison Campbell]

And now that Janice is gone, like everyone else, Kathy's analyzing every fight, every disagreement Janice had confided about to her. It's what people do when they're desperate for answers. I know this firsthand. I have an unsolved murder in my family over 20 years ago. My own grandmother was killed just a few hours up the road from where Janice disappeared. In my case, this need to know was so consuming that I made a podcast about it, Devil in the Ditch. And what I learned is that it's human nature to try to make sense of tragedy, so we reach for certainty where there isn't any. In the case of my grandmother's murder, the whole town blames someone in my family with scant evidence. So when Kathy tells me about replaying her conversations with Janice, it feels familiar. But this mystery is much bigger because in this case, Janice's loved ones don't even know what happened to her. Could the easiest answer, that her husband had something to do with her disappearance, turn out to be the right one? What started as a sort of opposites attract dynamic between Janice and Glen had calcified. His coolness, had probably started to feel like neglect. Her impulsivity, like irresponsibility. Then one afternoon, Janice calls Kathy with a shocking update, something more consequential than a minor Tiffany. Janice tells her she's left Glenn, moved into her own apartment and taken a couple of the kids with her.

[Kathy Ford]

I was like, why? Why are you leaving him? What did he do to you to make you leave? I mean, that was my attitude. What has he done to make you leave? She's like, nothing. I'm like, has he hit you? No. Are you sure? I, I'm sure. Does he drink? No. I just don't want to be married anymore.

[Larison Campbell]

This blows Kathy's mind. I mean, sure, Glenn could be stiff and self important. He wouldn't have been Kathy's first choice. But this was the seventies in the Deep South. Marriage wasn't a guarantee of happiness. It was about stability and safety. And it seemed like Glenn provided both. Both of those things. This cry for something more was something that women around the country were starting to make. She just didn't want to be married anymore. But Janice was in the wrong place at the wrong time for such a declaration. Even if she tried to get out, she couldn't. Legally, Right now it's 2025, and Mississippi law still doesn't allow a no fault divorce if only one party party wants it. Legally speaking, Glen had the upper hand. And from where Kathy was sitting, he intended to keep it.

[Kathy Ford]

Glenn wanted her back. I know he was angry that she had the children. He wanted his children.

[Larison Campbell]

And the way Kathy saw it, Janice should want to keep her family together.

[Kathy Ford]

And then after so many months, she went back. But I thought, well, maybe whatever was wrong has been fixed.

[Larison Campbell]

But it wasn't so much fixed as buried the way you do when you're in an unhappy marriage. And Kathy will wonder if this decision to save her marriage could have cost Janice her life. One of the last conversations Kathy ever has with Janice about her marriage is at the funeral of an old classmate.

[Kathy Ford]

I said, how are things going? And she said, better. But she didn't really sound like that was really true.

[Larison Campbell]

Afterwards, Kathy's husband tells her he had a dramatic run in with Janice's husband, Glenn.

[Kathy Ford]

He says, man, I can't believe that. Glenn. I said what? He said he really didn't appreciate me talking my wife into leaving me. And Buddy said, no, we, we didn't, we didn't know she was up there till she called us and we tried to talk her into go, no, we. I know you, I know you. You know, he was real, real mean about it. And so Buddy wouldn't go to their house after that.

[Larison Campbell]

And soon there won't be reason for Kathy to go over there either because Janice and Glen will split up for good. Glen will divorce Janice in 1974 before she goes missing. Glen will then get custody of their oldest daughter, Janice, the three younger ones. And then Janice just vanishes. And unlike Janice's sisters, Glen never calls up her best friend looking for her.

[Kathy Ford]

Never. Never. I thought he was glad she was gone and left the children. And I thought if he killed her, it's because he didn't want her to take the children.

[Larison Campbell]

It's not an outlandish theory. After all, a third of women who were murdered in the US Are killed by an intimate partner. No surprise those same stats for men are drastically lower. Then Kathy finds out that Glenn has moved on with that 18 year old.

[Kathy Ford]

When I heard that he married the babysitter, then I was like, oh, it was Clint.

[Larison Campbell]

And for more than 40 years, that's what people in Columbia whispered to each other, even though he was never a suspect. And then one day, things changed. By 2017, Janice's loved ones had stopped hoping they'd find her alive. They just wanted to find her. For decades, they'd had little to go on but town gossip. Until one day, an online sleuth changes everything. She runs a website called Mississippi Missing and Unidentified Persons. On this day, a message appears in her inbox. It's a woman telling her about her grandmother, Janice Rose Bullock, who'd been missing for decades. She passes along the tip to the sheriff's department and they work the case until they find evidence that Janice may have been last seen in Pearl River County, Mississippi. Now that's the same place where it was rumored she'd been out with a truck driver. Town gossip. That's when Major Mark Ogden's phone rings.

[Major Mark Ogden]

Called me and let me know about this case. And I said, send it. We'll look into it.

[Larison Campbell]

Ogden is retired now, but at the time he was overseeing a team of investigators working cases at the Pearl River County Sheriff's Department.

[Major Mark Ogden]

Every now and then, I'd pick one up, like this case came in. It was so old, I signed it to myself to look into. Really didn't think much was going to come out of it, but my guys and girls were out working current cases.

[Larison Campbell]

So Ogden's on the case. He starts by reviewing the file from the department that started the investigation about two years earlier. Inside, he sees a special agent with the FBI had met with Janice's daughters and swabbed their cheeks for DNA.

[Major Mark Ogden]

It was the daughters that started looking for their mother.

[Larison Campbell]

Janice's daughters. When Janice disappeared, they were young. Her oldest daughter wasn't even 10 yet. It's around the same age my twins are right now. So it's easy for me to imagine how much those little girls would have still needed their mom. 10 year olds still wake you up when they've had nightmares and they still absolutely grab for your hand when you're walking. To me, Janice's daughters are what make her disappearance so sad and so odd. One of her daughters told me that their mother's absence colored every part of her childhood. Local gossip didn't help, of course. She didn't know what to feel. She said her dad insisted that looking for Janice was a waste of her time. Time. And he didn't want them to even talk about their mom. Janice left them, he said, and maybe he was right and they should be mad at her. Except, of course, what if something had happened to her? Shouldn't someone look? Ogden reaches out to one of Janice's daughters.

[Major Mark Ogden]

She said, you know, I don't know if she's alive or dead. I want to know. I said, we'll try.

[Larison Campbell]

Turns out that even though Janice has been gone for decades, and even though at least one of her family members went to the police, there was no record of an original missing persons report until one was filed in 2017. What he does have, however, are dozens of unofficial records of Janice's whereabouts before she disappeared. That's because up until she disappeared, Janice and her family were a fixture in the social pages of the newspaper. In the days before Facebook and Instagram, Columbia Society could broadcast their Sunday lunches and summer vacations via the local paper. And it seems like few took advantage of this column more than Janice's family. In Mrs. C.J. fairchild's column, we hear about all the times Janice came over for Sunday lunch, about each time she and Glenn brought a new baby home from the hospital. But if you want more color or context than that, you're out of luck. Like an Instagram post. There's a sense here that people are reporting only what they want their neighbors to discuss. We hear about the family fish fry and the time Janice brought her oldest daughter to attend services at Pineburgh Baptist church. Over the eight years of her marriage to Glenn, Janice appears in Mrs. C.J. fairchild's column 77 times. Her last mention in this paper is different, though. It's not in the column. It's a classified ad that runs in the summer of 1974, summoning Janice to a hearing on the subject of her divorce. This is where the judge grants Janice custody of her three younger girls. Then the investigator Mark Ogden finds another official notice from 1977 summoning Janice to a custody hearing. Records show she never showed up, never appeared to claim custody of her four girls. And so custody is granted to Glen. But even though she wasn't in court, Ogden finds a key detail in the summons.

[Major Mark Ogden]

It said, served.

[Larison Campbell]

He's thinking, okay, great. Now we've got evidence that someone in law enforcement made contact With Janice. Ogden tracks down the deputy who served Janice, hoping he'll remember anything about her circumstances from that time.

[Major Mark Ogden]

But of course, he was dead, so I couldn't talk to him.

[Larison Campbell]

So he pivots and turns to Janice's husband, Glenn, the person some people locally had always wondered about.

[Major Mark Ogden]

Well, he interviewed. I had no reason not to believe him. He worked his butt off trying to, you know, provide for him. And she would run around on him. He'd catch her running around on him. He really had grief with her.

[Larison Campbell]

As he listens to Glenn era's grievances, Ogden doesn't feel a prickle of suspicion. He believes him.

[Major Mark Ogden]

Absolutely nothing there that said he did anything other than the right thing. I did not feel like he had anything to do with it. He was concerned, you know, his daughters wanted to find. Find their mom, of course, and he felt for them, you know, they didn't have any answers.

[Larison Campbell]

So Ogden rules him out. But if Janice's husband didn't kill her, then what happened to her? Did she go somewhere by choice? Or did someone take her? And why was she out with a truck driver or a group of secretaries? And what would be keeping her from coming back? That's when Major Mark Ogden made a disturbing discovery.

[Major Mark Ogden]

The Social Security number, I was able to check that, and it had been used since the 70s. So that means no bank account. That means no tax form. I mean, no. No use, no nothing. So it kind of starting to creep into my mind that she was probably deceased. I thought we were going to find a headstone if we're lucky.

[Larison Campbell]

Not only had her trail gone cold, Ogden discovers something that all but confirms his greatest fears. After her first husband, there was another man in Janice's life, One whose lasting legacy was murder.

[Kathy Ford]

She just all at once told me she. She needed to get away because she was afraid of him.

[Larison Campbell]

Don't want to wait for that next episode. You don't have to unlock all episodes of the Vanishing of Janice Rose ad free right now by subscribing to the Binge podcast channel. Search for the binge on Apple podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page, not on apple. Head to getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen. As a subscriber, you'll get binge access to new stories on the 1st of every month. Check out the binge channel page on apple podcasts or getthebinge.com to learn more. The Vanishing of Janice Rose is produced by Wild Night Media for Sony Music Entertainment's the Benjamin. The show was written hosted and executive produced by ME Larison Campbell. The executive producers for the Binge are Jonathan Hirsch and Catherine St. Louis. The show's senior producer and story editor is Lindsay Kilbride. Sheba Joseph provided additional production assistance and Aaliyah Papes is the story's fact checker. Mixing and sound design for this series by Scott Somerville with music from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. The show's theme song is Shake Me by Lydia Ramsey Legal review by Davis Wright Tremain.