Woman Missing for 14 Years... Found?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
A story that I just saw that I just saw
come across the Ledger here this afternoon, is a very
strange one and it's about a woman who went missing
fourteen years ago in Iowa who has just recently been
found alive and safe here in Nebraska. The police department

(00:21):
that has been doing the work and made this announcement
is the Des Moines Police Department. And luckily enough, I
have a great friend, Sergeant Paul Perezik from the Des
Moin Police Department, who was on our phone line to
talk about this with us today. SARS, first and foremost,
thank you so much for being on our show and
here in Omaha.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yeah, thanks for the invitation.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Man, Can you take me through this case? Because you
guys deal with cold cases all the time, and I
think a lot of people listen to the true crime
podcast and stuff. This is the kind of thing that
people are. You just never really hear somebody resurfacing safely
fourteen years after they've been reported missing.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
And that's probably one of the most compelling pieces of
the investigation. Started out in twenty eleven. Family was traveling
from South Carolina to a town in southern Iowa to
visit some family there. Were two people, the woman that
had gone it eventually goes missing and her partner. We

(01:16):
didn't get a whole heck of a lot of information.
They weren't really familiar with the area. There was no
sign of a crime, but the person that was with
her just said she just left, and we made the
miss person report with a lot of evidence. You know,
the leads drive up pretty quickly, and she was entered
into the national database as a missing person. So if
law enforcement having contact with her, we'd be notified and

(01:38):
we could reunite the people who need to be reunited.
Case goes on with nothing. We do routine audits of
people who are in the system, is missing, or in
the system is wanted, stolen property. That's something that every
agency does. And this case happened to land on one
of our detectives' desks late last week. She hadn't seen

(02:02):
it before. Obviously, she wasn't up there in twenty eleven,
which is I'm gonna dig into this and see what
I could find. And one of the unique things about
investigating now as opposed to fifteen years ago, you know,
we've got a lot more technology on our side. There
are a lot more databases there's more ways to track
people and track addresses and you know those types of things,

(02:22):
you know, that digital footprint that we all leave as
we go through our daily lives. And it was a
long path we ended up to following Leeds to a
couple different towns here in Iowa, back to South Carolina,
to Texas, and then eventually over to Nebraska, where we
did find her and made contact with her, and she
made it very clear that she had voluntarily left and

(02:47):
she hadn't made any big effort to hide, but she
just wanted to be left alone while she worked through
some family things. And the next thing, you know, it's
fifteen years later.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
We were careful, yeah, you know, one of the things
about it was we were careful not to share too
much information about where Nebraska she is, because she did
say she wants to be left alone, she's working through
some family stuff. But when we talk to the rest
of her family, they were all very supportive of that.
They were just very relieved to have that peace of

(03:17):
mind that nothing bad had happened to her. So that's
kind of the special thing about the case. And we
also wanted to make sure and I know that the
Omaha Police department. We follow them on social media. We've
got a great working relationship with them. We know that
they follow these cases as well, and sometimes, you know,
as they pay they fade from the public eyes. You know,

(03:39):
families and friends that are impacted sometimes tend to think
that there's not an investigation going on, or that we've
moved on and everybody else has moved on. And it's
important for people to know that we go back and
we put eyes on these cases, whether it's a cold
case homicide or a cold case missing person. You know,
we revisit these cases often that we can see if

(04:00):
we can come up with anything else, and in this case,
it worked out very well for everybody.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
Yeah, they're speaking with Sergeant Paul Parizik of the Des
Moines Police Department. So you guys are in here, it's
on your desk. You mentioned that she had come up
to visit somewhere in southern Iowa. How did it initially
get to the Des Moin Police Department in the first place.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Well, it may not have even been our case to
have in the first place, which is another kind of
unique piece. But as her partner was reporting this, he
had described that they were somewhere in the Des Moines area.
They weren't from here, or he wasn't from here at all,
somewhere in the Des moin area. He thought, You know how,
you know, Omaha des Moines very similar. The suburbs kind
of just all rolled together. You know, you drive down

(04:45):
University Avenue here and you can go through you know,
five of them, you know, so plus the city of
Des Moines. So we just rather than sit here and
split hairs about where she went missing, we took the
case just so we could get working on it right away.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
Sense. So when this happens and there's a missing person
and this is a it became a voluntary thing. It
doesn't seem like it's somebody who was trying to fake
their own death or anything. It just somebody left and
didn't tell anybody and didn't seem to have many connections
to anybody in the Midwest to begin with that would

(05:20):
be actively looking for her. I suppose how far can
you go on this sort of thing before you eventually like,
because she obviously wanted the privacy and you want to
respect that, but you still have this entire other side
of the of the aisle of this case. That is
just like we just want to know that she's okay,

(05:42):
or we just want to know what happened. You know,
how do you balance that?

Speaker 2 (05:48):
You got to do it right up front, you know,
as we were going through this, you know, you don't know,
and you have to treat these cases like it's the
worst case scenario because you don't know, you know who, Like,
as you open this segment, who really thought that somebody's
going to turn up fifteen years later and everything's fine.
You know that you just can't have that mindset. You

(06:10):
can't be dismissive and say they just you know, they're
an adult, they just wanted to go be alone, right,
You know, you have to The case is on our desk.
It's on our desk for a reason. We need to
follow up and give it the attention that it deserves.
And you know, as we got to that point, because
we do this a lot and a lot of these cases,
we run into the same dead end that the cop did,

(06:32):
you know ten years ago when he took the initial
report five years ago. You know, you run out of
leads and there's nothing new there. This one, he kind
of grew legs and we were fortunate to be able
to follow that around the country and then you know, again,
the best part of the story is that everybody has
the peace of mind now knowing that everything's okay, and

(06:53):
you know, everybody's going on with their life. Maybe different directions,
maybe not the outcome that everybody hopes for, but everybody's
good with it.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
Yeah, it's it's quite interesting, right, And a lot of
the trouble probably would have been, I you have no
idea what a person's motivation for doing this, but if
you would have just said, I'm going somewhere, don't contact me,
I'm leaving, maybe that would have been something that would
have just you know, not gotten the police involved. But
it makes me wonder, sergeant that, you know, how does
some case get kind of plopped onto a desk? You know,

(07:25):
with all these cold cases, there's dozens and dozens of
dozens of them, How does one specifically just kind of
land on somebody's desk? Do you do? You just need
new people, new eyeballs to see something and maybe that
can inspire some sort of lead or direction to it.

Speaker 2 (07:42):
It takes a lot of initiative on a detective because
it's pretty easy for you know, during this so the
audits started in our communications center, and you know there's okay, hey,
this person is still in the missing person clearing house.
I guess, for lack of a better term, you reach
out to the detective just to make sure that nobody
missed anything. Like here's a good example. There are kids

(08:05):
who are listed as missing persons right now who we
know are runaways and have returned home and their parents
haven't called us. That actually happens pretty frequently, just family
situations and stuff. So we go to make sure that
nothing got missed. We follow up again, We go and
make sure that maybe a detective didn't get busy and
forgot to clear it. So that's how that happens. And

(08:31):
you know, I'll tell you one of the interesting things
about the case that there's really no cause for us
to follow up on it. But this kind of stood
out to me when I was talking to the detective
this morning that in all of these efforts to you know,
go back and you know, revisit the leads and revisit
the people who we'd spoken to eleven years ago. The

(08:52):
partner of hers that reported or missing, he seemingly doesn't exist.
I mean, there's no nothing connected to his name. And
you know, it gets you wondering, I mean, was there
something up with that guy? And did he just lied
to us about who he was, but still felt like

(09:12):
he needed to make this report because he was worried.
It's I mean, you could talk all day about that,
but that's one thing that stood out to us. Just
these addresses confirmed different times, different places were confirmed in
different states. But he we can't find anything on no
driver's license history, nothing, So he it was.

Speaker 1 (09:34):
A fake individual or a fake name for the individual.
But like, so, who did you let know that you
found the missing person? Right? Like, wouldn't that have been
the person you would have gone back to and said, hey,
we found the person you reported missing fourteen years ago.

Speaker 2 (09:51):
Well, we tried, but he you know, obviously we couldn't
find him, but we knew of other family members, you know,
other adult family members who at the time had expressed
the same concern. When we reached out to him to
make sure, you know, you call around, you're like, hey, something,
you know, we're your mom's missing, for example, have you
seen her? Have you talked to her? So as you

(10:13):
do those things, you established contacts, and we established some
contacts in the family. Detectives made good notes on who
those folks were, and all we had to do was
refresh the phone numbers and reach out to them. But yeah,
I just thought it was kind of interesting. And you know,
he may have it may have been something as simple
as he had a warrant, you know, maybe a traffic
warrant or something, but still was genuinely concerned and wanted

(10:36):
to make sure we knew about it. But then he
just poof gone.

Speaker 1 (10:40):
So now the real missing person is the person who
said that this person was missing fourteen years ago.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
That's well, that's a whole nother thing. Wow, we've already
run those leads out, so we got it. We know
where we are on that one, right.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
Yeah, well, at least it's interesting. You know, nobody really
reported that person missing. If obviously it's a person, probably
just an assumed name. But that is a fascinating appendage
to this story. Sergeant Paul Prezek the Woye Police Department,
you guys do great work. Thanks so much for hopping
on our show to talk about this with us today,
and keep up the good work.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
Yeah, thanks for sharing the story. Man, We'll catch up
with you later.

Speaker 1 (11:16):
Just like play this out and again, we're not going
to have a chance to really do any more investigation
unless the person who would now be sixty eight years
old would be interested in telling her story. You want
to know what I think. I probably think that she
doesn't think this is any big deal, like it's a

(11:38):
fascinating cold case that has been solved or resolved partially.
It just kind of opened up the other question of Okay,
so who reported or missing? Because they can't find that person,
it's either a fake person or a person that just
also doesn't seem to exist at all anyway. So I'm
guessing she had fifty four years old, decided that I

(12:00):
just want to get away from the person I came
up here with and just voluntarily left, and after she
left then was reported missing by the person she came
up there with. They just wanted to make sure that
she was safe. That person has not been contacted as
far as we know, because we don't know how to
contact that person because they gave false information when they

(12:22):
reported her missing in the first place. It is very strange.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
He mentioned that she wasn't trying to hide quote unquote right.

Speaker 1 (12:30):
She wasn't like underground somewhere hoping to avoid somebody who
she thought was chasing her. She was living in the open.
It's just that nobody had really popped open this case.
And like he said, he was the tractor. She was
from South Carolina, or had been in South Carolina, but
tract her to She was missing in Iowa and has

(12:50):
been found in Nebraska and somewhere. Texas is involved in
that somewhere. But yeah, so she was just living but
just didn't have contact with anybody in her family. I
guess after being reported missing by somebody who was essentially
was an anonymous individual.

Speaker 3 (13:07):
Yeah, because the first thing I thought of was, of course,
she's going to leave a paper trail of some kind,
just with life.

Speaker 1 (13:12):
It's like twenty eleven. The Internet is a thing. I mean,
like you should be able to find stuff like that, right.

Speaker 3 (13:17):
Yeah, But like you said, there's it's not like, you know,
if I went missing here, like my family's here, so
they they would look for me here.

Speaker 1 (13:23):
It would be everywhere.

Speaker 3 (13:25):
I mean, but it's halfway across the country.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
Right, And you're just like, if you're not connected with people,
they don't even really know, right I don't. I mean,
I don't remember when this happened. I mean, people go
missing pretty regularly and that's not good. I'm not saying
that that's something that should happen. It doesn't happen, but
it it's just kind of interesting. Is this probably just
no big deal thing to the woman and we don't know.

(13:50):
They didn't want to say where she's living. But it's
just it's it's fascinating that it's probably just like we
find it an interesting story and we want to know
more about it. It's probably nobody deal to her. Here's
an interesting story. I'm from a tumble Iowa. That's my hometown.

(14:12):
Did you know, like the third Miss Universe ever was
a woman from a tumbil, Iowa.

Speaker 3 (14:19):
Third one ever?

Speaker 1 (14:20):
Yeah, So the Miss Universe contest, it has been going
on since the fifties. So I have the list of
Miss Universe title holders. She was the fifth one ever. Sorry,
my fast one. Yeah, but it's in the same respect. Yeah.
So this is Miss Universe. This is the entire world,

(14:40):
the Miss Universe. Yeah, that's not Miss Iowa. No. No,
the Miss Universe title holders. It started in nineteen fifty two.
The first person to win it was from Finland, and
then France and then a woman from the United States
who was born in South Carolina. And then a girl
from Sweden, and then a twenty year old named Carol

(15:02):
Morris from a Tumbel. Iowa was the Miss Universe winner
in nineteen fifty six. You can, I just I was
blown away by this. I had no idea and it's
nineteen fifty six, so I was like, uh, I want
to know everything about this woman. She's from my hometown. Like,
and then as I talked about it on and I

(15:25):
was on the radio when Iowa was like, people were
sending me links and stories and pictures and things of like.
When she won, they threw a huge parade in a
tumblin all this stuff. It's in the fifties. It's the
mid fifties. Think about how old she is now. So
Carol Morris become like like she's Miss Universe and she

(15:46):
was Miss Iowa a couple of different times, and she
goes like it goes all the way down into this
and I don't know. It was very strange to me.
She got married to a guy and he was an
investor in oil wells, moved down to Texas by the
time she was in her mid twenties and never came back.
I mean, she probably came back to visit, but she

(16:07):
never like moved back and lived in Iowa, which made
it very hard to like get a hold of her.
But I was doing everything I could to get a
hold of her. I was like, somebody, tell me where
I can find this woman and get a story from her.
And she's like eighty two years old at the time, right,
so she's in her eighties now, and she eventually she
emails me. I get an email from her because I

(16:29):
found her on Facebook and all this stuff, and I
was just like, I don't want to be weird, but
I want to I wonder what it was like to
be Miss Universe. You're from a Tumbel, Iowa and you're
Miss Universe. Dude. It was nothing to her. It was
nothing to her. She couldn't believe I cared that much.
She was just like, Wow, somebody like I was like

(16:51):
twenty eight or twenty nine when I was doing this.
She's like, somebody in their twenties and in you know,
whatever year was, twenty nineteen or whatever, cares this much
about something that happened sixty years ago. It's kind of
crazy to me. And I was like, I mean, she
was gracious, she told me the story, but she's just like, Eh,
it just didn't feel like that big of a deal
to me, Like it's something that happened to me, but

(17:14):
it's not something that's not the only thing that happened
in my life. It's just nobody like she just it
wasn't a big deal of her. And I had a
hard time with that. I was like, are you kidding me?
Like I would just sit there and talk to her
about this stuff for hours. So just like you came
from a tumbla and you achieved this incredible thing, and
it's just just like, no big deal. I bet that

(17:36):
this woman who went disappearing for fourteen years, this is
no She's like, I didn't even know anybody cared. So
it tells you, like everybody's perspective, things that seem like
they're really interesting or a big deal to us on
the outside, to the people that are actually happening to
they may not even notice how big of a deal
it is. They may not even care. So I don't

(17:58):
know what that says about us as a society, but
it certainly is something that's quite interesting