Episode 6: A Shared Name

Esther's past catches up with her, as investigators in South Carolina seek answers about what happened to Brooke Henson. In our season finale, we bring you the latest details on the fates of both women.   

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, it's Jake, thanks for listening to deep Cover.
I'm starting to work now on season four, and I
want to remind you that when you sign up for
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(00:36):
wrapped its first season, as well as Lost Hills, which
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don't miss early access to Revisionist History and The Happiness Lab,
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in twenty twenty three. Check out Pushkin dot Fm or
the Apple Show page for more information. Previously on deep Cover,

(01:02):
I remember the Chief asking me, like, how far are
you going to take this? It's said Chief, until I
can interer you asked to read, I can't clear this tip.
She just seemed like just an average person who got
caught up in something that got bigger than what they
ever planned it to be. I was already in the

(01:23):
car and we were pulling way, and I look over
and they have my whole car open, and there's many
of them, and I think, I said, I know what
this is about. I'm ester read. Esther's arrest brought about
a reckoning. She had to face the cops, the media,
and her own family. But it wasn't until she got

(01:46):
down to South Carolina that she had to face the
possibility of serious prison time. The FEDS were prosecuting her
for male fraud, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft, and
she got the sense that the authorities in South Carolina
had become pretty invested in her case. We all knew

(02:06):
something was going on with South Carolina, like they were
a little excited about the case. Because way back when
this investigation first started, before things got crazy, before all
the spy theories, before the media frenzy, before the nationwide manhunt. Originally,
the Copson travelers rest South Carolina were interested in one thing,

(02:30):
and one thing only, what happened to Brooke. For Esther Reid,
this whole saga had been about finding a new self.
For her, the name Brooke Henson was a ticket to
a new life, but she shared that name with a
young woman whose disappearance was still felt and for people
in South Carolina, that same name Brooke Henson conjured heartache

(02:56):
and a lingering sense of injustice. In some ways, Esther
had no idea what was in store for her in
South Carolina, what she had walked into, because there the
real Brooke Henson had I've been forgotten. They held candlelight
vigils in her memory in front of the police department
and Traveler's Rest. Friends and family commemorated her. The local

(03:18):
media ran stories on her, the local cops were looking
for answers, and the federal prosecutor wanted his day in
court for all of them. This story was far from over,
and now all eyes were on Esther Reid. I'm Jake

(03:51):
Halbern and this is deep Cover Season three, Never Seen
Again Episode six, our season finale, a shared name. Once

(04:27):
Esther was moved down to South Carolina, two cops from
Traveler's Rest paid her a visit. They wanted to talk
about Brooke Henson, to see what Esther knew about her disappearance.
The truth, of course, was that Esther didn't know a
thing about how or why Brooke went missing. She'd simply
found Brooke's name on the internet. Still, the cops they

(04:48):
wanted to talk. These two cops showed up where Esther
was being held. Esther's lawyer was there too. As soon
as the cops entered the room, Esther gave them a
handwritten statement on white lined paper saying that she had
nothing to do with Brooke's disappearance. And they start talking
and they're like, well, would you be willing to submit

(05:08):
to a lie detector tests? At this point, Esther freaked.
Given her high levels of anxiety, she worried she would
fail the test. Plus lie detector tests aren't liable to
begin with. I remember I started having a panic attack,
and like I couldn't breathe, and I started like ripping
my clothes because I couldn't breathe. I had a jump

(05:31):
suit on, and I was like scratching my neck and
I ended up back in the back corner, huddled down, hyperventilating,
and they just got out in the room and backed
away and probably left me alone for like fifteen minutes
so I could calm down. In the end, the cops
were apparently satisfied that Esther wasn't to blame for Brooke
going missing, in part because Esther was able to demonstrate

(05:52):
that she was living in Seattle at the time. But
even if she wasn't a murder suspect, Esther was still
facing charges for identity theft and fraud. She decided to
take a plea. So now it was all about the sentencing,
and there were still a lot of people in vested
in the outcome, not just the prosecutor and the media,

(06:12):
but also Brooke's family. Her parents kept a low profile,
but one of her aunts, Lisa Henson, sort of became
the public face of the family. During the height of
the media frenzy. Aunt Lisa did interviews with the press,
including CNN. She basically said that Esther's ruse had led
her to believe falsely for a period of time that

(06:34):
her niece was alive, and that when she learned the truth,
she was devastated all over again. Aunt Lisa decided to
speak when it came time for Esther to be sentenced,
to talk about the effect that Esther's actions had on
her personally. The sentencing took place at the Federal courthouse
in Greenville. CBS ran a story on the proceedings, and

(06:58):
that helped me fill out some of the details of
what happened that day. Esther was marched into the courtroom
and handcuffs and leg shackles. She wore a red prison
jumpsuit and her long brown hair was tied in a ponytail.
The whole day or being sentenced is very surreal. I
think the young man who got sentenced right before me
got forty eight years or something, and I had just

(07:20):
seen the judge like scream at him, and an attorney
for him was screaming back. Eventually it was Esther's turn.
She remembers coming to the front of the courtroom. Esther
knew that Aunt Lisa was off to the right, but
she didn't really see her because she had been told
that a defendant should never look directly at a victim.

(07:40):
When she spoke in court, Aunt Lisa kind of talked
directly to Esther. She said, nothing can bring our brook home,
but to know that you are not violating her now
gives our family a sense of relief. Esther also made
a brief statement. She took responsibility for her actions and
then asked the court for mercy, saying I was desperate

(08:04):
to escape an environment I felt I could not survive.
Esther's lawyer also made a case for leniency, but it
didn't seem to go over well with the judge. And
I remember he's interrupting her and won't let her presents
her argument, and I remember just thinking, oh my god,
this is really going to go badly, and then the

(08:27):
judge started to talk. Esther braced herself. She focused on
the federal seal, you know, with a great, big eagle,
that was displayed at the front of the courtroom. He
starts telling me basically why he's going to sentence me
the way he is. I just remember looking at the
seal and talking to my mom. The judge continued with

(08:49):
his remarks. Referring to Esther, he told the courtroom she
is a scheming criminal who has taken advantage of people's
identities and institutions. And then at some point he said,
I'm going to sentence you. And at that point I
lifted my eyes up and I remember he started to say,
I think a guideline sentence in this case is acceptable,

(09:12):
and then I just read a sigh of relief. In
this case, the federal guidelines led the judge to give
a sentence of fifty one months, a little over four years.
She was also ordered to repay one hundred and twenty
five thousand dollars in debts, mainly student loans that she
had accumulated in Brooke's name. That also included eighteen thousand

(09:35):
dollars in restitution to J. C. Penny where she had
run that receipt scam, and then she was marched back
out of the courtroom in her shackles. Afterwards, Aunt Lisa
told the press that the sentence was not long enough.
She lamented that Esther would not look her in the eyes,
and then added, she sly like a fox, she doesn't

(09:58):
want to face anybody who she's done wrong. Esther ended
up serving time a minimum security federal prison camp. There,
she had time to think, to reflect on her life.
She wrote letters, She reconnected with her brother EJ. And

(10:19):
her father too back in Montana. She read books and
took long walks around the prison's outdoor track. She'd gotten
there to that moment, in that place because she had
been trying to escape her own past, and she chose
to do that through a series of deceptions. I lied
and lied and lied and lied because I was in danger,

(10:45):
in mentally in danger right like I was not mentally
healthy in the environment I was living in, and I
knew I needed to get out of that. She says,
looking back, it was a terrible way to handle things,
and that many people were harmed by her actions. You
know my pain was visited, My trauma was visited on

(11:08):
so many people. My actions caused damage to so many people,
and it's a burden to to know you harmed people
and to not be able to do anything about it.
During her time in prison, Esther often thought about Brooke Henson.

(11:31):
Esther says she always felt a certain kinship with her
based on what she had read about Brooke online. She
knew they'd both struggled as teenagers and dropped out of
high school, and she also thought a lot about Brook's mother.
Esther worried that by stealing Brook's identity, she dredged up
the past and caused her pain. I think because I

(11:54):
lost my mom, and so I understand the pain doesn't
go away, there's no healing, and so the thought that
my acts made that agony worse for her it's really hard,

(12:18):
I think, because I'm intimately aware of what it's like
to miss the person you loved most in the world.
In two and eleven, Esther was released. The prison bought
her a bus ticket back to Portland, Oregon, where her

(12:38):
brother and sister were now living. There were no journalists
or news crews waiting as she left, no fanfare of
any kind. She was just a woman on a bus
headed west back into obscurity. We'll be right back. The

(13:05):
man who started this whole investigation was John Campbell, the
small town detective from Traveler's Rest, South Carolina. Over the
course of his investigation, John became convinced that Esther Reid
was a spy. He'd enlisted the help of the Secret Service.
He'd contacted Army CID its Criminal Investigation Division, and he'd

(13:28):
pursued every possible lead, telling his chief and Traveler's Rest
that he couldn't and wouldn't rest until he himself questioned Esther.
But that day it never came. By the time that
the authorities arrested Esther, John was no longer working for
the Traveler's Rest p D. He'd taken another job in

(13:49):
law enforcement, and so he never got a chance to
question her, which was hugely frustrating for John. In fact,
when I visited John in South Carolina this past summer,
he told me that he still believed in his spy
theories that they might be true. Honestly, this kind of
amazed me. There were so many holes in this theory.

(14:12):
There was no actual proof of espionage. The prosecutors never
pursued it, and of course it never came up in
court because the case never went to trial. But John says,
that's exactly the point she did in a spy move.
She pleded straight up to all the chargers and never

(14:32):
answered any questions about what she did, never had anything
in open court. So that's brilliant. In one of my
many conversations with John, I asked him point blank, wasn't
there a much simpler explanation than espionage, one that made
fewer leaps of logic? He said, Oh, you're talking about

(14:53):
Akham's razor. In case you're not familiar with that theory,
it basically says, if you're debating between multiple competing theories,
the one that makes the fewest assumptions is usually correct. Yeah,
I told John, Aham's rais is exactly what I'm talking about,
John being John quickly made a reference to The X Files,

(15:16):
the show he loves about the paranormal. You know the
truth is out there anyway. In one episode, one of
the agents refers to Akham's Raiser as quote Akham's principle
of limited imagination. John told me that all too often
law enforcement officials lacked imagination. We close our mind off

(15:38):
to anything but the facts. And if you close down
all those possibilities, you're going to miss something. Isn't it possible?
The danger as though, that your imagination runs away with
things and leads you too far from the facts. Could
you could? Yeah, you always have to have somebody to
rain you in if you get too far out. But

(16:00):
so who rained you in when you were a traveler's rest?
You know, in this particular thing, the ester read case,
there wasn't. I don't remember anybody rained yet. John is
also haunted by another mystery. He still wants to know

(16:22):
what happened to Brooke Henson. He believes that Brooke was murdered.
So it is virtually everyone that I talked to in
Traveler's Rest, including the town's current chief of police. His
name is Ben Ford. Chief Ford has been trying to
solve this case, even though at this point it's been
cold for more than twenty years. He talks regularly with John,

(16:45):
even though John's not officially part of the investigation anymore.
The two men seemed to share an obsession. Chief Ford
took command in twenty and eighteen, and right away he
made this case a top priority. At one point, he
searched Brook's old home looking for clues. John Campbell was
there too. They hope that maybe, just maybe they might

(17:08):
find an important clue that had been overlooked, a clue
that would break the whole case open. They didn't find it.
They also began another round of interviews, trying to find
someone who might know what happened to Brooke. One person
of interest was Ricky Shawn Shirley. He was Brooke's boyfriend
and he was with her the night that she went missing.

(17:30):
If you recall, Brooke left him a note that night
saying follow me if you care. Chief Ford hoped that
Sean Shirley might finally sit down with him and tell
him everything he knew. But that never happened, Remember I
told you. As part of the renewed investigation, the cops
searched Brook's old house. That happened September thirtieth, twenty nineteen.

(17:57):
Well a day later, Sean Shirley died, and then a
mysterious video was posted online. It's no longer up, but
I found someone who had a copy of it. In
this video, you can see Sean Shirley sitting by himself
in a darkened room. He's staring dead ahead like he's

(18:18):
in a trance. Then he turns to the camera and whispers.
When you listen carefully, it sounds like he might be
saying help. Then the video ends. It's extremely creepy and
it's hard to know what to make of it. According
to the local police, Sean's death was ruled an accidental overdose.

(18:40):
Button true Traveler's Rest fashion dark theories spin The video
is fueled speculation that maybe his death wasn't an accident,
maybe something more sinister happened, but those are just speculations.
The bottom line Sean Shirley, the guy people hoped had
the answers, he was now dead. At this point, both

(19:06):
Chief Ford and John Campbell believe that if they could
only find Brooks remains, they might solve this crime once
and for all. They have theories about where to look,
one place in particular, and the frustrating part is they
just can't get to it. When I was in Traveler's Rest,

(19:27):
John Campbell took me there to the spot where he
thinks Brooke may have been buried. To get there, we
hopped in his suv and took a drive down a
lonely road. The tidy streets of town quickly morphed into deep,
thick woods. You can get an idea about how big
the area is, how what a vast amount of land

(19:49):
there is, and how sporadic the houses are. So let's
you're talking about late at night. If you had to
get rid of a body out here, in the chances
of you're running into anybody everybody's seeing, it would be
pretty pretty slam. Eventually, John pulls his car over to
this side of the road. We're pretty high up on
a hillside at this point, and we have a view

(20:10):
down onto a sprawling field with a bunch of large
concrete structures. This is This is a typical water trap plant,
and there's a couple covered domes where water is treated.
This is the watershed for Greenville City. When Brooke Henson
went missing back in nineteen ninety nine, this water treatment

(20:33):
plant was still being built, and both John and Chief
Ford have gotten a number of tips over the years
that this is where her body was buried, interred in
the concrete. They've learned that several people who are with
Brook on the night that she vanished were working here
building the plant, so they would have had easy access

(20:54):
and could have hid her body and freshly poured concrete.
The problem is there's so much concrete in this facility,
tons and tons of it, that it would be very
difficult to find her remains. Now, in recent years, with
vances in technology, there are some really good ground penetrating
radars which might help a lot, But so far the

(21:16):
town hasn't been able to make this happen. There's one
final reason that John thinks that Brooks body maybe here
at the water treatment plant. He says, every time he
comes up here, he's being watched, and that right then
when I was standing with him, we were being watched.

(21:38):
We've already been spotted because three or four cars have
passed by here and they're calling around. Is already somebody
shaking their shoes that we're looking? Come on, do you
really believe that that has happened over and over and
over again every time we've come up here, John says.
The proof is that every time he or Chief Ford
come up here, right away someone dials up the police

(21:59):
department and says, you're looking in the wrong place. The
body's not there. Those people watch just trying to throw
you off the trail. Yeah, this is Look at this
somebody slowing down. What's going on? That's that's the rumor
mail right there that if it wasn't the three cars
before that one's calling already, that was a painting truck.
That was like, already know somebody, and they're calling somebody

(22:21):
who knows somebody. That's hard for me to believe. Well,
what it does for me is it tells me that
this is this is a tip that hasn't been fully vetted.
And until we drag a sled down air and get
an image that what's under that concrete, then this tip
is still not completely vetted. You can probably tell I

(22:56):
didn't buy John's whole theory about us being watched and
that someone would call in and say, you boys are
looking at the wrong place. It felt too much like well,
an episode of the X Files. But then lo and behold,
when we checked in with Chief Ford, he told us
that when we were up there, his phone rang and

(23:17):
an informant called in with a tip saying that the
body was buried elsewhere. It was a surreal moment, felt
a shiver run up my spine, and I started wondering
who else in this town was watching us or watching me,
and what did they know about brooks disappearance. For a moment,

(23:39):
I felt like I was in one of those movies
where the journalists asks too many questions and then late
at night, there's a knock at the door. Silly, I know,
but that's the thing about conspiracy theories. They're seductive. They
kind of cast a spell on you. Later that evening,

(23:59):
I got back to my Airbnb and came to my senses,
took a shower, had a beer, called my wife. But
I'm not going to lie to you. Some part of
me kept on waiting for a knock on the door.

(24:20):
For the Henson family, at least the members I spoke with,
the lack of closure is hard. Brooks' parents have both
passed away, but her cousins, Pattie and Holly Henson, have
spent years trying to keep the memory of their cousin
alive and hoping that maybe they'll find out what happened
to her. They told me that they did not harbor

(24:40):
bad feelings towards Esther Reid, a real contrast to Aunt Lisa.
They said that, if anything, they were grateful that Esther's story,
with all its notoriety, had drawn attention to brookes case,
not that it's done a lot of good so far.
They hoped for a while that Brook's old boyfriend, Sean Shirley,
might come forward with new information, or that the police

(25:01):
would finally break the case open. It's been frustrating for them.
I asked cousin Holly about the investigation as it now stands.
How optimistic or confident do you feel that they're ever
going to find out what happened to Brooke and where
her body may be. Not very confident at all. I

(25:23):
don't think they will. Why do you say that it's
been this long Sean Shirley is now dead. I feel
like when he died, I remember having tears because I
was like, well it's over now, We're never gonna find Brooke.
I asked cousin Patty what it would mean to her

(25:46):
if they could find Brooks remains. I feel like it
would mean everything. I feel like she deserves justice. She
didn't ask for what happened to her. She was a
free spirit just because she liked a party and hung
out with the wrong crowd. She didn't deserve to be

(26:08):
just dumped and forgot about. I'm sure if that was
your daughters, you know you wouldn't want that either. By
most accounts, the investigation into Brooke Henson's disappearance failed very
early on. John Campbell told me that initially the Traveler's
Rest Police department didn't recognize this as a possible murder,

(26:32):
and by the time they got serious about all this,
they missed their best chance to solve the case. I
heard versions of this from other people too, who Traveler's Rest.
They told me that because Brooke was a high school
dropout and seen as a party girl, that her case
wasn't taken seriously, at least at first. Brook story only

(26:53):
truly caught the attention of the public in a big
way when it intersected with Esther reads. It's interesting because
Esther was also a high school dropout who for a
long time existed in the margins of society, living a
transient life, struggling with her social anxiety. It was only

(27:13):
when she fled Columbia University and was depicted as a
spy and a seductress that suddenly everyone seemed to care.

(27:42):
Sun is shining, and Spokane it is for the first
time in a week. Well did shine yesterday, but before
that it was not funny. This past spring, I spent
a week with Esther in Spokane, Washington. That's where she
lives these days. On this occasion, I was driving with
her to work. Everybody here is very very nice. I

(28:04):
noticed that super friendly when about running or walking. Yeah,
that part is familiar to how To where I grew
up in Montana. Everybody's very nice and kind. For the
most part. Esther is in her mid forties now, and
she has a new life. She has friends, a good job,
a home, even a new dog, a little shit soon

(28:26):
named Louis. She's also gone through therapy, which has helped
with her social anxiety. In the car ride that day,
we talked about all kinds of things, like I asked
her if she ever saw herself getting married. M don't.
I don't know that. I believe in marriage. I wouldn't
be opposed to it. I would never change my name.

(28:49):
That's kind. Now, that's kind of ironic. Well, I'm very
attached to Matthews now. I mean it's I know it
is ironic. I would change my first name in a heartbeat.
She goes by Esther Matthews now. She made the switch
after she got out of prison. One last name change,
this time legally before a judge Eventually we arrived at

(29:12):
Gonzaga University. Nice. We arrived in one piece. That's always good.
And this is where Esther works. She's now a professor here,
Professor Esther Matthews. After getting out of prison, Esther went
back to school. She got her PhD in criminology and
landed a job teaching, first American University and then here

(29:35):
at Gonzaga. Esther gives me a little tour of campus,
and as she does, she tells me about her academic research.
She's done a number of in depth ethnographic investigations of
prison life, including a close look at several solitary confinement units.
She's also interested in reentry, looking at how we as

(29:58):
a society can best help people as they returned to
their communities. I always knew I would like researching, and
then I was like, oh, I can teach to research.
That's fine. And then I started teaching. And my students
are just the most fabulous, lovely human beings on the planet.

(30:18):
Esther says she loves how compassionate and non judgmental her
students are, and she's told them a lot about herself,
including her troubles as a teenager, her struggles with social anxiety,
even her time in prison. What they don't know, what
hardly anyone knows, is exactly why she ended up in prison.
The whole Esther Reid's story, with all its tawdry, tabloid melodrama,

(30:42):
she just hasn't gotten into it, really. But every once
in a while someone connects the dots, figures out that
Professor Esther Matthews is in fact Esther Reid. She'll get
a call or an email out of the blue, and
so finally last fall, she figured why not take the
reins tell her full story on her own terms. So

(31:05):
what do you do in this situation when you're a professor?
A talk at a symposium? Right? And she happened to
be organizing a big event to Gonzaga and thought this
could work. So she invited all of her students, all
of her colleagues, anyone who wanted to come. On the
day of the event, a crowd gathered at a large

(31:26):
lecture hall on campus. Esther aka Professor Matthews stood at
the front of the room. Okay, So, like I said,
I'm gonna go probably till about ten after she starts
by telling the crowd straight up that this isn't going
to be easy for her. I also have social anxiety disorder,

(31:47):
and I'm going to try to be unapologetically anxious. But
I'm going to talk about a lot of different facets
of my life and my experience in custody. She hits
a button on her laptop and an image flashes onto
the movie screen behind her. It's a picture of a
woman and a toddler standing in a garden framed by
pine trees. It's summertime. The woman is in jeans and

(32:11):
a blue, short sleeved shirt. This lovely woman is my mom,
and this is me as a little baby growing up.
This is our house in Montana. And I will talk
about many different identities that I've had, but the only
identity that I claim is her daughter, and I will

(32:37):
likely get emotion. Esther also explains how after her mom
passed away, she cut ties with her family to escape
a situation that was toxic for her. The thing I
became infamous for is that I didn't want my family
to find me, and so I started taking on the
identities of other individuals. There's another image on the screen now.

(33:04):
It's a collage actually, including a picture of Esther and
a boyfriend from West Point, climbing Mount Washington, Esther dressed
up for a party, surrounded by other twenty somethings, and
then there's a snapshot of Esther's ID from Columbia University.
I don't even remember how many people's names I used,

(33:24):
but at one point I was Natalie Fisher, at one
point I was Natalie Bowman. Then it came Brooke Henson.
What I would do as I would get identification in
their name, and then I would try and start over
stealing all of these identities, Esther explains eventually landed her
in prison. But that is the hard part of my story,

(33:44):
and I now want to switch to the good part
of my story, which is kind of another life shift.
Once I was released from custody, I had to start
to think about how I was going to rebuild my
life as Esther Reid, which you're probably thinking, you're doctor Matthews,
So I'll explain. You can hear that little murmur from

(34:08):
the audience, like folks are processing what she just said,
because this is actually the first time she's mentioned the
name Esther Reid. Remember, everyone here knows her as Professor Matthews.
So she starts to explain how she became professor Matthews
how after getting out of prison, she found a job

(34:28):
in the construction industry, started taking classes, got her b A,
and her PhD. Became a professor of criminology who studies
the challenges that people face when they come home from prison.
She has a lot of thoughts about this. She's on research,
for example, on the word inmate, how people react more
favorably to hearing that a person is being released from

(34:51):
prison versus an inmate. Another problematic word, she says, is
rehabilitation because it suggests that we need to cure people
to somehow alter who they fundamentally are. I have not
been rehabilitated, right, I received resource and I had opportunities. Right,

(35:12):
nobody rehabilitated me. I am the same person who is
a risk taker. I am still sassy, I am still defiant.
I still don't like authority. I'm still that same person.
I just have resources and support to help me build
a life that means more to me than what one

(35:33):
of my friends calls burning the house down. I love
to burn the house down, right, That's my favorite thing
to do. But I just do it an illegal way. Now, right,
with my research and all of this supports her belief,
underscored by both her research and her experiences, that words matter.
So today these are my words. Right, I'm a professor,

(35:56):
I'm a researcher, I'm a scholar. We can be those
things if you stop calling us the other things. When
she's done, she asks for questions. A man raises his
hand and ask about her current name, Esther Matthews, as
if to say, where did that come from? I know
you keep this is spice, but I wanted to know

(36:17):
the Matthews verse. Oh oh, so my mom is Florence Matthews.
So finally, when I got off probation, I was able
to change my name illegally, this time from Esther Reid
to Esther Matthews. But I would much rather have changed
my first name and last name, but I didn't think
the judge would go for that because I really liked

(36:39):
being Natalie. But next to now, I'm stuck with Esther.
But I wish I had said Natalie Matthews. But whatever,
I can't have everything I want, right, Does anybody else
have another question? We love you, Esther, and that was it. Afterwards,

(37:03):
students and other panelists from the day's events came up
to her, thanked her for her talk, told her they'd
see her later. To her students, she was still who
she'd always been, perhaps who she was always meant to be.
Professor Esther Matthews, her mother's daughter. All of this made

(37:35):
me wonder who Brooke Henson might have been, who she
might have become, if she'd ever emerged from that darkened
road in Traveler's Rest all those years ago. Follow me
if you care, She'd scrawled on a handwritten note like
a traveler's prayer, the hope that when we are gone,

(37:55):
our absence will be felt, and should we not return
in time, they will search. Ben Ford of the Traveler's

(38:42):
Rest Police Department is still working diligently on the Brookhnson
case to find out what happened to her. If you
have any new information that might be helpful, please contact
him at Ford at t R police dot com. Deep

(39:21):
Cover is produced by Amy Gaines and Jacob Smith. It's
edited by Karen shakerje mastering by Jake Gorski. Our show
art was designed by Sean Karney. Original scoring and our
theme was composed by Luis Gara. Fact checking by Arthur Gomperts.
Additional thanks to Milo Bell Jill Gillette, Travis Dunlap, Roya

(39:44):
Reese Tammy and Patrick Welch, Ryan Beasley, Roger Jewel, Franklin Schneier,
Ben Ford, Jeff Emlick, Natalie Fisher, Natalie Bowman, Meghan Kennedy
and Alicia Via Gonzaga University, and the team at Claris
Law at Pushkin Special thanks to Sarah Knicks, Daphne Chen,

(40:08):
Sarah brug Air, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Morgan Rattner, Nicole Morano,
Isabella Narvaz, Mary Beth Smith, Jordan McMillan, Meghna Row, Sophie Crane,
Peter Clowney, Edith Russello, Heather Faine, John Schnars, Carrie Brody,

(40:29):
Carlie mcgliori, Christina Sullivan, Jason Gambrel, Leta Mullad, Gretta Cone,
Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell. I'm Jake Halper