Crossing the Line with M. William Phelps

In December 1974, three kids take off for a local Fort Worth, Texas, Army-Navy store and mall and fail to return. Known as the "Fort Worth 3," this missing person case is one of the oldest and most mysterious on record. I speak to several victim family members and try to sort out fact from fiction in this Crossing the Line special trilogy of episodes.

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It's January 14^th, 1973. And the parents of 16-year-old Norman Prater call into the Dallas Police to report their son missing. Fifty-two years later, the answer comes with some remarkable police work, a little luck, and it is not what anyone could have ever expected. 

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A woman heads to a Florida beach to scatter her late husband's ashes. She meets a woman and strikes up a friendship. But then … no one can find her. Meanwhile, investigators 1200 miles north are looking into the murder of a local man—having no idea the two cases are connected.

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A lovely woman, enjoying the latter stages of her life, is found dead at the bottom of her basement stairs. There is far too much blood for her to have fallen, along with a slice from ear to ear along her throat. But who could have committed such a heinous crime in what seems to be a pleasant, charming, quiet Montana town. 

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A prominent Santa Barbara, California, family is found dead inside their home one March morning. A manhunt then gets underway for a killer, while a man proclaims he has developed an alternative energy source Big Oil is killing his friends over and looking to make him the next target. 

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A woman befriends a few coworkers and decides to move in with them. They begin fighting. Animosity builds. So, she moves out. Days later, she decides to reconcile with both of them … but the conversation doesn't go as planned and two of them wind up dead, dismembered, and placed inside several suitcases aboard a train heading out of town.

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A woman cannot reach her family—so she heads over to their house to check things out. What she witnesses inside is a scene straight out of a contemporary horror film. As the case moves into the investigative phase, decades pass before the evil behind it all is finally brought to justice. 

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You are sitting at home one night, just doing your normal thing, when someone busts through the door with a weapon and begins firing. Catching a double murderer takes all of about 15 hours to resolve, the result shocking the community and police … but not the victim's family.

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A Colorado man's mother goes missing. He spends years building up resentment and frustration with police not getting anywhere. He feels he has nowhere else to turn. So he takes matters into his own hands … and the results of what he creates could help solve thousands of cold cases all over the world.

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A hardworking Pennsylvania man arrives home from his second shift job one night, gets out of his vehicle, and winds up on the ground in front of his home … fighting for his life. Neighbors report hearing and seeing a dark colored SUV tearing away from the scene. As investigators begin asking questions, two candidates for the stupidest murderers of the year step forward.

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On St. Patrick's Day, 1987, the body of 20-year-old active-duty Army Specialist Darlene Krashoc is discovered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, behind a strip mall. With over 100 suspects, the case goes cold for over three decades. But when forensic genetic genealogy enters the picture, the perpetrator cannot hide for much longer. 

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Tanya Marie Frazier, a 14-year-old Seattle girl, disappeared on July 18, 1994, after leaving summer school at Meany Middle School. Her body was found days later in a wooded ravine in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. The medical examiner determined her death was a result of sharp force injuries to her neck and head, and the attack was sexually motivated. For 30 years, Tanya's family receives no answers or justice. Then … ...

On the morning of October 9, 2020, in their Dallas neighborhood, Jamie Faith is shot seven times while on a routine dog walk with his wife, Jennifer. Jennifer appeared distraught and publicly appealed for the killer to come forward in the media, portraying herself as a grieving widow. The initial appearance of a random robbery gone wrong quickly unravels as investigators uncovered a complex web of deceit. 

After neighbors and the postman stop seeing Tom Devlin around town, they ask his wife of 40 years, Laura Belle, about him. Laura is more than happy to describe exactly what happened to Tom–and the outcome is one of the more gruesome crimes the people of Newark, Ohio, will ever hear about in 1947. 

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A woman living with a violent man is found in her bedroom, stabbed more than 60 times. Several suspects emerge over the course of a few months, the man she is living with not among them. It takes almost 30 years, but investigators confiscate a napkin in a trash can and believe they have the case solved. 

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A storybook romance. A life of giving back to the world in ways that change thousands of lives. You and your wife settle into life in New Hampshire, away from the chaos and evil of the world–or so you think. 

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A young woman is murdered. Years go by without answers. Her sister begins searching for the murderer—and the experience sends her into a career in law enforcement and cold case work, as investigators close in on a savage killer.

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HALLLOWEEN SPECIAL - The Harvard Body-Broker Butcher

Body parts for sale! Not quite the advertisement you'd expect to see somewhere. But in the United States, under a strict set of guidelines, selling body parts is legal. Only in this case, a group of people take that business to an extreme beyond the macabre. 

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Season 5 of Paper Ghosts: The Texas Teen Murders takes you back to 1983, when two teenagers were found murdered, execution-style, on a quiet Texas hill. What followed was decades of rumors, false leads, and a case that law enforcement could never seem to close. Then a third teen is murdered and other questionable deaths o...