They drained a reservoir and dragged the Ohio River. They dug up a sandbar and chased a stage conjurer’s “clue.” Pearl Bryan’s head was never found.

In part two, we piece together Pearl’s last four days in Cincinnati: a hotel register signed with her sister’s name, an argument outside a music company, and a sarsaparilla in a saloon’s back room. Then comes the circus.

There are lemonade stands at the murder scene, a shooting gallery offering a five-cent cigar to anyone who shoots Scott Jackson’s effigy, a witness bribery scheme that falls apart on the stand, and two defenses built on epilepsy and hypnosis.

It all leads to March 20, 1897, when a governor’s offer, a five-minute decision and one man’s silence settle everything. And at the end, a ritual that still happens at a small Indiana grave: pennies, left heads up.

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On a foggy February morning in 1896, a farmhand outside Fort Thomas, Kentucky, finds a woman lying in the privet bushes. At first he thinks she’s just another girl, sleeping off a hangover maybe.

Then the sheriff pulls her down the bank, and her dress falls away. Her head is gone.

Detectives start with no name and not even what city she is from. There is a pile of wild theories, including one man who confidently identifies her as his wife until his wife walks in alive.

Then detectives notice her tiny size-three boots. A number stamped inside leads to a factory, then a ledger in Greencastle, Indiana, and finally to a farmhouse where a family is waiting for a daughter who said she was going to Indianapolis.

In this episode, we follow the shoes, the letters, a blood-soaked valise passed around three Cincinnati saloons, and two roommates who can’t stop pointing at each other. It all builds to a moment beside her coffin that will stay with you.

Part two will be out friday, and you will not want to miss how this one ends.

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"You're looking for bodies? Go ahead. Dig up the yard."

In Part Two, investigators take Hugo Selenski up on his offer. Less than 20 feet from his back door, they find Michael Kerkowski and Tammy Fassett. In the fire pit behind the house, they find the remains of three more people. One of them has never been identified.

We cover the drug-house sleepover that turned deadly, a jeweler's home invasion undone by sneaker prints in the snow, and the night Hugo climbed down a 60-foot rope of prison bedsheets, only to go home.

Then there's the 2006 trial that ended in a headline nobody saw coming, prison fan mail from people who really should have known better, and the jailhouse phone call where Hugo offered the least convincing denial in history.

Finally, after nearly 13 years, Michael and Tammy's families get their day in court. There's an informant who admits he lied, a mother who tells the defendant to wipe the smile off his face, and a verdict, followed by an elevator ride nobody at that courthouse will forget.

If you missed Part One, start there. Our Vanished Voices episode on Cindy Song, the Penn State student an informant tried to tie to this case, is out now.

To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here.

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