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.

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On the afternoon of May 3, 2002, Michael Kerkowski and Tammy Fassett were doing yard work when two visitors pulled into the driveway. When Michael's mother called, Tammy kept it short: "We have company."

Michael was a pharmacist from northeastern Pennsylvania who'd been caught selling hundreds of thousands of painkillers out of his own store, and he was days away from sentencing. The man he trusted to help him through it was his best friend, Hugo Selenski, a bank robber fresh out of federal prison who once tried to wash exploded dye out of stolen cash in his parents' washing machine.

When Michael and Tammy disappeared, police assumed Michael had fled. But Hugo knew exactly where they were. For months he sat with Michael's grieving parents, promising their son was alive and taking about $100,000 of their money, until the night a gun went off in their basement.

In part one of two, we cover a dream house on six wooded acres, a sweaty pair of men with brand-new shovels, a lie about a gas tank, a $500,000 story about Belize, and the moment an old prison buddy finally decided to talk.

Part two drops Friday. And over on Vanished Voices this week, we cover the disappearance of Penn State student Cindy Song, a case that became tangled up in this one. Look for that episode Thursday.

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Private investigator Ken Brennan has a theory about what happened in Room 348, and it starts with a question nobody thought to ask.

As he and Detective Scott Apple follow a rumor, a hunch, and one very small detail most people would never notice, the answer to Greg Fleniken's death turns out to have been hiding in plain sight the whole time.

But solving it is only half the fight. Susie Fleniken still has to push the case all the way to a courtroom, and she gets her chance to say exactly what she's been waiting two years to say.

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Greg Fleniken was a man of routine. Every Monday he drove from Lafayette, Louisiana, to Beaumont, Texas, checked into the same hotel, and spent his nights the same way: propped up on two pillows with a candy bar, a cigarette, and a movie.

On September 16, 2010, his co-workers found him dead on the floor of Room 348.It looked like his heart had simply given out.

Then the medical examiner opened him up and found injuries usually seen in car crash victims, and he ruled it a homicide.

But there was no sign of a fight, no enemies, nothing taken, no motive, and not a single neighbor who heard a thing. Months later, with the case headed for the cold files, Greg's wife Susie made one phone call that changed everything.

This week we take you through one of the strangest locked-room mysteries in true crime.

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For sixteen years, the disappearance of Mike Williams sits unsolved — a mother's letters to the governor, a reopened investigation, and still, no answers. Then, in the summer of 2016, something happens that has nothing to do with Lake Seminole at all. And everything changes.

In Part Two, we follow the confession that finally broke a seventeen-year silence, the search that found what a 44-day effort never could, and a trial that turns on the smallest, most human of details. This is the second half of the Mike Williams story — the half nobody saw coming, including the people who thought they already knew how it ended.

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December 16, 2000. Before sunrise, Mike Williams loads his boat and heads out onto Lake Seminole — a lake he's hunted a hundred times before, on a morning that's supposed to end with an anniversary dinner. He never makes it home.

What follows is a 44-day search across a reservoir riddled with submerged stumps and alligators, a discovery that seems to close the case for good, and a legal ruling that moves faster than anyone can quite explain. For years, the official story holds. For one woman — Mike's mother — it never does.

This is Part One of our two-part deep dive into the disappearance of Mike Williams: what everyone believed happened at Lake Seminole, and the small, stubborn refusal to let it stay that way.

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