First and foremost we just wanted to give a huge THANK YOU to all of our listeners and Patreon supporters. Having your support truly means the world to us. We're going to batch our episodes into seasons, with this episode being the last for season 1.

We will be back releasing episodes on Monday June 1st and we'll be back even sooner, here on Patreon recording those episodes live.

We love the live recording feature, it means that even though our episodes aren't hitting the airwaves until June 1st--you all get to join us LIVE while we record season 2 and get the juicy sneak peak! Of course, those LIVE recording won't be released until each episode airs--so you've gotta catch us live to be in on the action.

We took this episode to catch you all up on our plans for the spring and to tell you all about the JUICY gossip we've recited from our amazing listeners. Since our very first episode, we've had listeners reach out to us and give us the inside scoop. We always have questions and you guys always seem to have the answers. So enjoy this little special episode, join us while we record season 2 over these next 10 weeks and season 2 drops June 1st 2026.

Today, we go to a small rural town in upstate New York.

Tucked into the rolling hills of Dryden, the town was founded in 1797 on land that was once part of the Central New York Military Tract — territory taken from the Onondaga and Cayuga Nations and later granted to veterans of the Revolutionary War.

Some people like to frame that kind of history as the beginning of a curse, taking land from the Native Americans, But Dryden didn’t grow out of tragedy — it grew into a quiet, hardworking community. Over the decades, it became the kind of place families moved to for stability. By 1936, the town had its first official high school, Dryden High School — a sign that the town was putting down roots.

For generations, Dryden felt safe. The kind of safe where doors stayed unlocked. Where kids walked home from school. Where everybody knew everybody.

Life moved in an easy, predictable rhythm… until 1989.

That’s when the town’s sense of security began to crack.

I’m not going to dive deep into every case from that period today — this episode is about the two young cheerleaders. But it’s important to understand the backdrop. Because what happened to them didn’t land in a vacuum. It landed in a town that, in just a few short years, would be forced to face more loss than most communities see in a lifetime.

We’ll come back to some of those other stories another time.

On the morning of Tuesday, March 6th, 1962, Binghamton General Hospital felt like any other maternity ward in America. Dozens of newborns lined up behind glass. Nurses moving quickly. Parents resting upstairs, believing their babies were safe in the nursery.

It was admittedly busy, but nothing about that morning suggested that anything was amiss.

The earliest signs were subtle. A baby refusing a bottle. Another on the pediatrics floor crying inconsolably. One mother insisted something was off while trying to bottle feed, only to be told her daughter was just “fussy.” A nurse noticed the whole floor seemed to be fussy, fickle eaters.

By Friday, the maternity ward would completely erupt into crisis. Babies would begin vomiting, seizing and slipping away faster than staff could chart their symptoms. The nurses found in the staff office, breaking down while the doctors would be scrambling to recover & to find the cause.

The truth of how it happened — and who was blamed — would raise deeper questions about the hospital culture, and the dangerous confidence America had placed in modern maternity care. Sources:

https://www.pbs.org/video/the-salt-babies-zkdws8/

https://time.com/archive/6625294/medicine-death-in-the-formula/

https://www.nytimes.com/1962/03/12/archives/6-babies-die-in-2-days-at-binghamton-hospital-salt-found-in-sugar.html

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=DS19620530.2.47&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------

March 22nd, 2013.

A quiet residential street in Binghamton. Lisi Lane.

Inside one home on that street, police would discover a crime scene so brutal that even seasoned investigators were shaken.

This is the story of betrayal, domestic violence, obsession, and a case that would take six years — and two trials — to bring justice.

By the summer of 1913, Binghamton, NY was booming.

It was the fastest-growing city in New York State. Fifteen thousand people had arrived in just three years. New neighborhoods appeared almost overnight. Factories lined the rivers. The local economy was boosted. Downtown hummed with streetcars, storefronts, the sound of industry and the sidewalks were packed with people.

On Tuesday morning, July 22nd, the city awoke, already overheated.

At 8 a.m., the temperature had already climbed into the high eighties. Windows were thrown open along Court Street. Chocolates melted in shop windows. Gas lamps baked the insides of photography studios. And at the Binghamton Clothing Company on Wall St. every window and door stood open in a losing battle against the heat.

Inside, 111 people were already at work. And the hum of the sewing machines up on the 4th floor could be heard on the streets below. Looking back, the record breaking heat feels like an eerie premonition of what was to come that fateful July afternoon at the Binghamton Clothing Company.

SOURCES:

“Devil’s Fire” WSKG Public Media Documentary: https://www.pbs.org/video/the-devils-fire-3lpvou/

https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=198174

https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=256771

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1913_Binghamton_Factory_fire

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/binghamton-clothing-factory-fire-monument

https://www.nytimes.com/1913/07/24/archives/the-fire-at-binghamton.html

On September 29th, 2015, a 40-year-old woman named Kelley Clayton was found brutally murdered in her own home in Elmira, New York. She was stabbed more than a dozen times while her children slept upstairs.

At first glance, it looked like a nightmare scenario: an unknown intruder, a violent home invasion, a family torn apart.

But as investigators would soon discover, the truth wasn’t hiding in the shadows.

It was sitting right at the kitchen table.

This is the story of Kelley Clayton, who she was, how she died, and how the person responsible tried, and failed, to get away with murder.

It’s been difficult for me to write about this case because it seems like each time I've sat down to write, I pull up my sources and I’m hoping to find something that simply isn’t there. I want to know more about Keisha but there is so little information out there about her or about her death that it’s been frustrating trying to figure out how to tell her story–because there isn’t a story here. There’s just small fragments of a larger, much more sinister story.

All we know is that on March 22, 2009 Keisha Roman went missing from her home on Oak St in Binghamton, NY. Months later on September 21 of that same year her skeletal remains were found in Susquehanna County, Pa near the Susquehanna river–her body was found in a boat launch near a marina.

Since the discovery of her remains in 2009, there have been no details released about the case or the investigation. There have been no answers for Keisha’s family & there have been no suspects ever named in the murder of Keisha Roman.

https://www.truecasefiles.com/2024/10/the-disappearance-and-murder-of-keisha.html

Submit a Tip: https://www.binghamton-ny.gov/government/departments/police-department/submit-a-tip

Some disappearances don’t fade.

They linger — because they are unresolved.

In small towns, especially, when a missing child becomes part of the landscape. A name whispered. A memory that refuses to settle.

This is the story of two teenage girls who vanished within a year of each other — in towns just miles apart — along the New York–Pennsylvania border.

One girl was never found.

The other was found murdered.

And decades later, their stories remain strangely, hauntingly connected. This is the stories of Mary Lou Bostwick & Sharon Coston.