Welcome back to the deep Dive. We have a particularly dense collection of sources to work through today, and the through line connecting them all is well, it's fascinating, it really is. We're essentially building what we're calling a future library, a sort of curated stack of insights from books that are hitting the shelves or are about too, and they really reframe how we see the world. But we're anchoring this huge intellectual sweep with something very specific, very grounded, a deep re examination of the nineteen ninety two disappearance of the Springfield three. It's an interesting pairing, isn't it. On one hand, you have this high level view from the Crown Rights Guide, which is giving us a look at these upcoming literary shifts, yeah. Everything from revisionist history to the future of AI exactly. And then on the other hand, you have this incredibly granular, haunting investigation into a cold case on Delmar Street, a case that's frustrated the FBI for what over thirty years now. I think the connection for me, anyway, is this concept of the locked room. We're going to look at locked rooms in history, and I mean specifically inside WWII per W camps here in the US, right, we're going to look at locked rooms in our own psychology, and then of course the literal locked house in Springfield where three women just vanished. The mission today is really to pull out those aha moments, the things that challenge the standard narrative. We're not just summarizing these books. We're looking for the structural flaws and the systems we all tend to. Trust precisely, and that's the thread that ties it all together. Whether it's the legal system when it comes to reparations, or the social systems defining identity in. Modern China, or for the forensic system. Or the forensic systems that just completely failed the Streeter and McCall families. We're looking at what happens when the machinery of society grinds against the individual. So let's start with the history, because this first book, the fifteen by William Jeru, it completely destabilizes the andred American narrative of World War two. It really does we. Have this idea, you know, that the war was something that happened over there, right far away. We sent boys to Europe, we sent boys to the Pacific. But Jeru's central point is that the third Reich. I mean it was physically present right here in the American heartland. It's a massive blind spot in our collective memory. The sheer number is just staggering. The United States housed nearly four hundred thousand German prisoners of war. Four hundred thousand. That's the size of a major city, it is. And these weren't just temporary holding cells near the coasts. We're talking established camps in places like Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas. I think I read Kansas exactly. And because of the Geneva Convention, the conditions were frankly better. Than what a lot of Americans had at the time, right with the depression recovery still sort of lingering. That's the incredible irony of it. They were well fed, They worked on local farms to plug the labor shortage. And Jeru even talks about this strange frat in his a where German soldiers would you know, date local American girls. Wait, hold on, how did that even work? Weren't they behind barbed wire? Well, a lot of the work was outside the camps on farms, and you had these young men far from home and young local women. Human nature finds a way, But that's the surface story. Right, because Jeru's book isn't about that weirdly pastoral, almost friendly surface. It's about the war inside the wire. Yes, the central thesis here is that the Nazi command structure didn't just dissolve because they surrendered on a battlefield in Europe. No, in fact, it arguably intensified. It's like they felt this need to prove their loyalty while they were in the belly of the beasts, so to speak. So what did that look like inside the camps? You had a camp population that was completely divided. On one side, you had the average hans you know, the guy who was drafted. Maybe you didn't love Hitler and was just happy to be eating three square meals a day and not getting shot at. But then you had the true believers, the hardcore SS guys, the Gestapo types, and they viewed surrender as just a temporary tactical setback. They were still at war, and they ran the camps Internally. They set up their own kangaroo courts right inside these American camps. If a fellow prisoner was seen being too friendly with an American guard, or if they dared to criticize the furor they were labeled a trader. And we're not just talking about shunning, are we. The violence was brutal, Oh. It was brutal. They were beating and in some cases murdering fellow prisoners right under the noses of the American guards, who for the most part, were either oblivious or just wanted to keep the peace and didn't look too closely. Which brings us to the title of the book, The Fifteen. This refers to a specific, incredibly high stakes legal incident that came out of this internal war. This is the absolute core of the book. It starts with a murder at a camp in Oklahoma. A group of hardcore Nazis beat a fellow prisoner to death for what they call treason. And the US government finally had to step in. They realized they had compl deletely lost control of the internal discipline of the camps, so they decided to make an example. Yeah, they identified the ringleaders, fifteen of them, and they set up a secret military tribunal. This wasn't a standard court martial none at all. This was a tribunal specifically designed to send a message both to the prisoners and back to Germany. And the verdict was swift. They sentenced all fifteen to death by hanging. And this is where the geopolitics gets absolutely terrifying. Yeah, because the Third Reich, even as it was crumbling in late forty four early forty five, still had an intelligence network. They found out about the death sentences and their response. Their response was this chilling act of diplomatic leverage. They went into their own pow camps and they selected fifteen American prisoners, high value targets like pilots, intelligence officers, and they condemned them to death in direct retaliation. It was a literal hostage trade, a hostage trade proposed in blood. The message was simple, you kill our fifteen, we kill year fifteen. The book details these frantic diplomatic cables flying back and forth between Washington and Berlin, mostly through Swiss intermediaries. You can just imagine the tension in the State Department having to weigh the concept of justice executing convicted murders against the very pragmatic reality of saving American lives. And Juru really brings this to life by focusing on the individuals. There's this German ring leader nicknamed King Kong, who just represents this terrifying, unbreakable ideological conviction. He felt he did nothing wrong. But on the American side, it's the psychological torture of being upon. You're an American pilot sitting in a cell in Germany. The war is technically winding down. You think you might make it home, and suddenly you're told you're going to be executed, not because of anything you did, but because of a court case in Oklahoma that you've never even heard of. It just underscores that the battlefield is it's global, and the trauma of war isn't just about combat. It's that realization that your life is just a bargaining ship for the state. Absolute and Drew argues this incident, which was kept highly classified for a very long time, really shaped the post war treatment of prisoners. It forced the US to grapple with the limits of its own judicial power during wartime. It's a story about the state calculating the value of a life, and that is I think the perfect bridge to our next source, which deals with how the US government calculates value in a civil context. We're looking at getting to Reparations by Dorothy A. Brown. Now what's important here is that Brown is a tax law expert, so She's not approaching this from a purely sociological perspective. She's coming at it like a forensic accountant. And that's exactly what makes this book so powerful and so difficult for critics to dismiss. The standard arguments against reparations usually fall into two buckets. Right, it was too long ago, or it's just administratively impossible to figure out who gets what, and. Brown just dismantles both of those arguments by looking at the receipts. She pulls up the government's own records. Her argument basically shifts the debate from should we do this? To why haven't we done this? Given all the precedents. She lists these specific historical instances where the federal government had absolutely no problem cutting checks for what it deemed loss and violence. And most jarring example for me was the compensation of slaveholders. It's a historical fact that is so often glossed over or just not taught. When the District of Columbia ended slavery, and this is before the emancipatient proximation applied nationwide, the federal government paid reparations. Did they pay the owners? They paid the owners for their loss of property. She highlights this one case of a wealthy white woman, Margaret Barber. She received nine thousand dollars for her loss of slaves. And in today's money, what is that. It's roughly a quarter of a million dollars. So the government said, we are taking your property. Here is fair market value for it. So the legal precedent is established right there. The government pays for the loss of assets. The perversity, of course, is that the assets were human beings. But Brown's point is purely legal and financial. The mechanism for payment exists. She doesn't stop there either. She brings up the eighteen ninety two lynching of Italian immigrants in New Orleans. I had never heard of this. It's a crucial data point in her argument. A mob lynched eleven Italian men. It was a horrific, internationally condemned event. The Italian government was understandably furious. So President Harrison. President Benjamin Harrison, wanting to avoid a major diplomatic rupture with Italy, authorized a payment of twenty five thousand dollars to the families of the victims. In today's money, that's about seven hundred and sixty six thousand dollars. And what was the legal justification for that. It was an explicit payment for violence failed to be prevented by the state. The government acknowledged its failure to protect people within its borders and paid for that failure. And then, of course the big one is the Indian Claims Commission. Right, the government over decades paid out eight hundred and eighteen million dollars, which is hundreds of billions in today's value, to indigenous tribes for stolen land. Now you have to be careful with that example, you do. We have to be clear this didn't give the land back, and many activists argue is just blood money that didn't come close to the true value of what was taken. But from a purely legal. Standpoint, it's an admission of liability. It's the government saying we took this, it was wrong, we owe you x amount for it. So Brown's conclusion is that this whole administrative impossibility argument is frankly a lie. We have a tax code that can handle incredibly complex appreciation of assets. We have a history of paying for lynchings as long as the victims are foreign nationals. We have a history of paying for lost property as long as the claimants are white. So the exclusion of Black Americans from this framework isn't an accident, It's not a logistical hurdle, it's a specific, repeated policy choice. She argues that the refusal to pay reparations isn't about logistics at all. It's about who the law recognizes as a victim worthy of compensation. And she even proposes how it could be done. Yeah, through the existing tax infrastructure, things like tax credits, wealth transfers, stuff the IRS does every single day. It's about a system of justice that has been up to this point selectively applied. Speaking of selectively applied systems and state control, let's pivot from the US to China. We're looking at let only red flowers bloom by Emily Feng. We're moving from the American state's financial control to the Chinese state's control over identity itself. Fung was a correspondent in Beijing during this period, and she documents this major shift in propaganda, especially around one hundredth anniversary of the Communist Party. The state began to aggressively and very publicly define the ideal citizen. And that definition was extremely. Narrow, incredibly narrow. Han ethnicity, Mandarin speaking officially atheist and of course politically loyal to the party. The problem, which the party sees as a feature, not a bug, is that China is an empire of immense diversity. So you have millions upon millions of people Eigers, Tibetan's, Mongolians and others who suddenly find their very existence, their culture, their language defined by the state as incorrect. And Fung tells these deeply personal stories of the human cost. There's one about a Mongolian teacher who has to flee to the country and his crime. His crime wasn't terrorism or violence, it was wanting to teach his students and his mother tongue Mongolian. That's what she calls the soft violence of cultural. Erasure exactly we know about the hard violence. She covers the re education camps in Shinjang extensively, and it's harrowing, But the story of the teacher is so poignant because it shows the immense psychological toll this man has to leave his home, his elderly parents, everything he has ever known, just to preserve the language that defines how he thinks and dreams. And she connects all of this to the surveillance state It's not just about passing laws from on high. No, it's about the cameras on every street corner, the social credit scores that can determine if you can buy a train ticket, the pressure on neighbors to report on neighbors who aren't conforming. It is a totalizing system that aims to control every aspect of life. Which brings us to the most intimate form of resistance, imaginable food. We have another book here, at the Last Sweet Bite by Michael Shak, and this pairs so perfectly with things book. It really does shake looks at how authoritarian regimes and colonial powers often target culinary heritage as a specific strategy to break a people's spirit. It sounds kind of abstract, but he gives these really concrete examples. In the Uga region. He talks about the cinicization of bakeries. Which is just it's so insidious. It's not enough to control the people. You have to control their. Bread because bread is visceral. It's visceral the smell of traditional non baking in a tande or a clay oven, it triggers memory family identity. So by forcing bakeries to standardize, to use industrial ovens, to make Chinese style bread. The state is actively trying to sever that sensory link to the past. He also looks at Bolivia and US war on drugs. Yeah, this is a great example of conflicting worldviews. To the Ua Dea, a field of coca plants is a potential cocaine factory, full stop. But to an indigenous grandmother in the Andes, the coca leaf is medicine. It's tea for altitude sickness. It's a sacred part of rituals that go back centuries. So when those fields are raised, it's felt as. A cultural amputation. You're not just destroying a crop, you're destroying a way of life. But the sweet Bite in the title that refers to the reclamation right, the idea that cooking itself can be an act of defiance. Yes, that's the hopeful part of the book. He spends time with Rohinja refugees in the camps in Bangladesh. These are people who have lost their citizenship, their homes, their land, everything, But in the camps they will go to extraordinary lengths to find the specific spices, the right kind of fish paste to make their traditional curries. That active cooking isn't just about staving off hunger, not at all. It's a political statement. It's saying you can displace us, you can try to erase us, but you cannot make us forget who we are. You cannot take the taste of home from our mouths. This is very powerful, very quiet form of soft power, right from the bottom up. Let's follow that thread of reclaiming the self into our next section. We have a stack of memoirs here that are all in their own way, about individuals trying to find their footing and systems that really weren't built for them. And we're starting with a really radical pivot, A change of Habit by Sister Monica Claire. I love this story because it just completely disrupts our stereotype of what a NNN is. Monica wasn't some sheltered girl who went straight from Catholic school to the convent, not at all. She was a high powered photo editor in the New York media. World, dealing with cocaine fueled photographers, the insane vanity of the fashion industry, the constant noise of making it, and she just walked away from all of it to take a vow of poverty and join an episcopal convent. The detail that really stuck with me was what she calls the economy of grace inside the convent, specifically the rule against compliments. Right to a modern ear, that sounds so harsh, like hey, nice soups, sister, and the response is just silence. It seems cold, it. Does, but the philosophy behind it is profound. In her old life, her media life, everything was transactional. You do a good job so you can get a raise or a pat on the back or a like on social media. It's all about getting something in return. Validation, constant validation. The convent taught her that acts of generosity should be completely free from the expectation of return. You do a good thing because it's a good thing to do, not because you want to be thanked for it. She talks about the literal withdrawal symptoms she had from that lack of praise. She realized she was addicted to it. It's like a detox program for the ego. And speaking of the ego and the literal heights of achievement, Let's look at Enough by Melissa Arnott Reid. She was the first American woman to summit Mount Everest without using supplemental oxygen Physiologically, that is on the very edge of what is humanly possible. It's an incredible feat of endurance. But the book isn't really about the climb up. It's about the crash after she got to. This is the arrival fallacy. That's it, exactly, yeah, the belief that once I achieve X, I will finally feel whole. Reid conquered the deadliest mountain on Earth. She was quite literally on top of the world. But she writes with this brutal honesty about standing there on the summit and realizing she was still the exact same person. She still had all the same insecurities and that same gnawing feeling of not being enough. It's the silence of the descent that gets you. The adrenaline fades, the sponsorship deals get signed, the articles are written, but that internal void is still there. It's such a powerful cautionary tale about using external achievement to try and fix internal brokenness. Which is a perfect segue into Alligator Tears by Edgar Gomez. This is another memoir about survival, but the central metaphor he uses is just brilliant. The zigzag I grew up in the South, so I know this myth, the idea that if an alligator is chasing you, you don't run in a straight line. You run in a zigzag pattern because the gator has a wide turning radius and can't keep up. Right now, biologically it's a total Mythgators or ambush predators. They don't really chase you across a field like that. But as a metaphor for surviving poverty and marginalization, it is perfect. He grew up poor and queer in Florida, and. He argues that the American dream, this idea of working hard and moving a straight line up the ladder of success is a lie, a lie told to the poor to keep them running. He says, if you're marginalized, you can't run straight, the system will get you. You have to zigzag. You have to hustle, code switch, hide parts of yourself, and constantly dodge the jaws of the system that are trying to snap you up. The one scene that just captures us perfectly for me is his job at the sandal shop in a tourist trap. He's on his knees all day putting sandals on the sweaty, smelly feet of tourists for minimum wage. It's just so degrading physically. And emotionally exhausting work. And then the zigzag happens at night. He clocks out of that job and rushes to the Pulse nightclub, and in that space, the posture completely changes. He isn't the servant on his kne anymore. He's the star. He's celebrated, He's part of a vibrant community. The book is this beautiful, heartbreaking tribute to those sacred spaces like Pulse, where people who have to zigzag all day can finally, for a few hours, walk straight. But sometimes the space that looks glamorous and freeing from the outside is actually the most toxic, which brings us to you want to be on top a Sarah Hartsworn. This takes us inside the America's Next Top Model house. Oh man, we all watched that show as a cultural juggernaut in the early two thousand absolutely, but Hartshorn, who is a contestant on the show, reveals it was essentially a Stanford prison experiment, but with fashion and really bad makeovers. The luxury mansion was a total set, a set. She says, they didn't have a dishwasher or a microwave. The girls were fainting from hunger and sheer exhaustion during the elimination ceremonies, which she says would drag on for eight, nine, ten hours for just a few minutes of television. And the surveillance was total. She talks about having to hold conversations in closets. The closet confessions, because the producers had cameras and mics absolutely everywhere. The only place the production crew couldn't physically squeeze a camera operator was inside the small closets in the bedrooms. So if the girls wanted to have a genuine human conversation, one that wouldn't be edited into a villain arc or a SOB story, they would huddle in the closet among the clothes and with ber. It just emphasizes how reality TV strip minds human emotion for content. There's no reality to it. None. And on Hartshorn was the designated plus size model of her season, which looking back now. Is just laughable because she was what a size ten, maybe a twelve. Something like that, And it really just shows how incredibly toxic the early two thousands were regarding body image, the things that judges like Tyra Banks said to her, the way her body was framed as this obstacle she had to overcome. Reading it today, it just feels abusive. It's a stark reminder of how much unlearning we've had to do as a culture. And that unlearning has to extend to issues of race and desire, which is the subject of our final memoir, Fetishized by Kylie Yu. She deals with the specific trauma of yellow fever. You rise from the perspective of someone who is in the pin up and modeling industry, and she was caught in this impossible double bind. So on one hand, she was trying desperately to conform to Western beauty standards, the blonde hair, the body type, just to get work. But on the other hand, the work she did get was entirely predicated on her being the exotic Asian trope, the submissive, hyper sexualized fantasy. And she traces this back to the media we all consumed. Oh Absolutely, from Memoirs of a Geisha and Miss Saigon, all the way to specifically that infamous me Love You Long timeline from Full Metal Jacket. A line that became a weapon, a global weapon. It was used to reduce an entire, incredibly diverse demographic of women down to a single subservient sexual object. Used journey in the books about trying to reclaim her own sexuality for herself rather than performing a version of it for a white male gaze. It's a painful read, but it's so necessary. It shows how preference can often just be a mask for encoded racism and really skewed power dynamics. Okay, let's shift gears. We're moving into Part three, Business Tech and the Future. We're going from the personal zigzag to the systemic ones that leaders and all of us face. And we have to start with the biggest locked room mystery in the entire financial world, the mysterious Mister Nakamoto by Benjamin Wallace. This is the definitive story so far of the hunt for the creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. It is one of the few true enduring mysteries of the Internet age. It's incredible someone or some group wrote the code, released the white paper in two thousand and eight, communicated with other developers for a few years, and then poof vanished. But unlike the Springfield three, they left something very significant behind. The Genesis block exactly. There is a bitcoin wallet or a series of wallets associated with Satoshi that holds roughly one million. Bitcoins, and depending on the market on any given day, that's an eleven figure four. We're talking tens of billions of dollars. An untouchable fortune because it hasn't moved in all these years, not a single Satoshi has been spent or transferred. This is the detail that drives the crypto sleuth's absolutely crazy. If Satoshi is alive, they are the most disciplined human being on planet Earth. So Wallace runs through all the major suspects. To me, how Finny seems the most likely candidate. He's a strong contender, a brilliant cryptographer, an early collaborator. He lived just down the street from a man literally named Dorian Nakamoto, which suggests a possible origin for the pen name. And he passed away from als. Which would neatly explain why the coins have never moved. His family swears it wasn't him, but the circumstantial evidence is compelling. But then you have these other figures like Craig Wright. Oh, Craig Wright, the mercurial Australian who aggressively and in court claims to be satoci but has repeatedly failed to provide the definitive cryptographic proof moving one of the original coins. Wallace paints this whole world as a bizarre mix of high minded libertarian philosophy and frankly low rent grifting. It's a fascinating study of how a myth is created and sustained in real time. Managing that kind of complexity, whether it's the crypto market or global supply chains, is the focus of our next book, The System's Leader, by Robert Siegel. This one is a bit more academic, but the core concept of cross pressures is vital for anyone in a leadership role today. Siegel's argument is that the old business school model of do one thing and do it well is completely obsolete. Leaders today are caught in advice of opposing forces. Can you get an example. Sure, you have to be hyper local to please the community and deal with local regulations, but you also have to be hyper global to manage your supply chain and talent pool. You have to execute slawlessly and maximize profit for the next quarter to keep shareholders happy, but you also. Have to invest heavily in R and D that might not pay off for ten years, or you'll be disrupted. Exactly. These are opposing contradictory pressures happening simultaneously, and most people crack under that strain. They pick aside. They say we are an innovation company and they neglect current operations in the business fails, or they say we are an operations company. They focus only on efficiency and they get blindsided by the next big thing. So seagal solution isn't to pick one. No, his point is that you have to build a system and a leadership team that can hold the tension. You don't solve the paradox of local versus global, you manage it. It's about developing cognitive flexibility and being comfortable with ambiguity, which. Brings us to the cognitive load we all carry, not just leaders. Time Anxiety by Chris key to Bow. I have to admit this book hit me hard. I am a person who lives by my to do list. I get anxious when there are unchecked boxes at the end of the day. I think we all do. It's the modern condition. Giebo's diagnosis is that our anxiety doesn't come from a literal lack of hours in the day. It comes from a misalignment and from the false belief that if we just work harder, faster, or smarter, we will eventually finish. But you can't finish. You can never finish. The incoming stream of tasks, emails, and demands is infinite. The inbox never gets to zero for long. So his solution is what he calls building a tolerance for incomplete to do lists. It's a form of radical acceptance. You have to be able to look at a list of ten important things, choose to do the three most critical, and then go to sleep without hating yourself for not doing the other seven. He has a line in there that is just It's brutal, but true. You must be willing to disappoint people to save your own life. Is so good because if you try to reply to every email, if you say yes to every request, you are fundamentally prioritizing other people's agendas over your own health and your own most important work. I am putting that on a sticky note my monitor. Disappoint people to save your own life. It's a game changer. Finally, in this business stack, we're pairing two books that tackle the intersection of race and capital play. The game change, The game. Leave the Game by Robert W. Livingston and You Deserve to Be Rich by Rashad Balal and Troy Millings. Livingston's framework is super clear and helpful for understanding how to navigate corporate America, especially for black professionals. He says, you essentially face three strategic choices. Right first is play the game. This is the Ruth Simmons approach. She became the first black president of an Ivy League university Brown by mastering the existing rules of academia and outperforming everyone. Okay, that's one path. The second is change the game. This is the activist approach. The fime example is Colin Taepernick, who used his platform as an NFL quarterback to force a national conversation about police brutality. Even though he knew it would cost him his career, he tried to change the rules from within. In the third path, leave the game. This is about opting out of predominantly white institutions entirely to build black owned businesses and generate black owned equity. Which is exactly what Bllal and Millings preach in You Deserve to Be Rich. These are the guys from the Earn. Your Leisure PODC Their entire philosophy is leave the game by buying the board. They focus heavily on financial literacy as a form of civil rights in the twenty first century. They arn you that you can't protest your way to freedom if you don't understand how capital gains, tax works, or how to leverage whole life insurance policies as a financial tool. It's about healing financial trauma, it is. It's about removing the mystery and the fear around money so that it can be used as a strategic tool for liberation rather than a shackle that keeps you in a game you can't win. Okay, So we have examined the systems of war, the systems of identity, and the systems of commerce. Now we are going to walk into a single house on a quiet street where all of those systems completely and utterly failed. Part four, the deep Dive, the Vanishing on Delmar Street. We are drawing our information primarily from the new investigation detailed in the book Pitch for White, Pines and Stone by the actor Dylan McDermott and former FBI agent Christopher Whitcom, as well as the fbis of vice cap alerts and other public Records. This is the story of the disappearance of the Springfield Three. To really understand this case, you have to feel the atmosphere of that night. It's June seven, nineteen ninety two, Springfield, Missouri. It's the Ozarks, so it's hot, it's humid, it's sticky, the crickets are definitely loud, and it's graduation night for Kickapoo High School. You can just feel that energy that transition from high school to real life, the parties, the excitement, that feeling of total invincibility. And at the center of it we have Susie Streeter who's nineteen, and her best friend Stacy McCall, who's eighteen. If they are the golden girls of the night. They're beautiful, popular, and just so excited about the future. And the third woman is Cheryl Levitt, Susie's mom. She's forty seven of popular hairdresser, described as tough but deeply loving. The timeline of that night is absolutely crucial. Here. Susie and Stacy are bouncing between a few different graduation parties. They're driving their own cars initially, but then they consolidate into one to make things easier. Right, and the original plan was for both of them to stay the night at their friend Janelle's house. But when they finally get to Janelle's around two point in the morning, the place is a zoo. Yeah, it's totally packed. People are sleeping on the floor. It's loud, it's chaotic, and Susie has a much better option. She just got a brand new king size waterbed as a graduation gift. The ultimate nineties luxury item. It's the perfect crash pad. So she tells Stacy, Hey, let's just go to my mom's house. We've got the big bed. It'll be quiet. We can sleep in late before we go to the White Water Park tomorrow. So they leave Janelle's they drive to Cheryl's house at seventeen seventeen East Delmar Street. They probably arrive around two point one pm am. We know this because they park their cars, both of them, in the circular driveway. The cars were still there untouched the. Next morning, and that is the last positive sighting of any of them. That is the moment they effectively vanish from the world. It is so let's walk through the discovery. The next day, the morning after their friend Janelle, expecting to meet them at the water park, it's calling the house. Around eight am, no answer. She calls again, still no answer, so she and. Her boyfriend decide to just drive over. Maybe around nine am. They pull into the driveway. They see both cars are there, so they figure the girl's just overslapped. They walk up to the front door and it's unlocked. It's unlocked. Janelle walks in. The house is silent, but there are these immediate visual cues that something is wrong, even if she doesn't process it as a crime yet. First the dog, Cinnamon, little Yorkshire terrier. The dog is agitated, yapping, freaking out, which is apparently out of character. And then the purses. This is the detail, This is the detail that has haunted every single person who has ever studied this case. At the foot of the stairs, lined up in a neat orderly row, are the three women's purses, Cheryl's, Susie's, and Stacy's. Let's just analyze that for a second. A woman's purse is her lifeline. It has her keys, her money, her driver's license, her cigarettes, her makeup. You do not leave the house without it, ever. Especially not Cheryl Let, who was a known chainsmoker. Her cigarettes and her lighter were found on her night stand upstairs in her bedroom. She would never ever have walked out the door willingly without them. The fact that the purses were all there and lined up so neatly suggests one of two things. Either they arrived, put them down and were immediately interrupted by someone they knew. Or they were forced to leave them there by an abductor. It's not the sign of a panicked, voluntary exit. So Janelle keeps walking through the house. She goes to the kitchen. What does she see. She sees a pot of coffee on the machine. The pot is full, but one cup has been poured and is sitting. On the counter, and the coffee is cold. The coffee is cold. This suggests a timeline and suggests Cheryl probably woke up first, maybe around seven zero or eight zero am, went to the kitchen, made a pot of coffee, poured herself a cup, and then the interruption happened. Whatever happened happened then. But there's another critical detail in the bedrooms. The beds look like they'd been slept in. The covers on the water bed were pulled back. And here's the folded shorts detail, which is so mundane it's terrifying. In Susie's room, police later found her clothes from graduation night, but they also found a pair of flowered shorts folded neatly, and inside the pocket of the shorts was her jewelry, her watch, her necklace. That implies a routine, a calm end of the night routine. She came home, she took off her jewelers, she put it in her pockets so she wouldn't lose it. She folded the shorts, she went to bed. This wasn't a frenzy. This was a completely normal night. So the evidence points to this. They came home, they got ready for bed, they slept. The abduction likely happened in the morning after shery'll make coffee. But how how do you abduct three adult women from a house in broad daylight, in a dense suburban neighborhood, without a single scream, without a gunshot, without any sign of a struggle. The house was undisturbed, no broken glass except for one thing, no overturned furniture. The only sign of any disorder was the glass globe cover on the front porch light. It was shattered on the porch, but the light bulb inside was still war Okay. Now we have to talk about the tragedy of the investigation itself, the good intentions that completely destroyed the crime scene. Janelledan know it was a crime scene. She and her boyfriend thought the girls had just been spontaneously picked up by friends to go to a lake or something, so, trying to be helpful, she cleaned up. What did she do? She swept up the broken glass from the porch light and threw it away. She washed a few dishes that were in the sink. Then more friends and family started showing up as the day went on. They used the toilet, they answered the ringing phone. By the time someone finally called the police late that afternoon, realizing this was serious, the house had been contaminated by at least a dozen well meaning people. So any fingerprints, any DNA from a potential perpetrator. Was likely wiped away or hopelessly overlaid with all the new prints. It was a forensic nightmare. And then there's the answering machine. This is the detail that feels like it's straight out of a horror movie. The phone had an answering machine with a cassette tape. The little red light was blinking, indicating that there was a message. A friend trying to be helpful, press play. And they heard a male voice. A male voice. The descriptions of it very Some say the method was lude and sexual, some say it was just strange and unsettling. But here's the catastrophic part. The friend, thinking the tape might be full and that the women might try to call home, decided to clear space, and they accidentally deleted the message. That one button press erased the only potential piece of audio evidence of the killer. It's just a devastating, irreversible mistake. The FBI later brought in audio engineers, some reports say from NASA to try and recover the audio from the magnetic impression on the tape, but it was gone, just digital silence. So with no physical evidence, no bodies, and no witnesses who could have done this. The investigation looked at everyone ex boyfriends, local criminals, transient workers, but one name just keeps surfacing year after year. Robert Craig Cox. Cox is a terrifying figure. He was an Army ranger, which means he was trained in silent movement, surveillance and killing, and in nineteen seventy eight he was convicted of murdering a nineteen year old woman in Florida named Sharon Zeller's. And the details of that Florida murder are absolutely gruesome and very specific. When Cox was arrested for that crime, he had a significant undeniable injury. An inch of his tongue was missing. He claimed he bit it off himself. He had some story about biting it off himself in a fit of rage or something. But the prosecution argued very convincingly that the victim, Sharon Zellers, bit it off while fighting for her life. The forensics supported that theory. He was sound guilty and sentenced. To death, but he got out. He got out on a procedural error. The Florida Supreme Court overturned his conviction on a technicality regarding how evidence was handled. He was released and in June of nineteen ninety two, where was he living Springfield, Missouri? And what was he doing for work? This is the key. He was working in underground utilities. He laid cable, he worked on water mains. He knew the subterranean layout of the city, intimately knew which backyards connected to which drainage ditches. And he admitted to the police that he'd worked on Delmar Street. So you have a trained killer, a known sexual predator who knows the terrain inside and out, living nearby at the time of the disappearance. Did he have an alibi for that morning? He did. His girlfriend at the time told police he was at church with her that morning, and the police apparently verified it. But alibis can be faked, times can be fudged. Years later, Cox was imprisoned in Texas for a different kidnapping, and from prison he started taunting journalists and investigators about the Springfield case. What did he say? He said things like, I know the women are dead, I know where the bodies are. You play these cruel games, saying I'll tell you what happened. But only after my mother dies. And his mother eventually died did he talk. No, he went silent again. He refuses to give the families any closure. It's the ultimate power play for a psychopath. The new book White, Pines and Stone re examines the Cox theory, but it also looks clo at the possibility of a ruse. And this would explain the purses. This theory suggests that someone knocked on the door that morning, maybe dressed as a police officer or a utility worker claiming there was a gas leak, someone in a position of authority. And Cheryl would have opened the door. She would have. And if this person said, ma'am, you need to evacuate the house, immediately, come with me. Now, what would you do? You wouldn't stop to grab your purse if you thought you were just stepping out to the curb for a few minutes while they checked a gas line. And once they're out the door. A van pulls up, a weapon is shown, and it's over. It explains the lack of struggle inside the house. It explains the compliance. It is to me, the most terrifying theory because it weaponizes our trust in the systems that are supposed to protect us. The Springfield three remains one of the most baffling and heartbreaking cases in American history because these three women simply ceased to exist. No bodies have ever been found, No definitive physical evidence has ever been located. There's just the void they left behind and that house on Delmar Street. It's a profound reminder that our sense of safety is an incredibly fragile construct. We lock our doors, we live in nice neighborhoods, but there are predators out there who know how to bypass those systems. We really want to encourage you to read more about this White Pines and Stone when it comes out, will go into the ground penetrating radar searches that have been done on parking garages where some people believe the bodies may have been buried in the fresh concrete. It is a deep, dark rabbit hole, and. To pull us out of that darkness just for a moment, let's wrap up with our literary miscellany. We always like to end with a few other intriguing titles that expand the horizon in completely different directions. First up, if you need a serious palate cleanser, we have the Spamlot Diaries by the Great Eric Idyl. It's hilarious. It's a chaotic, anxiety ridden and brilliant diary of trying to turn Monty Python and the Holy Grail into a smash hit Broadway musical. It's also a great lesson in resilience, isn't it? Creating art is just messy. Idle breaks his ankle, he fights with producers, He's dealing with massive egos. It completely demystifies the glamour of Broadway. Then for the adventure lovers, we have Neptune's Ransom by Julian Santon. This is the story of the San Jose. The San Jose, a Spanish galleon that sank off the coast of Colombia in seventeen oh eight with what might be the single richest treasure in human history, billions and billions in gold, silver, and emeralds. But the book isn't just a treasure hunt. No, it's about the legal and political battle over the wreck. Today it's the government of Columbia versus Spain, versus indigenous groups whose ancestors mind the gold, versus an American salvage company that claims they found at first. It shows that even three hundred years later, at the bottom of the ocean, history is still a battleground. Okay, Next we have Should We Go Extinct? By Todd May a light title. For a light read, A philosophical heavy hitter for sure. May asks a really uncomfortable moral question. All the suffering humanity causes two animals to the planet to each other. Would the universe be an ethically better place if we just quietly stopped reproducing and faded away. He doesn't advocate for violence, just a voluntary end. It is a truly challenging thought experiment about our ultimate value as a species. And finally, a novel to round things out. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. This is a beautiful story about a seventy three year old woman who has spent her life as a recluse, but decides to start writing letters to all the important people in her past to confront things left unsaid. It's a very moving look at memory, regret, and the courage it takes to confront your own history before it's too late. Joh we have traveled a very long way today, from the secret tribunals of World War II to the modern tax codes of reparations, from the Summit of Everest to the Vanishing Act in Springfield. What's the synthesis here? What's the thread? I think the synthesis is about the edge. We mentioned that book briefly, Letters from the Edge, and I think that's where we've been hovering this whole time. We've looked at the edge of the law with those German POWs, the edge of social acceptance with the Zigzag survivors, and the literal edge of human knowledge in the Springfield three. Case, and it's human curiosity that drives us to that edge. We want to know what's in the dark. We want to know where the money is, where the bodies are, where the justice is. Exactly, and sometimes looking over that edge is terrifying. The things we find there can be horrifying. But the alternative is ignorance. And as we saw with the Nazi power structures in those camps, and as the McCall and Streeter families learned in the most painful way possible, ignorance doesn't keep you safe. Understanding the systems, how they work, how they fail, and how they can be manipulated is the only way we can hope to navigate. Them, and that is the mission of the Deep Dive. Thank you for going on this journey with us today. Please check the show notes for links to all these incredible books and sources. Stay curious and. Keep questioning the locked rooms. Goodbye,