Every disappearance has a final moment of certainty, a last sighting, a last call, a last place someone was known to be the last known tells real true crime cases. Using only the facts. Today we are we aren't just recounting a crime. We are stepping into a ten year old paradox. That's the perfect word for it, a paradox. We're going to Midloath the in Texas to look at a case that well, frankly, it just shouldn't exist. It really shouldn't, you know. In modern forensics, we usually deal with a lack of data, no witnesses, no camera, no clear timeline. Right, you're looking for that one tiny thread exactly. This case is the complete opposite. We have the killer on video, we have audio from the security system. We have a timeline of the murder that we can narrow down to what a window of less than forty five minutes. It's an astoundingly small window. And yet here we are a decade later, and the person behind that mask is still free. It defies logic. We are talking about the murder of Taramecy Bevers. And look, if you're on the internet in twenty sixteen, you know the image, you know the video. Oh yeah, that figure walking down the church hallway in what looks like. Swat gear, the swat walker. That image is it's like a roar shock test. Of true crime, it really is. Yeah, everyone sees something different in that walk. Is it a limp? Is it a sway? Is it a man a woman? It's just this haunting loop that's played millions and millions of times online. But that's exactly where we need to be so careful because that video, as you know, as famous as it is, it became a bit of a trap, a huge trap. It spawned this massive industry of amateur sluice, and some of them, as we'll get into, did some real tangible damage to innocent people. Absolutely. So our mission today is to cut through all that noise. We're going to look at the source material, the warrants, the actual expert gate analysis from doctor Michael Narenberg, and the police files to try and figure out what is fact and what is just you know, internet folklore. Precisely, we need to deconstruct the movie version of this case that everyone thinks they know and look at the forensic reality, which is a lot more complicated. Okay, so let's set the scene it's the early morning of April eighteen, twenty sixteen mid Lothian, Texas. And Midlothian is a quiet place. You have to understand. That's about twenty five miles southwest of Dallas. So commuter town territory. Yeah, it's the kind of place often described as a bedroom community. It's safe, it's family oriented. Chief Carl Smith later noted that in his ten years as police chief there, he had never seen an event of this magnitude. It was a shock to the system, a complete shock. This kind of thing just doesn't happen there. And the weather that morning, it's almost like a character in this story. Oh for sure. It's not just raining. It is storming. It's a torrential downpour. I mean thunder lightning the works. It's pitch black, and the roads are slick with water. And that weather is really the first domino in this whole tragic chain of events. So let's talk about Missy Bevers, our victim. She was a forty five year old mother. Of three and a fitness trainer for a program called Camp Gladiator. And for those who don't know, Camp Gladiator isn't like a gentle yoga class in a climate controlled studio. This is boot camp. It is intense. Yeah, it's usually held outdoors, you know, they're in parking lots, on football fields and parks rain or shine. But because of this massive storm system that was moving through North Texas, Missy had to make a different call the night before. Right the parking lot was going to be a lake. I actually have her Facebook post here from the evening of April seventeenth. She writes, no excuses, you are gladiators. If it's raining, we're still training. Wow. And then she announces that the location is moving from their usual spot in the parking lot to inside the creekside Church of Christ. That post, you know, it really highlights her dedication. She was incredibly committed to her students, to her campers. Absolutely, But looking at it strictly from an investigative standpoint, that post is critical. It's a public broadcast of her location. It told the entire world and potentially her kill or exactly where she would be and when she would be there, and that she would likely be there first alone. To set up. Yet, so she moves the class indoors. Now let's jump ahead just a few hours to the discovery. It's just after five am on the eighteenth. And the campers, her students, they start pulling up to the church. Imagine that scene. It's still dark, it's still pouring rain. These people are amped up, you know, ready for really tough workout. Yeah, they're probably shaking off their umbrellas, expecting to walk in and hear Missy's voice shouting instructions over some music. Instead, they find silence, total silence. And then at five soeros six am they find Missy. And she was unresponsive. But the initial reaction from her students wasn't this is a murder? No, And that's really common when you find someone down in a church vestibule your brain it tries to make sense of it in the most logical way possible. Right, you're not thinking homicide. Not in church. The initial nine one one calls, they suggest a medical emergency, or maybe even a car accident, you know, perhaps she'd stumbled in after a crash on slick roads. That makes sense. But once ems and the police arrived, the scene told a very very different story. It wasn't an accident. No, she had puncture wounds to her head and chest. The autopsy conducted the next day confirmed it was a homicide and the brutality of it. Puncture wounds imply a very specific type of weapon. We're not talking about a gun. No, and not a simple knife either. It's something blunt and piercing at the same time. Which brings us to the hammer because almost immediately police pull the security footage from inside the church, and that's when this local case just explodes. That's when they see the figure, the intruder, and this is where that whole SWAT description comes from. The figure is wearing a helmet, a heavy vest with police written across the chest in these big white block letters, gloves and shin guards. But let's be really clear right up front. This isn't a rogue FBI agent or a real cop. No, no, no. We'll get into the specific details of the gear in a little bit, but it's a costume. It's a disguise. And what's so chilling isn't just the outfit. It's the demeanor. Yes, the behavior. You'd expect a killer inside a church to be frantic, nervous, running around. This person is strolling. That's the perfect word for it. Strolling. They're opening doors, they're peeking into classrooms. At one point they smash a glass pane with a hammer. But they don't seem to be in any rush to get through it. It's almost casual. It is casual, and that casual nature is what is so deeply terrifying. They are comfortable in that space. They are not afraid of being caught. Okay, I want to pause the overview right there and really really drill down into the timeline, because when you look at the hours leading up to the murder, it feels like a countdown. Every single minute matters. Absolutely. The timeline is the backbone of this entire investigation. And to do it right, we have to back up to the day before, to April seventeenth, and we. Have to start with, missus has been Brandon Bever's in any speusal murder? The husband is automatically suspect number one. That's just statistics, it's just procedure. You always look at the inner circle first. But Brandon wasn't in. Town, not even close. No, he was on an annual fishing trip to Mississippi. And you know, in the digital age, being away is easier to prove than ever before. He posts a photo from a restaurant called The Half Shell Oyster House in Biloxi. I've seen the photo. It's geotagged, it's time stamped, it's a digital receipt of where he was, and. It was corroborated by witnesses who are with him. He is physically states away. There's no ambiguity there. He and MISSI are texting that evening. They exchange I love use YEP. It appears on the surface at least to be a completely normal night for a couple that's temporarily. Apart, so the husband is physically cleared. Now we move into the very early morning hours of the eighteenth, and at two AM, this is where we get the first really weird variable, the Nissan Ultima. This one detail has driven investigators and websleuth's crazy for a decade. About a mile or so from the church, there's a sporting goods store called SWFA Outdoors, and they have good cameras, high quality exterior cameras. And at two AM, a light colored twenty ten to twenty twelve model Nissan Ultima pulls into their parking lot. Now, pulling to a parking lot isn't a crime, obviously, but it's the behavior of the car that's so strange. Right, it pulls in just sits there. The driver turns the lights off, then flashes them on, then off again. It just sits there for a few minutes and then it drives away. That feels like signaling, feels like I'm here, Are you ready? Or the coast is clear? That was the prevailing theory for a very long time. Was this a lookout? Was it the killer switching cars? But we also have to look at the context. This is a fairly rural part of Texas. It's two point zero am. Is it possible it's just someone pulling over to check their phone or send a text. Or a security guard doing their rounds, or just someone who missed their turn and is turning around. The police eventually clarified that while the driver is a person of interest, which just means they really want to talk to them, they aren't necessary early a suspect because they never came forward exactly. That's the key, because that person never called in to say, hey, that was me, my bad. That car remains a ghost. It's this frustrating loose thread that has never been tied off. Okay, so the ultimate leaves. The rain keeps pouring. Now we hit three p fifty am. This is the moment the intruder enters. The church, the motion activated cameras trigger when we see the first glimpse of that tactical gear. They likely pried open a side door to get in, and from three fifty am to four twenty am, we have a thirty minute window of well of waiting. This is the part I want to slow down on, because thirty minutes is a very long time to be alone in a building. You're breaking into an eternity. If I'm a burglar, I'm in and out in five minutes tops. I'm grabbing the av equipment from the sanctuary, the soundboard, maybe checking the office for a safe, and i am gone. Exactly. A professional or even a semi competent burglar is efficient. They have a target. They go for the high value idea. This individual just wanders. They go into the kitchen, into the kitchen, they open the fridge. Reportedly, they walk down hallways that lead to empty children's classrooms. And they break things. But it feels, I don't know, half hearted, aimless. That's a good way to put it. They use the hammer to smash some glass, but they ignore much more valuable targets. There are trophy cases in the lobby, there's a glass table they walk right past. If you're a pure vandal, you smash the trophy case. That's vandalism, one oh one. Right. If you're a thief, you're looking for cash or electronics. This person does neither. So what are they doing. They're hunting, or, as some profilers have suggested, they're rehearsing, maybe familiarizing themselves with the layout, checking for exits, making sure no one else is there. But the aimlessness of it all suggests they were killing time. They weren't there for the church's stuff. No, they were there for an event. They were waiting for something to happen, and that event arrives. At four to sixteen am. Missus truck pulls into the parking lot. The headlights sweep across the rain pavement. She parks right up under the awning to unload her gear to stay out of the storm. Now think about this from the killer's perspective. You've been inside in the dark for nearly half an hour. It's quiet except for the rain, and then suddenly you see those headlights slice through the windows. You hear a truck door slam. This is the convergence point the killer knows someone is here. Missy starts unloading her equipment, and at four to twenty am she enters the building. She's carrying her gear, weights, mats, all that she's seen on an interior camera walking toward the main area, and. The window here is just it's terrifyingly small. She enters the building at four twenty am. She has found unresponsive at five point six am. So the attack, the murder, and the killer's escape all happen in less than forty five minutes. Unlikely much much less than that. The attack probably happen almost immediately after she entered. And there's a piece of evidence here that the public has never seen, but that doctor Michael Nyronberg, the Forez podiatrist, has described this is. The horror movie moment you mentioned. This is it. Narrenberg was allowed to review the raw, unreleased footage for his analysis. He describes seeing Missy walking down the hall and then she just stops. She turns her head sharply to the side. She heard something, he said. It was absolutely clear she heard a noise off camera, maybe a footstep, maybe the rustle of that heavy nylon gear. He compared it to that split second in a horror film where the protagonist finally realizes they aren't alone. But this wasn't a movie. It was the last moment of normalcy in her life. She turned her head, and it's highly likely she saw the figure in the helmet coming at her from down the hall, and. You have to wonder, because of that gear, the helmet, the vest that says police, she might have hesitated. We'll get into the psychology of the uniform. But yes, absolutely, if you see what you think as a police officer in a church at four am, your first instinct probably isn't to run, it's to ask is everything okay? Office, and that hesitation could be fatal. It's all the time the killer needs. So the attack happens, the killer leaves, vanishing back into the storm. The campers arrive at five zero years, the police are there by five point zero one, and by five four point thirty the family is getting that first confusing call. And initially the family is told it was a car accident. You have Brandon who is in Mississippi. He's panic stricken, trying to figure out how to get home. It wasn't until later that the detective had to make that second, much harder call. To tell him this wasn't a crash, your wife was murdered. Just unimaginable. I want to pivot now to the suspect, the swat figure. Yeah, because this is the image that haunts everyone. We really need to break down and analyze this gear. You mentioned it's a costume. How do we know that for sure? When you look at the high resolution stills that police have released, the tactical nature of the gear, it just falls apart under scrutiny. Let's start with the helmet. It looks really shiny in the video. Exactly, it's gleaming. Real ballistic helmets, kevlar helmets are matt They have a rough textured finish, specifically to prevent reflection. Right, you don't want a sniper seeing a glint off your headgear from a mile away. Precisely, this helmet is gleaming under the fluorescent lights of the church hallway. It looks like cheap, shiny plastic, like something you'd buy for airsoft or for a Halloween costume. It's not protective. And what about the vest, it clearly says police it does. But again, look at the fit. It's bulky in all the wrong places. Real plate carriers real body armor. They're designed to cover the vital organs but allow for maximum mobility of your arms. And shoulders so you can use your weapon. Right, this thing looks like a generic tactical vest you could buy online, probably filled with foam or some soft padding. It's cumbersome. It's theater, not function. So if it's fake, why wear it? Why go through the incredible trouble of putting on shin guards, a heavy vest, a helmet, and gloves for this? Well? There are basically three schools of thought here among profilers and investigators. They A is the disguise. It's camouflage for the mind, a psychological trojan horse. That's a great way to put it. As we said, if Missy c' is a cop, she dropped her guard. It buys the killer those crucial two seconds they need to close the distance and get within striking distance with that hammer. Okay, that makes sense. What's theory B? Theory B is the fantasy. This is what the Internet has dubbed the neck beard theory, the idea that the killer is someone who fetishizes power and authority. They want to feel like a swat officer. So the crime is part of a roleplay for them, exactly. The wandering around the church checking rooms, it mimics a police building, clear procedure. They weren't just waiting, they were role playing, living out a fantasy. Which is desturbing on a whole other level. And theory C. Theory C is just cold, hard practicality. Missy Bevers was a camp gladiator trainer. She was strong, she was incredibly fit. She would have fought back vicious. Absolutely. So if you are going to attack her with a hammer, and maybe you aren't physically imposing yourself, you have to worry that she's going to fight back and maybe even win, so you wear armor. You wear armor, the shin guards, the heavy vest, the helmet. It's not just for looks. It's bite proof, it's scratch proof, it's kickproof. It turns a potential physical struggle into a completely one sided slaughter. Even if she lands a solid kick to the chest, she's just hitting plastic and foam. That is terrifyingly pragmatic. Yeah, and it suggests they knew her capabilities, they knew who they were up against. It does it suggests they did not want a fair fight. They came prepared to completely overwhelm her. Now we have to talk about the walk, the gate gait. For a while, this one word became the obsession of the entire internet. It became the absolute focal point of the investigation for a long long time. In the video, the killer has this very distinct walk. Their feet point outward, what potatrists called being. Outtowed like a duck walk almost a. Little bit yeah, and there's a sway to the hips. It looks laborious, awkward. And people immediately jumped all over this. It has to be a woman because of the hips. No, it's a man with a prosthetic leg. It's someone I know who add a knee injury. Everyone had a theory, and. This is where we really need to stop and listen to the science. The FBI brought in doctor Michael Nahrenberg, a forensic podiatrist, to make sense of this walk, and he did something brilliant. He didn't just sit and watch the video on a loop. He recreated the conditions. He ran an experiment. He did he took a police officer of a similar height and build and dress them in similar faux tactical gear. The ill fitting vest, the plastic shin guards, the helmet, and. He just told them to walk, and what happened. The walk changed completely. See, when you strap twenty or thirty pounds of awkward bulk to your chest and shins, your entire biomechanics have to shift. Your center of gravity moves up and forward, so. You have to adjust to not fall over. To stop yourself from toppling over, you instinctively widen your base of support. You turn your toes out. So the duck walk might not be their natural walk at all. It might be entirely a product of the costume. It's a compensation strategy. And the limp everyone saw. Niirrenberg pointed out that the shin guards in the video looked loose. If you have a piece of hard plastics sliding down your ankle with every step. You're gonna walk funny to keep it from tripping it. You're gonna step gingerly to keep it from falling off or getting under your foot. So the limp could just be a wardrobe malfunction. At the age of everything. If the gear creates the walk, then trying to identify the killer by the walk is impossible. It's a dead end. Nyronberg calls it the gender trap. He explicitly warned investigators and the public do not use this video to determine the sex of the killer. The police initially said they were looking for male, then they walked it back. Even today, a decade later, they officially state that they do not know if the killer is male or female. But Nyronberg's normal work, he usually looks at wear patterns on shoes, right, the shoe autopsy, as it's called. Right, that's his real expertise. If he has a suspect's actual shoes, he can look at the wear on the soul and say, this person pivots on their left heel when they turn, or they pronate the right foot. He can match that to a video with incredible accuracy. But he didn't have the shoes here. No, without the shoes, and with the suspect wearing a costume that fundamentally distorts their natural movement, the video evidence is scientifically inconclusive for identification. It's a disguise for the body's mechanics as much as it is for the face. Which brings us, unfortunately to the web slouths because while doctor Nihrenberg was doing careful, methodical scientific analysis, the Internet was doing well something else. Entirely the armchair detectives and look, I get it. The human desire to solve a mystery is natural. We all want to help find the bad guy, of course, but in this case, the vacuum of official information from the police in those early days led to an explosion of speculation that turned toxic fast. Facebook groups like case Crackers and Justice for Missy Bubbers grew to thousands and thousands of members overnight, and they. Weren't speculating, they started naming names they did. And this is where we see the incredibly dark side of so called citizen journalism. Let's talk about Randy Bab's, Missy's father in law. The internet mob decided he was the killer. Why him? Because of the gate. It all came back to the walk. Someone dug up an old family video of Randy walking a dog from years prior. It was grainy shot from a weird angle, and. They compared it to the security footage. They made a split screen jiff of him walking next to the killer. They drew gridlines on it. They did their own analysis and convinced themselves and thousands of other people that the angle of his right foot was a perfect. Match it's the definition of confirmation bias. You look for the similarities and you actively ignore all the differences precisely. And then came the story of the bloody shirt. This is the detail that really made that theory take off. It was the proof they needed. The story was that Randy dropped off a shirt at a local dry cleaner shortly after them. The shirt had blood on it. The dry cleaner, doing exactly the right thing, called the police, which. On its face sounds incredibly suspicious. I can see why people latched onto. That if you only read the headline, Yes, it sounds damning, but here is the full context that the mob ignored. Randy owned a couple of chihuahuas. One of them, a little dog named Kilo, had been attacked and killed by a larger dog. Randy was the one who had carried the bloody injured dog to the vet. The blood on his shirt was canine blood, and. The police tested this right, this wasn't just his story. Immediately they got a warrant, They seized the shirt from the dry cleaners. They ran the DNA it was confirmed to be dog blood. Furthermore, Randy had a rock solid, verifiable alibi. He was in California at the time of the murder. You physically cannot be in a Texas church while you were standing in California. The laws of physics are pretty clear on that. You'd think so. But did the Internet apologize? Did they retract their accusations? Of course not. No, the narrative was already set. The new theory became the police are covering it up or the alibi is faked. The harassment of the family, people who were already grieving the violent death of their loved one, was just relentless. And it wasn't just the family who got targeted. I want to talk about April Sandoval. This story. This one makes me genuinely angry. It should. The case of April Sandoval is a cautionary tale about the real world consequences of online witch hunts. She was a complete outlier. She wasn't a rival fitness instructor right or a jilted. Friend, nothing like that. She was a single mom who had taken a few of Missy's boot camp classes years before. She wasn't a close friend, she wasn't a rival. She was just a former client, one of hundreds. So how on earth did she end up with a target on her back. The sleuths went digging through Missy's Facebook friendless they found April. Then they started combing through her personal photos and found one where she had a foot injury. Her foot was swollen in a picture. And they thought, huh, the limp. It has to be her exactly. That was connection number one. Then they found her Pinterest account. She had pinned some political memes related to the three Percenters, a patriot militia group. Okay, and so the Internet mob decided this meant she was militant, She was tactical and therefore capable of this kind of planned violence. That is a massive leap in logic, a. Grand Canyon size leap. And then there was the car, the Nissan Ultima. April's mother happened to drive a Nissan Altima, one of the most common sedans on the road in America. But because an Ultima was seen in that SWFA parking lot video, the sleuths connected the dots. Injury plus Patriot memes plus her mom's Altima equals. The killer and they went after her hard. They doxed her, They posted her home address online. They found out she worked at a gas station and people would show up to her job just to stare at her, to watch her. They accused her of murder on these massive public forums. I can't even imagine that being a single mom, just trying to work, you shift and realizing people buying coffee or trying to decide if you're the person who killed someone with amor. She was terrified. She told reporters. She feared for her children's safety. She had to go out and hire an attorney, spend money she didn't have, despite being completely and totally innocent. Did the police ever step in. It got so bad that Midlothian Police officer Mark Holton had to personally email one of the leading web sleuths who was pushing this theory and tell them in no uncertain terms to stop. He confirmed they had interviewed April. They had measured her height, she didn't match the height estimate from the video. They checked her alibi and they had completely cleared her. This is the real danger. These online investigations are not a game. They ruined real lives and they must waste an incredible amount of police time. That's the other huge cost. Every single hour a detective spends running down a baseless rumor about someone's Pinterest board is an hour they aren't spending chasing actual credible leads to find the real killer. So let's look at what the police were doing, because they weren't just s around reading Facebook, not at all. The Midlothian Police Department, to their credit, recognized immediately that this was way beyond their normal capacity. They brought in the cavalry, the big guns, all of them, the FBI, the ATF, the Texas Rangers. They even used ATF bomb sniffing dogs to clear the church just in case the swat gear implied some kind of explosive threat, and they started executing warrants. We learned a lot from the public records of those warrants, specifically about the digital trail. They served warrants on LinkedIn, of all places. Now, that's a very unusual platform for a murder investigation. Right, It's not exactly a hotbed of criminal activity. But apparently, starting in January twenty sixteen, a few months before the murder, Missy had received messages on there that police described in the warrant as creepy and firtatious. Familiar Familiar is a weird word to use. That it is it implies it with someone who knew her or pretended to, but was maybe hiding their true identity. A secret admirer who was crossing the line to. Stalking and maybe LinkedIn was the only place she hadn't blocked them yet. That's a strong possibility. A stalker who was blocked on Facebook and Instagram and was just looking for any open channel to reach her. They also did a massive tower dump, right They pulled the records for the AT and T cell towers in the area. They did that. We have to remember this is twenty sixteen technology and a semi rural area. A tower dump isn't the magic bullet people think it is from watching TV. It's not like you get a perfect dot on a map for every phone. Exactly. In a dense city, you can triangulate a phone to within a few meters because there are cell towers on every other block. In a place like mid Lothian, you might be pinging off a single tower that covers a five mile radius. So you just get a giant haystack of data. A massive haystack. You get every truck driver on the nearby highway, every farmer waking up early to check their fields. The data is huge, and it's incredibly noisy. That's very likely why the Nissan ultimate lead went completely cold. Probably have a thousand phone numbers that could have been in that car, but no reliable way to narrow it down from the tower data alone. And of course they looked into the marriage. We have to address this because it was all over the news at the time. Standard procedure, they subpoenaed financial records, phone records, and the warrants did confirm there were financial struggles, which, as you said, is common for many families, and what the police officially termed external intimate relationships. Which is police speak for flirtatious messages or affairs. Right, there were flirtatious messages exchanged by both parties with other people. But and this is the most important part the headline police officially cleared the husband and the rest of the family. Yes, emphatically. They investigated those leads thoroughly and found no link whatsoever between those personal marital issues and the murder, the jealous spouse or affair angle. While it's always sensational for the media, it just didn't lead to a hit man or a crime of passion that matched the forensic evidence of what happened in that church, and. The police are also holding a lot of cards close to their vest. We know for a fact they have more video than they've released. Oh, they have hours of it. They've never released the video of the actual confrontation. They've never released the video of the killer leaving the church. And they haven't released the specific cause of death beyond the term puncture wounds. Right, this is all standard holdback evidence. It's crucial for investigation. If someone walks into a police station tomorrow and confesses, the detectives need to be able to ask them questions that only the real killer would know. What kind of hammer was it? Which door did you leave through? Exactly? If the police tell the public everything, then a false confession becomes impossible to filter out because the person could have just read it all online. So here we are. It's twenty twenty six. Ten full years have passed. Where does this case stand today. It's officially a cold case, but it's not frozen. It's not sitting in a box in a basement somewhere. Chief Carl Smith has kept it as a top priority for the department. That's good, and in the last few years MPD actually did something pretty interesting. They hired a retired federal agent to work the case part time. What's the strategy there? A fresh set of eyes, a. Fresh set of eyes, and a new set of tools. They're trying to apply twenty twenty six era digital forensics to twenty sixteen era data. Maybe new AI software can clean up the license plate on that Ultima video. Maybe new algorithms can sift through that massive cell tower data more effectively and find a pattern nobody saw before. And the tips they must have thousands. By now, over. Three thousand official tips have been logged and they still come in, especially around the anniversary each April. Local podcasts like the True Crime Broads keep the story alive in the community. The Tree of Angels vigil happens every year. The community has absolutely not forgotten Missy Bevers. But Brandon Bevers, her husband, he has largely stepped back from the media spotlight. He has and you really can't blame him. After the initial intense scrutiny, after the trauma, after the online her e ass mean, he basically said in later years, I'm done talking. He wants to protect his daughters, who are young women. Now. He still wants justice, obviously, but he's not going to be the public face of the investigation anymore. So after a decade of investigation and speculation, what are we left with? What are the main enduring theories? It really boils down to three core scenarios, and they haven't changed much over the years. Scenario one the staged burglary. This is the idea that the killer was trying to make it look like a robbery gone rol right. They broke some glass, wandered around to make it look like a burglary, and Missy just interrupted them. But the disguise, the waiting, it all suggests it was personal. They wanted Missy, not the church's projector. Okay, scenario two. Scenario two is the stranger. This is the neck beard theory. We talked about a random mentally disturbed individual who maybe drifted off the highway, saw an empty church and broke in to live out some kind of power fantasy, and Missy was just the tragic, random figure who walked onto his stage at the wrong time. That's the scariest theory in a way. It is because it means there is no connection to find, there's no motive to trace back to her personal life. It's just horrifyingly random. And the final theory scenario three. The targeted hit. This is the one that suggests the killer knew her. They knew her schedule, They might have even seen the raining post on Facebook. They knew the layout of the church, and they hated her enough to attack her with that level of brutality with a hammer. This theory suggests the killer is someone who was in her orbit, someone who has managed to blend back into the community for ten years. It is the ultimate frustration of this case. We see so much, but we truly know so little. It's the paradox we started with. We have the killer on tape, but the tape is almost useless for identification. We have the time of a crime, but we don't have the face of the killer. Before we wrap up, I want to leave our listeners with a final provocative thought. We spend so much time obsessing over that swat gear. We all think, how could someone hide that? How do you throw away a helmet and a tactical vest without someone noticing? We assume the costume was a one time thing, something they bought for the crime and then immediately discarded. But what if it wasn't What if the costume wasn't a disguise at all for the person who wore it, but a regular part of their life. Go on, what do you mean. Imagine a neighbor, a guy down the street. Maybe he's a bit odd, maybe he's a prepper or really into airsoft. He has tactical gear in his garage. You see him wearing it sometimes when he's I don't know, working in the yard or loading up his truck to go to the shooting range. So the gear itself doesn't stand out to the people around him because it's just part of his normal quirky persona exactly. People just think, oh, that's just Steve being Steep. It's not a murder costume, it's just his hobby gear. And then consider the walk. We all spend years looking for someone with a permanent limp, someone with that distinct sway. But if doctor Nierenberg is right, and the gear created the walk. Then the moment the gear comes off, the distinctive walk disappears with it. That is the nightmare scenario. The killer walked out of that church, drove a few blocks away, stripped off the shin guards in their car, took off the helmet, and simply blended in. They drove home, put on a suit or a work uniform, or just a pair of jeans, and walked out their front door for their morning commute with a perfectly normal, unremarkable gait. They could be standing next to you in line at the grocery store and you'd never ever know, because you're looking for a phantom, a phantom that only existed for about thirty minutes on a rainy Monday morning a decade ago. If you have factual information, not a theory, not a hunch from a jiffy saw online, but a real concrete lead, please contact the Ellis County Crime Stoppers. It's been ten years. Someone somewhere knows who that person is. It's time to talk. Thank you for listening to this deep dive. We'll see you next time. This was the last known The facts are limited. The record ends where the answers disappear. Until more is known, this case remains unresolved.