For the most part our sleepy little town pretty much stays a sleepy little town, but every now and again things get crazy and the past 48 hours have been crazy.
A couple of days ago we got some information from a family that two sisters aged 23 and 20 were missing and had been missing for several days. It was a situation in that they left their house one night without purses or cell phones or anything and said they were headed to a local store and never returned.
Yesterday evening about 5:30 p.m. the police were somehow notified to check out a local strip pit. For those of you who don't know what a strip pit is, it's a pond or lake that was left behind after coal mining was completed in an area. Usually great for fishing.
After they called in the dive team they found the sisters in their car at the bottom of that strip pit. There has been some speculation as to where the sisters were in the car (i.e. trunk, back seat, front), but either way this is a bad situation.
This is the kind of stuff they do TV mystery specials on and this town can have a few of them.
The plot just thickened a few hours ago as the ex-husband (scratch that, it was an on-again-off-again boyfriend of one of the girls) was questioned by the police and promptly after the police left his home was burned to the ground as well as an out building he had.
As of right now the police are treating this as a "death," but like I've said to a few people today, it's easier to build a murder case than an accidental death or a suicide case.
I have my speculative opinions as to what I think may have happened, but I'll keep those to myself for now.
A question mark is that where the car was in the strip pit had a large hump about 3-feet high to negotiate to get it in the water. So how the car negotiated the hump to get into the water is in question. The is a 10-foot drop on the other side of the hump so I'm thinking kids used it to jump off of and perhaps ride bicycles off of into the water.
The saddest part about this is that the 23-year-old has three children.
It was several years ago when we had several murders here in the OC that went unsolved because of these strip pits. In fact we had so many that Paul Harvey said on his radio show that if you ever wanted to get away with murder this was the place to be. I don't think it was so much because the cops weren't able to solve the crimes, but the fact that all of the victims ended up in one of these huge strip pits out of the way from anyone and rarely visited even for fishing.
So now we have a situation that could get serious media attention. This story cooked overnight and all of the regional news outlets have had time to dig around. Now that the ex-husband's house was burned down things could get even crazier.
I thought this kind of thing only happened in the movies.
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6 comments:
There is no telling how many bodies are in the bottom of those strip pits. To be honest with you, the first thing I thought when I heard that the two girls had been missing for close to a week with no word and leaving all valuables behind, was that you would find them in a strip pit.
I would not be surprised that you would find the bodies of the three guys that disappeared 10 years or so ago in the bottom of a strip pit, the question is, which one of the hundred are they in? I knew all three of the guys who disappeared, though not well. And even though I do not know the girls in this case, it still sends a chill down the spine when you think things like this can happen in our little town.
It's just like the movie In Cold Blood that Bratch and I watched yesterday. A small town in Kansas gets torn up by the brutal murder of a family of four. Just like there, it is hard to believe the violence of the "cities" can reach rural America.
Did the ex-husband die in the fire?
There is a movie waiting to be made about the Strip Pits. In fact you can just call it Strip Pits.
I didn't get that he died in the fire, but I'm sure bratch can shed some light on that.
He said police are treating this as a "death," not deaths, so I thought maybe he was referring to the ex, not the two girls.
I don't think he was injured at all. He's just without a home.
Actually, it is thought to have been angry family members jumping to conclusions. So they lashed out and torched his house.
We have information that we didn't publish in the newspaper simply because we didn't want something like this to happen. It is just extra info that doesn't have anything really to do with the case, but if we had published it there could have been more homes set on fire.
I think I have a new idea for a story and/or movie.
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