Crime Junkie - MISSING: Leigh Occhi

Episode Date: November 16, 2020

In 1992, a teenage girl disappears from her home during Hurricane Andrew, leaving behind only a few gruesome clues and kicking off a search for answers that hits closer to home than anyone could ever have expected. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/missing-leigh-occhi/ 

Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And so, obviously, one of the reasons we started doing this show is because we've both been obsessed with true crime since forever. Right. But every once in a while, I come across a story that I kind of think of as, like, a gateway for new crime junkies. Like, the story that just, like, hooks you

and makes you realize, like, why all of us, like, bananas, true crime people are the way that we are. And that's kind of how this story is today that I want to tell you. A story filled with so many twists and turns and unanswered questions that it just grabs you by the throat and refuses to let go. Because at the heart of it all is a girl who vanished from a place where she should have been safe. This is a living, feeling girl with hopes and dreams and fears

just like the rest of us, who, no matter how much time has passed, still deserves to have her truth told. This is the story of Lee Ochi. In August of 1992, the city of Tupelo in northeastern Mississippi is bracing itself for the worst hurricane as Hurricane Andrew approaches. This is a total sidebar, but did you know that Tupelo is where Elvis was born? I did not. It does not surprise me that you know that fact, but got it now.

You loved Elvis. Well, anyway, so this hurricane that is coming in is terrifying. Like worst of the worst, we're talking category five hurricane that has already cut a path of destruction through Florida and Louisiana, causing billions of dollars worth of damage and leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless along the way. Like, again, this is a big one. Luckily, Andrew is losing force as it makes its way north across Mississippi.

And it's actually been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm, but it's still powerful enough to produce super high winds and tons of rain. Definitely enough to scare anyone who's afraid of storms. And Lee Ochi is one of those people. Even though she just turned 13 less than a week ago, Lee's still really scared of storms and a hurricane is like the worst-case phobia scenario for her. She's so freaked out by the bad weather that she spends the night of August 26, 1992

in bed with her mom, Vicki. Now, Lee's parents met when they were both in the military, but they've been divorced since she was a toddler. Her dad is stationed in Virginia, and her mom just recently separated from her stepdad, Barney. So it's just Lee and Vicki living in their house now. Lee's a pretty typical girl in a lot of ways. She loves horses, much like you did, Fred, and she's sort of awkward around her peers.

Like, I think we probably all were at that age. I was like, also like me when I was at age. Also very much like you, yeah. But everyone says that she's a good kid, you know, which is why the next day, August 27th, this is a Thursday, Lee is allowed to stay home alone. Vicki gets up to go to work like normal, but Lee is still on summer break.

She doesn't start school until Monday. So Vicki decides to let her stay home. She knows that she has plans to go to an open house with her grandparents a little later at the middle school, and then they're going to have like a special dinner at Taco Bell afterwards. So I want to go back to the weather for just a second, because I didn't know this, Brett, you might have, because, you know, we don't get hurricanes here in Indiana,

but I know you spent a good deal of time in Florida, but storms like Andrew actually can cause tornadoes. I mean, I didn't know that, but it kind of makes sense with the strong winds and the pressures moving and everything. Right. So as if a hurricane or tropical storm isn't enough, after Vicki's been at work for about an hour, she hears about some tornado watches that are now in the area. So knowing how Lee feels about storms,

she calls home at about 8.30 a.m. to make sure Lee's okay. According to David Lorre's reporting for the Discovery Channel's criminal report blog, Vicki's got a special ring pattern worked out with Lee. So basically, like, she'll know if it's her calling. This is way before the days of caller ID. Like, you can't shoot a text, you can't see who's calling. So the program that they had is mom would let the phone ring two times, then hang up and then call back.

And that's like Lee's signal to be like, this is my mom, I got to pick up this call. But Lee doesn't pick up the phone. The phone keeps ringing and ringing and ringing. Lee still doesn't answer and none of this is sitting right with Vicki. So she leaves her job and actually drives back home that morning to check up on Lee. But as soon as she pulls into the driveway, alarm bells start going off in her head because the garage door is wide open.

And Vicki was 100% sure that she had closed it when she left for work? Well, here's the thing. I don't know that it necessarily matters either way, right? You know, sometimes we all get in our like routine. And I mean, how many times have you like driven home and like I can't like tell you? I have no idea how I got here. Yeah, it's like muscle memory. Like you're just kind of in autopilot.

Right. But there's something that makes me think she didn't leave it open the whole time. Because according to Rod Guajardo's reporting in the Daily Journal, she said that the light on that motor mechanism thing is on. So if she'd accidentally left the garage door open when she left for work, that light would be off. Exactly. Okay.

So the door to the house is unlocked and Vicki goes inside calling out Lee's name. But her heart drops when she sees blood pulled on the floor and spattered on the hallway walls. She runs through the house yelling at the top of her lungs for her daughter and checking every place she can think of. I mean, she's opening up closets, yanking blankets back, hoping against hope that she'll find Lee. But it is like she vanished into thin air. And so finally around 9am, Vicki calls 911 to report Lee missing. Police hurry out to the house right away.

And this area, Tupelo, is considered a safe place. And in West Tupelo where Lee and Vicki live, people don't even lock their doors. Like a child going missing is so shocking that a detective, this man named Bart Aguirre, tells the open podcast that he's actually interrupted right in the middle of teaching a fingerprinting class so he can be told about what's happened. Like that's how serious everyone is taking this right away. Bart himself is one of the first officers on the scene. And right away he notices the house isn't messed up.

And there's no sign of forced entry. Like those are the things that are sticking out to an investigator. Bart and the other police find blood pooled on the carpet outside Lee's bedroom. And it's still wet. They also find blood spatter and some strands of hair sticking on a door frame. So Lee had to have hit her head or her head was hit on the door frame somehow or something? Yeah, well that's police's working theory kind of at this point that whatever happened here happened inside the house and the blood on the door frame basically supports that right.

And I don't know if they're thinking she got like carried. I mean she could have hit her head when she was walking, when she was being carried, when she's unconscious. Like there are so many like unanswered questions even though they have blood in the house. Now in the main bathroom, the countertop is smeared with what looks like a pink substance. Almost as if someone was trying to do a quick cleanup of yet even more blood. And a pair of scissors stained with what looks like blood are found on top of the refrigerator. There's also a trail of more blood going from the hallway through the living room and towards the back door of the house. Was the back door unlocked?

Well nothing in my research says one way or the other. They don't specifically talk about the back door. Remember the other door in the house was unlocked. That's how Vicki just came back in and noticed that was unlocked. But I don't for sure know about that back door. But according to Detective Bart, here's the important piece is Vicki tells police that the doors were locked when she left to go to work. So even though I said earlier that it was a safe neighborhood and it was common for people to leave their doors unlocked, Vicki insists that she didn't do that on this day that she left her daughter home alone.

Which I totally get. Like even when I was that age and my parents would leave me home alone. I mean we lived in the middle of nowhere, knew all of our neighbors super well. And again rarely locked our doors. They would still lock me in if they were leaving me alone even just for a couple of hours. Right. So this is definitely sticking out to Vicki and again to police. Now when Vicki leads the police to Lee's bedroom, that's where they make even more disturbing discoveries. In her room, Lee's shoes, reading glasses, a sleeping bag and a new pair of underwear she got for her birthday are all missing. But it's worth noting that the matching bra that came with like the underwear as part of a set was still there and her bloody nightgown is crumpled in a laundry basket.

When they take a closer look at the blood on the nightgown, it looks as though it's been dripped down onto it if that makes sense. So police are thinking that Lee was injured somewhere above her neck. Like maybe again we talked about that door frame. Maybe she hit her head on that door frame where they found the blood. Maybe she was hit over the head. Maybe something else happened. Maybe she was cut. They don't know but just based on like the drop pattern, they know that the droplets came from above. Which also makes me think that she could have likely been in an upright position as well. Like standing or still conscious the first time her head was hit. Right, right. So you've mentioned a lot of blood but how much are we talking? Like definitely a homicide amount or?

Well, it's impossible to say 100% if Lee is dead or alive based on what's at the scene. Detective Bart says it doesn't look like enough that they can automatically assume she's dead but that doesn't mean there isn't more blood somewhere else. Right, and you mentioned earlier that someone may have been trying to clean up blood in the bathroom with that like pink smear on the counter. Right, right. Did they ever find something like a bloody washcloth or paper towels in the trash can, something like that? No, no, right. So like we're thinking someone might have cleaned up. We're thinking there might be more blood but there's nothing there to prove that. Now at this point police are operating with this super narrow time frame which under normal circumstances could be really helpful for tracking Lee and bringing her home safe. Right.

But because of Hurricane Andrew these aren't normal circumstances and right from the very beginning the weather is a big obstacle in this case. The wind and all the rain are so bad that the bloodhounds Tupelo police bring in that morning can't catch a scent anywhere. They're all over this field and ditch near the house but as their handler tells law enforcement either the weather is messing with the bloodhounds ability to pick up a trail or Lee was just never out there. There is no trail to pick up. There is no trail to find, right. Yeah, and again there's just no way to tell what happened without more evidence. The blood from the house is eventually sent off to be analyzed at the Mississippi State Crime Lab and over the next 13 days the search for Lee stays in high gear with every resource in Tupelo working around the clock to try and bring her home. Now as they continue to process some of the evidence they realize that the bloody scissors they found on top of the fridge actually turn out to be rusty.

So what they thought was blood is actually not blood at all. But the other evidence at the scene all of that blood kind of confirms what everyone's already suspecting. According to Ashley Elkins piece in the Daily Journal test results show that the blood found in the house is human blood that all came from the same person and that person was someone with type O blood. Was that what Lee had? So there's this article that says Lee's either type O or type A but I heard on the open podcast which came out after that that Lee is type O. So it did seem weird that there was that like inconsistency or discrepancy but that original article that said O or A was published in 97 and the podcast came out in 2017. So I'm thinking it's one of those things that you know as more time passes you know information gets nailed down a little bit better. The original article was going off of what was available at the time.

Right right but I mean without knowing the original source for that article I mean I can't even say for sure. Now since this is back in the days when DNA testing was still kind of just like getting off the ground it was still very new. The most definite answer police can take from all of this is like again it's one person and it could be Lee and it probably is likely Lee. As the search continues Lee's dad Donald finally gets leave from the military and hurries down to Tupelo on September 4th 1992 to help search. Police some on foot others on horseback all join with tons of volunteers to scour an 80 acre area around Lee's house. I mean they have helicopters that are looking from the air a special cadaver dog comes in and the FBI even gets involved. Like you name it they are trying it and it feels like the whole city is pulling together in their search for answers. But no one can find even a single clue about what might have happened to her or where Lee might be.

But then just as the trail seems like it's going cold a shocking development raises a ton of new questions. On September 9th 92 this is 13 days after Lee vanished her mom Vicki gets this strange package in the mail and inside the package are Lee's missing reading glasses. According to the investigative podcast 13 the glasses come to the house in an envelope that's addressed to be Yarborough with the homes street address misspelled. So the home is on Honey Locust H-O-N-E-Y but this was spelled H-O-N-Y. Okay but who's be Yarborough. Oh so that is Lee's stepdad Barney Yarborough. But here is one of the things that's so strange about this Barney like I said remember he moved out he hadn't lived with Lee and Vicki in over a month. And the other thing that I find really weird is that there's nothing else in this package.

There's no ransom note. There's no list of demands. It's just the glasses. It is just the glasses. So this is nothing that you'd expect from like a kidnapping. Right. Now I mean Vicki is taking this as a sign of hope that Lee is still alive somewhere and she actually takes to the media to thank whoever sent them. But the police aren't so sure though they want to figure out like the real intentions of whoever sent this and to do that they have to find out who actually sent this.

So they send the envelope to the Mississippi State Crime Lab down in Jackson for DNA testing for like a handwriting analysis hoping that maybe the experts with their like advanced technology be able to give them a little bit of information. Right. And while they're waiting for all of the results to come back what they also do is the Tupelo police like decide to actually trace where the package was like postmarked. And they trace the glasses to the town of Booneville Mississippi which is about a half an hour north of Tupelo. Now at first they're really hopeful because just four days before Vicki got the glasses there was actually a tip about Lee's whereabouts that came in from Booneville. So like this is the best leave they've had there could really be a connection there someone saying they see her there the glasses are postmarked there. This is feeling like they're on to something when they look closer at that original tip according to Ashley Elkins reporting in the Daily Journal. It was actually an employee at the Booneville McDonald's that called into law enforcement claiming that he saw Lee on September 5th at the drive through.

And this witness said they saw her in a blue pickup truck with an older African American man. He said that Lee looked upset and she looked kind of dirty as though she hadn't showered for a few days. By some miracle police are actually able to track down this truck and this very girl. But of course it isn't Lee. Ultimately that witness sighting and that tip is a dead end. And once the results come back from Jackson about the envelope that carried these glasses police are even more gutted because there's just nothing there. Like there's no fingerprints there's no DNA there's freaking nothing. And the problem is like none of this feels like a coincidence or random though right.

Like clearly whoever mailed these glasses knew enough about Lee or her family or whatever to know that Barney used to live there. But like maybe not enough that they knew he moved out. Yeah. And I mean even to that point like they spelled the street name wrong so maybe they didn't know him that well but they knew the general location. I don't know. Yeah. I mean it's super super strange to me. And by the way it's not like oh we didn't get like a good profile or anything.

Like whoever sent this though this isn't like someone found the glasses and just sent it in as like again this isn't a coincidence. This has to be a person related to the case because they found that they used water to like seal the envelope instead of saliva. Yeah. Yeah. And they used water to put all six of the stamps on the envelope. So it's not just someone being like I found these glasses. I know they belong to this case but I don't want to get involved. It seems way more pointed than that.

Yeah. And at first when I heard six stamps I was like that seems excessive. Like it takes one but it's not talking a letter. Right. Like we're talking about actual like something that's heavier. Like a little parcel. Yeah. Yeah.

I have no idea if six was the right amount. Nobody really knows. But the Clarksdale Press Register reported that it for sure was six stamps on the envelope whatever that means. Like I mean I think we're just looking at like whoever mailed these glasses clearly wanted to ensure they made it. But seemingly overnight this like really promising clue turns out to just be a brick wall. And so people around the city start to wonder what if that was the point of the glasses all along. Like a red herring. Yeah.

Like a diversion. But you said there aren't any suspects like there's no attention to divert from you know. Well officially no there are no persons of interest there are no suspects. But according to the local rumor mill there might be a person closer to Lee that needs to be looked at. Her own mother Vicky. Multiple articles I read and the shows that I listened to about this case mention that the people in Tupelo have been suspicious of Vicky. Honestly from like day one they think she's been too calm too collected about the whole thing. And generally they think that she's acting honestly just totally opposite of how they think a scared mom should behave.

OK but to be fair Vicky was in the military right. She was trained to be calm in crazy situations. She was and in like the interviews that I've read or listened to whatever like they do acknowledge that. But people still see it as something more sinister than military training kicking in. And the people in town who think this they're not alone. You see Lee's dad Don Vicky's first ex husband is super dubious of Vicky. And he makes some really disturbing claims about how she acted in the first couple of weeks after Lee disappeared. He alleges that Vicky misled him about what happened telling him first that Lee ran away from home.

In his interviews both with open and 13 Don says she didn't tell him about the blood in the house until a couple of weeks later. Like what. Yeah he says that's part of why it took him so long to leave Virginia and get to Tupelo. He said he had no idea how how important it was to be there. Yeah. He thought she was a runaway. Yeah he didn't have the full story. I mean did he ever talk to the police himself. Like I trust my husband and I trust a lot of my friends. But I would still want to go to the source to be like tell me everything. Well you trust your husband because even you're still married right. You have a good relationship. This is what I didn't understand either. Like everything I can tell like that's not a question that anyone asks him as follow up.

Like he doesn't clarify one way or the other in interviews if he ever had contact with police before he actually got to Tupelo. But he's adamant either way that the very first thing he did once he got to town was then go right to police. And it seems like from all the interviews I've seen like that's the first time that he really understands what's happening. Like severity of the situation. Yeah. And when we get more background according to Don Vicki kept Lee away from him and didn't let them talk very much. And he thinks he knows why. He believes Vicki was worried that Lee might say too much or tell him things that she wasn't supposed to. What does that mean. Well he won't say what those things might be. And listen I think we all have to take Don with a little bit of a grain of salt because just from listening to him.

I mean you can hear in his voice just how much animosity he has towards Vicki. And I mean listen co-parenting through divorce and then compounding that with this kind of trauma. It's super messy. But I do think that we have to at least consider his version of events. And when asked what he thinks happened to Lee this is what Don said on 13. Quote I believe she was murdered either accidentally or intentionally inside her house. Maybe somebody got real mad at her. Maybe knocked her against the door frame into the kitchen and she died from it. End quote. Now I do want to be very clear here. Vicki's never been officially named as a suspect.

And she's never been charged with a crime related to Lee's disappearance. And like I said angry ex living out of state kind of grain of salt thing. But the people living in the state right there in Tupelo have their own reasons for being suspicious of Vicki. Beyond just her being like too chill for their comfort. According to an article by William Moore in the Daily Journal Lee reportedly showed up to school with bruises and black eyes. And when pressed about what happened to her face Lee claimed that she got kicked by a horse. Now to be fair like I said Lee was very into horses she did ride horses she spent time at a local stable so it isn't a totally like out of left field kind of thing. I mean I did all those things growing up too and there were definitely some times where I got pretty banged up but it wasn't all the time.

And I mean I even remember a time you got kicked pretty badly by a horse. Oh like in the side of the leg my leg was like four times its normal size I don't know how I didn't break anything. Yeah so I mean again it could happen but it's kind of a rarity at least in my experience. And that's what I go to right so like you and I have both been hurt by horses. I've been flung off of them. I've been kicked by them. Didn't one of my horse try to like just rub you off on a tree one time when we were in a trail. Yeah I got like we were riding in our bathing suits and I got bucked off.

Naturally. Yeah I got bucked off your horse and like I hit like a brand. I mean there's a whole thing my bathing suit ripped like. But this what I'm saying is like we have been injured by horses a lot. I was never injured in the face. No neither was I. Not that that can't happen but I think that it's it's more rare to have your face be injured and then more than that it's it's really rare to have that happen over and over for that to be your excuse more than once.

I think is a little bit of a red flag and something that for sure a reason I can see why people would be taking notice in her schools. Now put just putting this aside though like beyond the bruises and the black eyes or whatever like this isn't the only thing people are going off of. Multiple people interviewed by both Jason Lee Usry and Emma Ken for their shows all shared some pretty disturbing not anecdotes but things that they claim to have heard about Lee in her home life mixed with things that they'd seen themselves that impacted like how they thought of Lee's home life what they thought of Lee's home life and we can start with people further away from her and as we get closer honestly the allegations only get darker like for example teachers at Lee's school described Vicki as being like a pretty strict disciplinarian who may be doled out spankings beyond what some might consider normal or acceptable.

Some of Lee's neighbors mentioned she was afraid of her mom and her stepdad and that Barney locked her out of the house as punishment one day. One person remembered hearing that when Lee went to summer day camp she actually freaked out so badly about having to go home that the staff had to call in counselors more than once to calm her down. I'm sorry can we pause for a second because I have a question. Yeah what's up. Was any of this ever reported to child protective services or anything. You know it seems like it would have to be. Yeah especially when you talk about like multiple counselors coming in more than once her showing up at school with all these like bruises

and stuff teachers noticing. Yeah so that was something I was super curious about as well. I mean granted this is early 90s you know we're a couple of decades out from that now but I was like surely I mean her teacher someone would have had to report like I don't again I don't know when mandatory reporting started at schools but like the 90s doesn't feel like that long ago. Right. But I couldn't find anything official in my research that said like CPS had ever been called or involved with the family or like there had never been formal allegations of abuse as far as I can tell which is an important distinction to make. But I also think it's important to say that there was this classmate that remembers Lee that came to this like school support group

and this classmate said that she was super careful to kind of like walk this line between sharing what was going on at home but not sharing so much that the school would be obligated to report it. I don't even know. So she was being open and not cagey but yeah but was never quite as open as maybe she felt comfortable being. Yeah it's almost as if Lee like knew if I say too much like it's going to affect my home life. Like again did she know that because it had before how did she know I don't know any of that. Right. And like like you said before there was definitely some animosity between her parents so she may have just been trying to protect

her relationship with both of them really. Yeah right. And again like I think she was super careful about what she said to authorities. It sounds like she was more open with her friends like one of her friends goes even further and claims that Lee directly admitted that Barney whipped her and another friend hints at rumors that he allegedly abused her sexually. And Lee's boyfriend this kid named Jordan who was one of the few close friends that she had also said that Lee confided in him about being afraid of Barney. Now no specific allegations of why she's afraid of Barney but that she was.

Was Barney ever considered a suspect. Well David lore reported that Barney's very cooperative and passes a polygraph test. So he was actually ruled out as a possible person of interest pretty early on. Now Barney's actually been deceased for many years but like Vicki he was never charged with a crime never declared like an official person of interest in the case. So with these rumors kind of swirling all over town and pressure mounting to find answers about where Lee might be. The Tupelo police do start to look at Vicki a little bit differently like they're hearing everything in town as well. Now I wasn't able to find an exact time frame of when she really like gets on their radar. But I do know that police aren't just basing their interest on town gossip.

They are much more interested in Vicki's timeline of events about like basically exactly what happened that morning. That's what they're honing in on that makes them kind of question her. Wait you said that Vicki left for work around 740 that morning and she called 911 around nine right after she got back home right. So here's the thing Vicki tells police a couple of different versions about what she did that morning. Oh no. Yeah my research doesn't clarify what she tells police first but I can tell you that at some point she tells them yes I did call 911 as soon as I got home. But then in another version she tells police no she actually called her mother as soon as she got home and found Lee was missing before she called 911. In that version there's like 15 20 minutes of unaccounted time between when Vicki got home and when she called the police.

And obviously there's like no one else who can corroborate her story. And you know one of the biggest things police are looking at when they're starting to get these inconsistent stories is they're not even 100% sure that Lee was alive when Vicki left for work that morning. Like up till this point they've had to take Vicki's word for everything but now that they're starting to question Vicki they're kind of wondering like well we don't know what we can believe because there's no one to corroborate that Lee was alive that morning. Right you almost have to take the time frame that you originally had and go back honestly who knows how far back to determine what timeline you're even looking for. So you can see things are getting really messy and so far again we talked about how limited the physical evidence is all police have is Vicki's word which is looking pretty shaky to them after she fails not one, not two, but three polygraph tests. Oh my God. Vicki isn't bothered by what police or the people in town have to say about her. She not only maintains her innocence but she also has a theory of her own about what could have really happened that morning. Vicki is convinced that a man named Oscar Kearns who a lot of people know as Mike might have something to do with Lee's disappearance.

This guy lives about a mile away from their house and teaches Sunday school at the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church where they all go and he also keeps horses at the same stable where Lee goes. So there is a connection there right he's not a total stranger, but I get the impression that they're basically casual acquaintances at most like the kind of people who would say hi at church or if like they passed in the grocery store like they know. So you like nod to them at the grocery store is what I was imagining. Right friendly but not like socializing regularly or anything. According to David Lawers reporting Vicki first gets suspicious of him when she notices that Oscar starts to act really weird after Lee goes missing. Weird how well he brings a picture of Lee over to the house and gives it to her, which I don't know if you're like me but like I when I heard this I wanted to know everything about this picture. Yeah, I have so many questions. All the questions.

What was it? Yeah, like listen. How did he get it? I have no kids but I feel like the very first thing I'd be asking is like why on earth does this grown man have a picture of my missing 13 year old. One thousand percent. Yeah. So I like did a deep dive trying to find out more like what exactly is this a picture. What is this picture?

Right. Is this a picture she posed for? Is it like a newspaper clipping? Yeah. My mind is going wild. She'd take it like of her but like, you know, she's walking by and like she had no idea it was taken. I don't know. To your point, was it taken by him at all?

Did he clip it out of the newspaper? But I don't know because that David Lawers in Discovery's blog is like the only place that this is mentioned. And Vicki doesn't give any more details about this picture but it's something she points to as like all her spidey sensors are going off when again this like grown man stranger. Yeah, I like totally imagine it being like a picture he snuck and he has it in like a really pretty frame and it's awful. Yeah. I don't like any of this and I get why Vicki's like if this you can say whatever you want about me like this guy. And the other thing that I think is weird too, right? You know, we talked about like how their casual acquaintances he's never been to their house before.

So he clearly knows where they live and he shows up now suddenly he's here with this picture. So, you know, at first Vicki kind of thinks maybe he's just trying to be nice. And doesn't know how to do it and not creepy way. Yeah, but like if that was all maybe it wouldn't have stood out to her so much. I mean, I think it still would again, not a mom here, but like I think it would have stood out. But there was more because the changes in Oscars behavior aren't just kind of a one time thing because as Vicki realizes as time goes on, Oscars stopped looking her in the eyes. Every time she sees him after Lee goes missing, it's the same thing like Oscar can't make eye contact anymore.

And this change feels off to Vicki like even if she can't put her finger on why. And according to that same article, Vicki also remembers Lee telling her that Oscar had offered to take her to ride his horses. So this kind of all boils down to the fact that Vicki is convinced that Lee never would have opened the door for a stranger. Remember, there's no forced entry. She doesn't think she'd open the door for a stranger, but she might for someone that she knew from church or the stable. Exactly. Now, even though Vicki's got her suspicions, there's no reason for police to suspect Oscar had anything to do with Lee's disappearance. Nothing in my research clarifies when exactly she brings Oscar to police's attention and there's not a huge amount out there about how exactly the investigation timeline unfolds.

By October of 1992, though, despite the evidence at the house, despite Lee's glasses in the mail, all the rumors all over town and the huge search efforts, the case is just straight up going cold. A long, miserable holiday season passes and the cloud of Lee's disappearance hangs over Tupelo. And I think this is why people, and I'm totally including myself in here, get so obsessed with this case. Because, I mean, on the surface, it seems so solvable, right? Like, you have this house, which sounds like it's full of evidence. People of interest stand out pretty much right away. And assuming that someone really did snatch her that morning, there's only so far a person can get in less than two hours. I mean, whether Lee was alive or dead.

Right. Like, you compare this to a case like Brice's Pizza, where he does just vanish into thin air. That seems impossible to solve. This one seems like it has so much more evidence and so many avenues to follow to find answers. Yeah, I mean, I specifically hone in on the timeline of this, right? Like, if we're to believe Vicki, and if Vicki is right about that garage door light being open when she got home, I mean, we're talking her missing a person who took her daughter by, like, minutes. Yeah, meaning that they still have to be really close by. And yet, here they are, watching 1992 turn into 1993, and there have been no arrests, no suspects.

There's no weapon. There's no clue about what really happened that day. Gradually, public interest starts to move on. There's not as much coverage about the case as I would have expected to find, partly because it's the 90s. They have that, like, 24-hour news cycle like we do today. And also, I think, too, it's because so much else was happening at the same time. I mean, yeah, we have the hurricane that was happening, like, as this disappearance happened. 1992, I think, was an election year, presidential election year. Yeah, big one.

The news is definitely going to focus on that nationally. Right. And you got to imagine, right, like, so election time, we're living it currently. Election time is that, like, October, November. So right after she was missing, the news cycle just gets filled. So even though people are still kind of gossiping left and right, life just kind of moves on. And then, in May of 1993, this is less than nine months after Lee vanished, there's a shocking development. Oscar Kearns, Vicki's number one suspect in her own mind, is arrested and charged with the abduction and rape of a 15-year-old girl in Memphis, Tennessee. According to the Daily Journal, Oscar drove to this girl's house like early one morning, like around 7 a.m., when she was home alone.

And he offered to take her to school before taking her into a field and sexually assaulting her. Wait, how far is Memphis, Tennessee, from Tupelo, Mississippi? So when I looked it up on Google Maps, it's like less than two hours, give or take. Okay, so had he moved from Tupelo to Memphis? So I looked, I actually couldn't find a definitive answer one way or the other. I don't know where he was living at the time this took place. So he could have just hopped in his car, driven across state lines and snatched a stranger? Well, he could have, but here's the thing, this girl didn't view Oscar as a stranger.

She knew him and she trusted him because guess where they met? Where? At the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Tupelo. No. Yes. That's like such a similar situation to, you know, how Lee knew Oscar. That's, my mind is blown. I know, even when you kind of like line up the two cases, right?

Like, again, Oscar is not a suspect in Lee's case, but the similarities are jarring. Even the fact that he went over to this girl's house like super early in the morning. At the same time of day. Yeah, the fact that Lee didn't have any like signs of forced entry because someone is sure that she probably would have opened the door. Not that she would have necessarily gone willingly, but she at least could have opened that door for someone that- For someone she recognized and felt at least comfortable with, if not even safe.

Yeah. I mean, the cases are just so similar to me with the exception that the only thing that doesn't totally add up to me is that this girl, this 15 year old girl, obviously is still alive. She made it. Whereas Lee had happened before, you know, often we talk about predators like escalating. Escalating, right? That's not always the case. I think that's something that we are getting our heads from like watching too much Netflix

or CSI or whatever. That's not always the case. And it could have very well been that again, it's not the actual act of murder is what he's going for. It is this sexual act, but maybe something, if this was him, maybe something in the sexual act went wrong in Lee's case and things got terribly out of control. And he had to do something worse. I don't know.

I don't know. But I mean, you can see suddenly to everyone, Vicki's theory now doesn't seem so far fetched anymore, right? Right. News of Oscar's arrest shocks the community. People from the church who knew him are kind of going over every single memory of him, wondering how the heck they could have missed a predator so close to home and more and more little interactions that seemed innocent at the time take on sinister new angles.

Like as people who went to the same church told the podcast 13 at the time, it seemed totally normal that Oscar would talk about leave, right? Like she was everywhere in Tupelo conversation. So back then Oscar talking to people and swapping rumors he'd heard like a rumor he said that Lee's body had been buried out at a local barn or the one about how her body was actually right there in the church basement, the new church basement that had opened construction during Hurricane Andrew. Like all of this is starting to set off alarm bells later.

Oscar eventually pleads guilty to the rape and kidnapping of the young girl in Tennessee and he's sentenced to 24 years in prison with a 16 year suspended sentence. I mean, this has to put him on police's radar for Lee's case, right? Well, it does. So I read in William Moore's Daily Journal article that police trying it Oscar to cooperate during what the piece calls the initial investigation, but it doesn't exactly specify like when that is. Yeah.

Like what is that time period? What causes the initial versus secondary or something? And it definitely sounds to me like it might be after Oscars in jail for the rape in Memphis though, because that same article also says the Oscar kind of toys with the Tupelo law enforcement. He tells them, sure, I'd be happy to take a polygraph test for you if my lawyer says it's okay. And as you can imagine, his lawyer's like, yeah, that's not happening.

Yeah. Now, I know that they had to have looked into this a little bit because I know a search came up negative out at that barn. Again, I remember I talked about Oscar had these like rumors that he liked to talk about. Yeah. They did a search out there. They didn't find anything there, but I couldn't find anything definitive about whether or not the church basement was ever really searched or looked into.

And as far as we can tell, Oscars gossip is just that it's gossip and unfounded. So even though he's a scumbag, Oscars never been definitively linked to Lee or charged with anything related to her disappearance. And his arrest also wasn't enough to take away the public's suspicion about Vicki. Those rumors are still going on and it took over another year after Lee went missing before her ice cold case turned scorching hot because on November 5th, 1993, an 18-year-old man named Ray is out on a farm in Northwest Monroe County, Mississippi, which is just like Caddy Corner southeast of Tupelo.

Now this guy, Ray, is in one of those soybean fields working the land when he makes a horrifying discovery. They are right in the middle of a field is a human skull. According to the Clark Stale Press Register, police only find the skull when they first get out to the soybean field. Just days later, the Monroe County medical examiner makes a stunning announcement. They say that they've used dental records to identify the skull as belonging to Lee Ochi.

Within a day of this hitting the press, police announced that they found the rest of Lee's remains in the same area where her skull was all about 15 to 30 miles away from where she lived. So as suddenly as it seems like this case might finally be solved, they're like getting closer to a resolution, all that hope comes crashing down because there's an even more shocking announcement. The Monroe County medical examiner says they're recanting their ID. What?

They've made a mistake. Yep. I don't know how many times I've never seen this happen in any of the stories. You've covered. But after they make an official ID, they take it back and say that the bones from the soybean field are not Lee Ochi. Instead, as the Hattiesburg American reported on November 12th of 93, they actually belonged to an adult woman, not a teenage girl.

How does this even happen? And that's what I want to know too. And according to that same Hattiesburg American piece I just mentioned, the medical examiner says that a lot of the teeth were actually missing from the skull, which I guess wasn't like a complete comparison. Yeah. So it limited what they could learn from dental records. But like they wouldn't go into any more detail about how exactly the office realized they

were wrong, how they got to be so wrong, like, because just like, you know, like how does this happen? How can we make sure this never happens again? Exactly. And how does Vicki react to this? Well, according to 13, she's really upset. The former Tupelo chief of police is actually one of the people who has to break the bad news to Vicki and her parents about the bogus ID.

And he sees her reaction as being right along with the lines of what he'd expect from a grieving parent saying that she was, quote, quite a bit of emotion, end quote. Now, it's impossible to say if Vicki's reaction actually changes any minds around the town about whether or not, you know, people think she's guilty. In December of 93, the bones from the soybean field are properly identified as belonging to a 27-year-old woman named Pollyanna Sue Keith, who'd been missing since March of 93. Now that it is officially not Lee, once again, her case goes cold. But it is still open and the mystery of her disappearance still haunts the Tupelo police.

Oscar Kearns got out of prison in 97, only to go back less than two years later in 99 on a 20-year sentence after being convicted of another rape and kidnap. Oh my God. Yeah. Clearly this guy has a pattern. He was due to be released last year, but I couldn't find 100% for sure if he's out or if he's still incarcerated. Over the years, the physical evidence from Lee's house has been reexamined with better

technology. The blood from the crime scene, they like use DNA, it is definitely hers. And according to another one of William Moore's articles in the Daily Journal, in 2014, police work with the FBI to develop a comprehensive DNA profile for Lee, and they get it to the missing person section of CODIS. A year later in 2015, a team of cadaver dogs searches a drainage ditch near Lee's house that happened to be under construction during Hurricane Andrew. But despite a few areas kind of cropping up as points of interest and some digging, the

search again just comes up empty. To this day, Lee Ochi is considered a missing person in Tupelo, Mississippi. Her father Dawn believes she's dead, but her mother Vicki still holds out hope that somehow, somewhere in the face of overwhelming odds, Lee might still be alive. Either way, they deserve to know the truth, and above all, Lee deserves justice. If you have any information about the disappearance of Lee Ochi, please call the Tupelo Police Department at 662-841-6491 or Crime Stoppers of Northeast Mississippi at 1-800-773-8477. You can see all of the pictures and source material for this episode on our website crimejunkiepodcast.com.

And be sure to check us out on Instagram at Crime Junkie Podcast. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Crime Junkie is an audio chuck production. So what do you think Chuck, do you approve?