The Deck - Tonya Teske (2 of Spades, Idaho)
Episode Date: May 17, 2023Our card this week is Tonya Teske, the 2 of Spades from Idaho.Tonya Teske was a free-spirited 18-year-old who chose to live her life on the open road by hitchhiking around the mountain west. On August... 13, 1997, she was last seen in Montana at a truck stop before her body was discovered two days later on the side of a highway in Idaho. If you have any information about Tonya’s murder, you’re asked to call the Bonneville County Sheriff’s Office at 208-529-1200. To learn more about The Deck, visit www.thedeckpodcast.com. To apply for the Cold Case Playing Cards grant through Season of Justice, visit www.seasonofjustice.org Follow The Deck on social media and join Ashley’s community by texting (317) 733-7485 to stay up to date on what's new!
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Our card this week is Tanya Tesski, the two of spades from Idaho.
Free spirited Tanya was 18 and choosing to live her life on the open road by hitchhiking
all around the mountain west, when one summer day in 1997 she hitched a ride that would be
her last.
For the past 26 years, the investigation into Detonia's murder has spanned across several
states, and detectives are very close to solving it, so I need you to listen close.
Because they've decided to provide us with the most information they have ever released
in her case in hopes of a resolution.
I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. August 15, 1997 was a Friday afternoon, and a trucker named John and his wife had just
picked up a load of produce in East Idaho.
John hopped into the passenger seat while his wife took the wheel and off they went.
But when they turned onto the on ramp of US Highway 20 near Yukon, Idaho,
something out the window caught John's eye.
It was a naked woman lying motionless on her back down the grassy embankment off the highway ramp.
John told his wife to pull over onto the shoulder.
And when she did, they got out and flagged down
two more cars behind them.
John, his wife and one of the other drivers stayed put
while the other motorists took off to the nearest truck stop
to call for help.
Deputies from the Bonneville County Sheriff's Office
arrived on scene at about 5.45 pm.
When they walked down the grassy hill to the woman,
it was clear right away she was
dead, but there wasn't any noticeable blood on her at the scene. So it wasn't immediately
clear how she died, though she did have some noticeable scratches and bruises. Officers
secured the scene and called for the coroner as well as the Idaho State Police forensic
lab to come quick. Here's Detective Prescott Sagers who is the lead on the case today.
It appears that the body had been dumped roadside and had rolled to its final destination,
which were several feet from the road. As medical personnel arrived, they took a closer look
along with detectives, and something about the woman's body perplexed them.
They noticed that the body had two different states of decay, the left shoulder and arm, body perplexed them.
This was something none of them had ever seen before.
Honestly, I've covered hundreds of cases now, consumed thousands, and it's something I had
never even heard of.
But they weren't going to figure it out right there on the side of the highway.
So as the coroner's office took the woman's body to prep for an autopsy, detectives stuck around.
They took statements from the people who found the body, but none of them had anything else to add.
They hadn't seen anyone stopped on the ramp or any suspicious cars or anything like that.
So John, his wife and the other two motorists were allowed to leave and detectives took a
more detailed look around the scene.
were allowed to leave and detectives took a more detailed look around the scene. It was odd finding a body with no clothing, no identification, so they searched the area
for any kind of clues that they could find and they took a lot of evidence, mostly it being
roadside trash, but one item of note, they found some shoelaces.
The shoelaces were up the hillside and on the gravel shoulder of the on-ramp, as if
they'd either been dropped there or tossed from a car.
And the reason police keyed in on the shoelaces was because of some marks on the woman's
wrists.
On the right arm you can see ligature marks on the arm that kind of looked like they
could have been done by some shoe laces.
So of course the shoe laces were taken as evidence."
Detectives also collected everything else in the grassy median area, which, flight detective
Sager, said, looked to be mostly just trash, not really anything else of note.
But they did take all of it back to the Bonneville County Sheriff's Office evidence room, just
in case.
Detectives started looking through missing person reports to see if they could find anyone
who met the woman's description.
She was white about 5'9", and her hair was cropped short, just to her chin and died a
very distinctive color.
It was this bright yellow orange color, like almost the color of a highlighter marker.
Based on her roots, they figured her natural hair color was blondish brown.
Her fingernails were painted pink, and the only other thing on her body was a single ring,
not a wedding ring or an engagement ring, though, more like a metal costume jewelry ring
with a mother of pearl center.
They continued to search and search, but there weren't any missing person reports from
anyone similar.
The next day, August 16, the autopsy was done at Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center.
There was a lot of interesting things in the autopsy.
The determined that there was a blunt force trauma to the back of the head, but they didn't
determine that as a cause of death.
They found a bunch of superficial bruising that could have been made from her
being dumbed pro side and rolling,
but there's also what appeared to be a bruise
on her left breast that appeared to have been anti-mortem.
Even though she had signs of blunt force trauma,
her skull wasn't fractured,
which is why the pathologist didn't believe
blunt force trauma was what killed her. They were also able to rule out strangulation because the woman's
hyoid bone in her neck was still intact. There were no other obvious signs of how
this woman could have died. No gunshot wounds, no stab wounds, no big open
wounds, nothing that would suggest that she bled out at the scene. She wasn't
covered in blood. Her lips were swollen and kind of protruding
from her body and doesn't mention this in the autopsy itself, but to me it almost looks
like she had been struck in the mouth as well because they were quite swollen.
However she died, it was violent, but ultimately the pathologist couldn't determine an exact
cause, though the manner was clear.
So her cause of death ended up being listed
as homicidal violence by undetermined origin.
A sex assault examination was done,
but even results of that came back as undetermined.
There weren't any signs of trauma,
but they did collect some biological materials
just in case.
So how about the big question though?
The different stages of decom.
Well, even the pathologist also had no idea
why the woman's head and arm were more decomposed
than the rest of her body.
So even though the autopsy was complete,
investigators were really no further along
in their investigation.
The only thing somewhat valuable
that was gleaned
from the examination was a better guess on her age,
which the pathologist determined to be likely
anywhere from 18 to 25.
Bonneville County Sheriff's Detective,
Victor Rodriguez was assigned to the case.
So with very little to work with,
he decided the next move was to get a sketch drawn up
and distributed some posters around the region.
A black and white sketch was made of the woman's face and it was labeled
Unknown Homicide Victim. They also included a sketch of the ring that she'd
been wearing and her physical description. Anyone who recognized her was asked
to call the sheriff's office. While police waited for tips to come in, they
called Idaho State University and asked for a body consultation to try and make
sense of the differences in decay of the woman's head and arm. So between the autopsy and the consultation with Idaho State
University, they determined that the state of Decomp was within a four, five hour period for most
of the body, but the head and left arm looked appeared
to be in a state of Decomp closer to 40 hours.
So most of her body was telling them that she was likely killed just hours before her
body was found.
The thing that backed that theory up was the fact that she still had undigested food in
her stomach during the autopsy, beans, olives, and tomatoes. But then, how in the hell was part of her body showing decom in the range of 40 hours?
It was baffling to everyone.
With no name and more questions than answers from an autopsy, investigators were feeling stuck.
But a week later, police got the break that they'd been waiting for.
On August 22nd, a trucker named David Lord was at a port of entry station near Idaho Falls. And he went inside to check in with the inspector, this guy named Devon Weaver.
While he's speaking, he looks over and sees the flyer. And he tells Mron Weaver. David lore didn't call police though. her on a personal level. I'd just seen her, but it was still something for detectives to follow up on.
David Lorde didn't call police though. The port of entry inspector Devon Weaver did,
and Devon did his best to tell the Bonneville County Sheriff's Office what David had told him.
He might have said that he gave her a ride at that point, but he was very much minimizing his
involvement with her to-myster weaver.
Police called David and asked him if he remembered the woman's name, and he said,
yeah, that's Tanya Tesski, a frequent hitchhiker at truck stops.
Clearly, David had some valuable information, and detectives wanted to get more out of him,
so they arranged for David to come in for an interview, and in the meantime, they looked
up Tanya Tesski.
She was an 18-year-old from a teeny tiny town called Shoshone, Wyoming.
She had dropped out of high school and had one minor infraction on her record, a $50
check forgery from a pizza hut in Utah a few months before her death.
She was actually arrested for that, which meant that police were able to see Tanya's mug
shot, and they were pretty certain she was their victim.
The sheriff's office sent some deputies nearly 300 miles to East Shashone to find Tanya's
family, to let them know and to have them officially identify her through a photo.
They found Tanya's mom Catherine Teske at home.
They didn't seem like it was a huge surprise to Catherine.
Tanya had run away since she was 15, 16 years old.
So for the last two, three years, she had been home, you know, once every couple months,
once every six months, and she would stay for maybe a night and then be on the road again.
Catherine described Tanya as a transient who would just go get rise from truckers to anywhere
she wanted to go.
Catherine told police that, though their visits were infrequent, she actually saw her daughter
just five days before her body was found, on August 9 and 10. She said Tanya came home looking
very tired after being gone for several months and she stayed the night. On the 10th, Catherine
said Tanya had told her she was going to Denver to visit a boyfriend,
and that was the last time she saw or heard from her daughter.
Catherine threw out a few names of boys or men that Tanya had mentioned, but she wasn't
sure which was the Denver boyfriend.
Before leaving, deputies asked Catherine to describe what Tanya had been wearing when she
left and what she had taken with her, you know, just in case her belongings turned up during
their investigative efforts.
She was wearing some cut-off shorts, a t-shirt, some lace shoes.
She said that Tony would like to go barefoot a lot, but she had some lace shoes, and then
she left with a large green suitcase, and I think a brown bag as well.
Catherine also told police that Tonya had been on her period or was about to get it, so she gave her some tampons to take with her.
Now, back in Idaho, detectives were sitting down with David Lord and finally piecing together
some information.
David said he saw Tanya on August 13th and did, in fact, give her a ride.
He told the police that he had met Ms. Tesessky in a truck stop in Belgrade, Montana.
He had been at the truck stop and he saw sheriff's deputies there talking to Ms. Tessky about prostitution.
While there, he was told by deputies that she needed to get out of there and they asked him to give her a ride out of there
so she would stop being a problem.
So he said that he was just trying to help out law enforcement by getting her out of the
area.
Okay, so David said the only reason he gave Tanya a ride was to do Montana law enforcement
a favor.
Detectives noted to check on that later, but in the moment they pushed on.
They asked David, well, where did you two go?
He said he took her to a place called the Cinnamon Lodge,
which is roughly 100 miles south of Billgrade,
just outside of Big Sky Montana.
Took her to the Cinnamon Lodge,
where that is the last place he saw her.
He claims that once they arrive at the Cinnamon Lodge,
he's tired, so he gets back into the sleeper
of his truck.
She wants to continue going, so he has her permission to get on the CB radio and ask
other truckers for a ride.
David said it was around 10pm when he watched Tanya get out of his truck and into another
semi-trailer with her big green suitcase and brown shoulder
bag in tow. But unfortunately, David said he didn't get a good look at this other truck.
He didn't notice the color of it, or what they were hauling, or who was driving, nothing.
They said, you know you're the last person to see her alive. Do you know anything that happened
to her since then? And he said, no, they didn't ask her point blank, did you kill her?
Anything like that.
At that point, he was a person of interest, but they didn't have anything to say that
he had done anything more than what he said.
The interview with David lasted about an hour and a half, and the sheriff's office didn't
see any violent crime on his record that would make them think he killed Tanya.
So they released him.
After that, they went to Galaton County, Montana to see what they could find out about Tanya's
last movements.
If David's story was true, then she was alive and well on August 13th, just two days
before her body was found in Idaho.
Their first stop was to talk to the deputies who reportedly had contact with Tanya just
before she got a ride with David. And their story of events was a bit different than David's.
The Gallatin County authorities said that they were called to a truck stop in Belgrade,
Montana, on August 13th at around 6.30 pm by an employee of the business who said some
truckers were complaining about a girl getting on a CB radio soliciting sex work.
They approached Tanya and she said she had only been kidding.
According to reporting by the Bozeman Daily Chronicle in 1997, the deputies couldn't find
anyone who she'd solicited, and her warrant for the Utah Pizza Hut forgery wasn't extra
diable, so they let her go.
According to Detective Sager, the Montana deputies denied asking David Lord or any trucker to
give Tanya a ride out of state.
So, this made Bonneville County detective decide they should dig a little deeper into David.
They asked Idaho State Police to conduct an investigation into David's truck logs, and
they found what they called discrepancies.
It could be truthful, but he would be driving at very, very slow speeds to make the log fit
what he was saying.
This was interesting to detectives, but not enough to exactly call him a suspect.
But then David called police with a tip.
Not long after he was interviewed, he calls into Detective Rodriguez and tells him of a clothing
dump site down in Brigham City, Utah that that he believes has the clothing of Tanya Tessky.
Detectives asked David how he knew this, and he said he had just randomly heard it over his CB radio.
So, detectives start looking into it, and it turns out that this is a place that David Lord actually made deliveries right
next to where the clothing dumpside is.
Bonneville County detectives went down to Utah, canvas the area, took photos of the clothing
and sent them to Catherine Tesske who identified them as Tanya's.
Police returned to Idaho, put all the clothes in evidence, and with no other leads really
to go on in Tanya's case, detectives headed out to all the area truck stops to see if they could get a better read on David's behaviors
and routines while out on the road.
Now David told police that he and Tanya did not have sex.
So they were not only questioning his story, but they were wondering what his motive would
have been to give her a ride.
And also, why lie about being asked to give her a ride by the Montana authorities?
Unless, of course, deputies in Montana didn't want to admit
that they told a teenager who turned up dead
to get into a stranger's truck.
After lots of trucks stopped canvassing
in the months after Tanya's murder,
it finally paid off when detectives ran into someone
who knew David.
They found out that David Lord had a tendency
to pick up girls on the side of the road
and take them to some family property in the Shakaan Village, Island Park area to party.
So that's not that far from the cinnamon lodge in Montana, just over the Idaho border,
and it's on the way to Idaho Falls.
So next stop, Island Park Ida Idaho, which is about an hour north of
Ritanya's body had been found in Yukon.
It was fall by now, so police knew it might be a stretch to find any type of crime scene.
But they started knocking on doors and showing Kanya's photo around the shot-gun village
neighborhood anyway, and some people did remember seeing her there back in August.
And here's where things get really interesting.
Above a local store, there was a vacant apartment where a window had been left open, and detectives
asked if they could have a look around.
Now, I'm not sure if someone led them there, or if they just got lucky, but inside, they
found cigarette butts of Cambridge Light 100, which was Tanya's preferred cigarettes.
They also found Tanya's hair dryer and tampon wrappers,
the same brand that Catherine had given to Tanya on August 10th.
They couldn't say for sure,
but police were thinking Tanya had been inside that apartment
just days before she was murdered.
And their trail of clues didn't end there.
There was no sign of a struggle,
anything like that inside the apartment, just some odd items that kind of tied her't end there.
This vacant cabin was in the same neighborhood and was across the street from David Lord's
uncle's cabin. And a window at the vacant cabin had also been mysteriously left open.
Detectives called the owner of the cabin before going inside, and he said that he had
suspected a break-in over the summer because he had popped by at some point and found a faucet
running. And he also thought that his hot tub had been tampered with. As if someone had drained it and then partially refilled it and then put it on the wrong temperature,
and that was especially interesting.
When the body was found, there were two circular marks on the lower back of Tessky bruising that
appeared to have happened before death, two circular marks that could line up with jets of a hot tub.
When police finally went into the cabin,
they were struck by something immediately.
They went in, and when they entered the cabin,
they claimed that they could smell
the odor of a decomposition of body decay.
But there was no sign of any kind of burglary,
any kind of disturbance, any kind of crime scene.
But there was that smell there.
Detectives were almost frozen in shock, thinking,
did we actually just stumble upon the murder scene
two months later?
They took some measurements of the hot tub and some photos
and called out a canine and his officer to do a walkthrough to see if the dog would notice the smell
But unfortunately the police records from the investigation they did after that at the cabin are nowhere to be found
In the report it says refer to the canine officers report again. I don't have that report
So it's very frustrating
I
Know you're probably wondering if the hot tub could
be the answer to the mystery about Tanya's arm and head being in a further state of decay.
We asked, but there's not really a straight answer. So it's theorized that it could have been her
head and arm were inside the hot tub at a hotter temperature and been there for a little bit and then the body was removed
and because the hot water was inside her skin it continued to further the decomp of the body.
Do we know for certain? No. And to be clear there were no signs of water in Tanya's lungs during
the autopsies so police never once thought she had drowned. And her toxicology report was clean, so she wouldn't have passed out in the hot tub,
at least not on her own.
In early 1998, police wrote an affidavit
for a court order for David Lorde's fingerprints, DNA,
and they collected the bedding from his semi.
Because the police reports from this time frame are lost,
we aren't sure what came of any of that.
But it must have been nothing because after that is when the investigation into Tanya's
murder hit a wall.
Also, they figured that by the time they obtained David's bedsheets in 98, he had likely changed
his bedding.
By that spring, police were going down a completely different path, trying to find out if Tanya's
murder might be connected to seven other murdered women around the mountain west.
The Associated Press ran a story on April 22, 1998 that said Tanya might have been another
victim of the quote-unquote great basin serial killer.
The murders all spanned over several decades and states, but all the women were known to
hitchhike with truckers.
Their bodies left on the sides of major highways.
The press seemed to have run wild with this possibility because every headline involving
Tanya's murder from 1998 was something about the great base in serial killer.
In June of 98, the AP ran another story reporting that investigators had found links between
all of the murders, including Tanya's.
But police today thought that the theory was too much of a reach.
The timeline didn't add up, and the causes of death weren't the same.
They're kind of grasping its straws, trying to clean to anything that makes any kind of
sense, because there's just not a lot to this case, that there's not a lot of proof,
not a lot of evidence.
So they're kind of, in my opinion, grasping at anything they can to see if they can
get anything to make sense with the case.
In August of 1999, two years after Tonya's murder,
a tourist hiking in the woods on Targy Pass on the border of Montana and Idaho
came across a pile of girls clothing and a stuffed animal.
The tourist reported the discovery to a park ranger and then the ranger called Montana Highway Patrol
and a trooper who was familiar with Tanya Teske's case called the Bonneville County Sheriff's Office.
Some of our detectives went up there and collected the clothing and the clothing was again photographed,
placed into our evidence and photographs were sent to Catherine Tessky and again Catherine Tessky identified
items of this clothing as Tanya's.
The stuff in the woods was all specific stuff Tanya was known to either carry with her or
wear, like a t-shirt of Tanya's that Catherine recognized that had a rip in the collar, and
some other items that were a harsh reminder of just how young Tanya was when she
died. There was a doll, a barney stuffed animal doll that Tanya was said to have always been
caring with her. There was a sports watch that appeared to be the same kind of watch that Tanya
was wearing when she left home. And then there was also a pair of underwear
with a pad in it that Catherine believed was Tanya's.
So if you're keeping up, so far,
we've got Tanya's clothes being found in Montana.
Tanya being found in Idaho,
and more of her clothing being found in Utah.
All of these places have one thing in common.
It would have been right on the the pathway that David Lord would have been driving.
To be fair, it's a route a lot of truckers drove. See, the other clothing discovery in Montana
was just into the woods from a popular trucker turnout. Detectives interviewed and acts
of David and she did say that they used
to stop at that very turnout to hook up. So by fall of 99, David was back on Bonneville
County's suspect list, which was also right around the time they were receiving a very
interesting tip in Tanya's case. In September 1999, the FBI got a call from a woman named
Michelle, and she was like, hey, a few years ago, my
husband at the time, a guy named Franklin James, and I were living a little less than an hour
from Island Park Idaho.
She went on to say that on August 15, 1997, Franklin had just gotten home from being away
on a construction job.
And he gifted her this random Levi's denim jacket with cartoon characters all over it.
Michelle's told agents that she had reason to believe that jacket belonged to Tanya
Teskiew.
At the time, Michelle thought the gift was weird, so she asked her husband Franklin where
the jacket came from. And he said that he had gotten it from a friend at work and he just thought
that she would like it.
Well, she didn't, so she hung it up in a closet and never really wore it.
And a few weeks later, Michelle saw their friend Wendy wearing the exact same jacket.
Wendy was married to a guy named Douglas Schumat, who worked with Franklin.
In August of 1997, Douglas and Franklin
had been building houses in Island Park Idaho,
in none other than the Shotgun Village neighborhood.
But there's more.
She thought the whole thing was very odd,
and then coupled that with the fact that
she had overheard Douglas and Franklin
saying if the FBI finds out our involvement
at Shotgun Village, we're gonna be into a lot of trouble.
When the FBI gave this information
to the Bonneville County Sheriff's Office in 99,
they obviously wanted to know more,
so they interviewed Michelle.
And Michelle said there was something else
she wanted to divulge.
So they had a pay phone out by the shock and village store.
So when Doug and Franklin were working in that area, they would go to use the pay phone
there to call home on one night, a couple nights before they came home on the 15th.
Douglass apparently heard a altercation happening in the apartment above the Shocking Village
store.
Neither Franklin or Douglass went and looked into that,
which Michelle thought was odd because Franklin was the kind of guy that would go and see what was going on.
But yeah, neither one of them went and investigated the altercation.
Next, police tracked down Douglas and Franklin and interviewed them.
By 99, they had both moved out of Idaho, but police asked them in separate interviews if they knew David Lord and they both
say no. The interesting thing is Michelle also wasn't sure if she had ever met
David but her daughter did remember him. Later on she asks her daughter about
David Lord and her daughter says yeah remember David Lord he was at our house in
September of 97 with Franklin.
The daughter also told police in a follow-up interview
that she remembered her dad having a big green suitcase
in the back of his truck that weekend
when he returned from the island park job site.
And that summer, he had tried to give away
some of the clothes that he said had been inside the suitcase.
Police also asked Franklin and Douglas about Tanya Tesski.
They both said they didn't know Tanya,
so detectives were like, okay,
well then where'd you get the denim jacket?
And Douglas's wife Wendy said that they had got it
from Franklin, and in fact, she still had it.
In December of 1999, Wendy shipped the jacket
to the Bonneville County Sheriff's Office.
They confirmed through Tanya's mom that it was Tanya's jacket, so they stored it away
in evidence.
But over the next several years, there were no further developments in Tanya's case.
And in 2008, there was a massive, unexplainable, misstep. and destroyed a large portion of it. Clothing items found at the potential crime scene
just destroyed.
You know the cigarette butt
that they collected from the possible crime scene
in Island Park?
Gone.
How was a cigarette butt that could be loaded
with DNA taking up too much space
in an evidence locker?
I asked why it was destroyed
and I don't have a good answer,
but we still do have some evidence.
They still have Tanya's fingernail scrapings.
They have some cups that were found near her clothes in Utah, the Barney doll, her watch,
and the glass slides from the sexual assault kit.
It's not as much evidence as they used to have, but it's a hell of a lot better than nothing.
Virtually nothing happened in Tanya's case after the evidence
mishap. And for whatever reason, she hasn't ever had very many people advocating for her case to be
solved over the years. But in August of 2021, that's 24 years since her murder, someone who was a
total stranger to Tanya did take interest in her case. Lily Lee, this artist and professor of arts and design
at Boise State University, honored Tanya
by including her in an R project
where she created weaving patterns
with textiles to represent homicide victims.
The weaving Lily made to honor Tanya
is five feet nine inches long to match Tanya's height.
And she used orange yarn and even bleached the edges
of the weaving as a nod to the color Tanya had dyed her hair. She she used orange yarn and even bleached the edges of the weaving as a nod to the color
Tanya had dyed her hair. She also incorporated silver yarn to represent the one thing Tanya still
had on her when her body was found, that silver ring. Lily and photographer Carrie Quinnie
visited the grassy median in Yukon, Idaho on August 15, 2021, exactly 24 years since Tanya was discovered there. They laid the
weaving down in the grass and took some photos, which you can see on our website,
thedeckpodcast.com. It was a beautiful tribute to Tanya, by two perfect
strangers. And maybe it was that gesture that breathed new life into Tanya's
case. Because after that is when Detective Sager started investigating it, and he decided to send
off the old sex assault slide to be tested for DNA.
And what do you know?
There's a partial profile on the left breast, and then on the other breast, there was evidence
of multiple people, DNA.
There's three people's DNAs, one, Tanya's, and then two other, one for sure male.
And then the third, it's unknown if it was a male or a female
because it's such a small sample of DNA.
When they tested those partial profiles
against David Lord's DNA that they had also preserved
since the 90s, the tests came back inconclusive.
Detective Sager is once to try and get a fresh sample
from him to test again.
He also wants to get DNA samples from Franklin James
and Douglas Schumate, and he wants to re-interview them.
Because there are questions that have still gone unanswered.
There's too many coincidences with all these people.
They say they don't know each other,
but other people say they do.
Where did the jacket come from?
Why would you have a green suitcase in your car?
Tanya Tesski was barely 18 when she was murdered. Who knows where her adventures would have taken her in life, had it not been cut so short. Tanya's cousin, Kelly Garza, told our
reporting team that Tanya was kind. She was a creative kid, and when they were little,
she talked about having a family of her own someday. I think some have discounted Tanya's tragedy because she was on a wild streak when she was killed.
But Tanya deserved to have those life experiences and come out the other side.
Please need your help to solve Tanya's murder. If you remember seeing Tanya, or interacting with
her in Montana or Idaho, between August 10th and 14th of 1997, call the Bonneville County Sheriff's Office
in Idaho Falls, Idaho.
Or, if you also witnessed
Tanya getting into another semi-truck
at around 10 p.m. on August 13th of 97,
near Big Sky, Montana,
detectives wanna hear from you.
And if David Lord, Franklin James,
or Douglas Tumate are listening,
it's time to cooperate and tell the authorities
what you know.
You can call 208-529-1200 with information.
The Deck is an audio-chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis
to learn more about the deck and our advocacy work,
visit thedeckpodcast.com.
So what do you think, Chuck?
Do you approve?
Oh!