Original subtitles

[Child 1] Get up, hurry up. I don't wanna get up.

I'm gonna get ya!

[Child 2]No, you're not! You're it!

[Kent]Where could they be?

I mean, they could be anywhere.

What happened? Who took them?

[Woman] It's just scary to think that a monster

came into our town and plucked two little girls.

[suspenseful music]

[Larry] December 5th,

about five months after the abduction,

we were notified that some hunters

had found the remains of two bodies.

[Kent] I received a phone call telling me

that we needed to get there.

It was pretty certain they were our girls.

[suspenseful music]

[Dylan] Seven Bridges Wildlife Refuge

is a unique park,

as in it's one way in, one way out.

[Dan] Seven Bridges was a random location

to dump a body.

It's so far out in the middle of nowhere.

Why here?

What did those little girls go through.

If you scream back there, nobody's going to hear you.

[Larry] Now, okay, well,

clearly once their bodies are found,

we're working a double murder case.

[Kent] We had something more to go on,

we had more physical evidence now

that we could use to try and narrow

the search down on who was responsible.

[suspenseful music]

[time ticking]

[Dan] A plan had been developed

that when the girls’ bodies were found,

I was supposed to go to Evansdale...

I was supposed to go to City Hall,

yeah, and meet Drew and Heather.

[cries] So I did,

'cause I had developed a relationship with them.

So, I met Drew and Heather there

and Chief Smock wasn't there yet.

They had all kinds of questions for me

and I didn't have the answers.

You know one of the first questions was,

"Well, did they find the girls?"

And I lied, I say, "I don't know, uh,

uh, we're just supposed to wait here for Chief Smock,"

and I think it was Kent that told them.

[dramatic music]

[Drew] I got a call and they said,

"You gotta get down to the City Hall."

We had talked about like

if they had found the girls alive

that they would be rushed to Iowa City,

to be tested and different things

that they would have to do.

And so, I was like, they must not be alive.

[dramatic music]

[Dan] They were saying they were calling a meeting

in Evansdale or something

and I didn't want to hear what they had to say,

I knew it wasn't good, I don't know.

I didn't want to lose my hope and so I just,

I didn't, I didn't go down there.

[tense music]

[Kent] We didn't want it getting out in the media

to notify the families,

it needed to come from a friendly face.

I've delivered a lot of death notifications

in my career...

none harder.

Those two girls had become my two girls.

[Drew] Kent Smock came in and I just,

I'd seen his face and...

I knew.

[tense music]

[Wylma] So I called Heather and she said,

"They found them, they found them."

I just crashed to the floor and started crying,

because I knew they were dead.

[Misty] I remember laying on the ground

and just kicking it and crying and just screaming at God,

"Like if you, if you are real, like why would I continue

to call out to you or, or believe in you,

when you let little kids be hurt, you know?"

[Dan] My mom was the one that told me.

[sighs] It's been a while since I thought about that.

She said, "Daniel, they've found them."

That's all she had to say.

It wasn't, "They've found them,

let's go get them, here they are, you know."

[Heather]I remember just being numb,

just sitting there like what do we do now?

We've been for five months looking for them,

praying and hoping they were gonna come home.

It's home but it's not home with us, you know.

[Elizabeth] Dad just got me this in church.

[dramatic music]

[Heather]The next day it snowed.

Their bodies would have been covered

for so long till spring,

so I'm really grateful to the hunter

that he found them.

I don't know how much longer Drew and I

could have like kept going like we were.

[Drew] You know that part is done

and being relieved and like feeling so guilty

about being relieved, it's like that is,

that will just... that will haunt me

I think anybody that knows what I'm talking about,

will agree.

[Vicki] There's so many out there

that have lost their loved ones

and they've never found them.

I was grateful that we at least,

you know, found them and had some closure.

[tense music rises]

[Larry] We know what happened now,

it's the worst possible scenario

we could have imagined,

they're dead, and we want the person

or persons that did it, and, you know, so it's,

everything's ramped up again.

[Dan]Seven Bridges County Park,

we're looking at that as a crime scene.

We have to process that crime scene.

[Kent] Where the girls were found

was some distance away from any parking area or road.

I don't want to go into the graphics

of what I saw,

but since there was footwear on them,

we could surmise the girls went there

on their own power,

but it doesn't necessarily mean that,

it could have been that they were carried,

that there was more than one person responsible,

at that point anyway.

We knew that their clothing was there,

their full clothing was there.

[Drew] I had one question for them and that was just,

"Were they found together, were they together?"

And he said, "Yeah, they were together."

At least they had each other, you know.

And he said, "And Lyric had her flip-flops on."

I didn't ask them for that, you know,

that tells me more than I need to know,

you know, that she trusted and believed

that if she just went along with whatever's going on,

that she would come out okay, everything will be alright.

You know, she's so trusting, she didn't realize

how dark this world was

and how evil these people could be.

[Misty] I do believe that had somebody

taken them that they didn't know,

I do believe she would have fought,

and I do believe she would have tried

to protect Elizabeth.

[Dan]I rely on my faith a lot.

I'm hoping that somehow

God gave them comfort as they were dying.

[Dylan] One of the big questions in this case

was how long were Lyric and Elizabeth alive.

There's a number of different scenarios

that could have happened to the girls,

one being they're abducted and killed the same day,

another being they were abducted

and held for a period of time,

and then murdered and left in Seven Bridges.

Investigators have never revealed

whether the girls were sexually assaulted,

because the investigation is ongoing.

[Dan] Statistics show that so many of these kids

are killed within the first hour.

I'm convinced within 24 hours those girls were dead,

that day, probably Friday.

[soft music] [birds chirping]

Seven Bridges area, it's all recreation area

that people use for hunting and also

from everything I've learned,

it's a magnet for bad activity.

The Waterloo Police Department has discovered

evidence of crimes there, some...,

we'll have a burglary and so we'll find

a safe dumped there,

or a firearm will be discarded.

So, it's an area that's well known

with a criminal element.

[Larry] Seven Bridges Park is what I would call

extremely remote,

if you didn't know it was there,

you wouldn't just stumble across it,

you wouldn't just be driving down a road and say,

"Oh there's a park," you know,

if you're looking for a place to dump the bodies.

We can make a pretty strong argument

that the person knew that park existed,

had been to that park before,

had some connection to that park

and clearly had some connection

back to Evansdale,

and you've got cellphone towers

up in that area,

you've got cellphone towers down here.

Can we find people

that their phones are pinging down here,

and then they were pinging up there,

and what's your time frame, what's your window?

Well, it's five months.

A short period of time after the bodies were found

there were over a thousand people

that had been interviewed. People started calling in tips,

"Hey you need to look at this guy,

he used to go up there and hunt,

he used to go up there and fish,

or he used to go up there and whatever."

So it generated a new energy, a new focus

and a new level of activity in the case.

Now the resources that had dwindled, back,

you know, pretty much full strength.

Well, now we need them where the bodies were found,

there's a neighborhood around Seven Bridges

that needs to canvassed.

[Kent] It was a common area for hunters,

so we started looking at hunting licenses,

people that were known to hunt that area.

We wanted to know who was familiar enough

with Seven Bridges

that could get in and out basically unseen.

[Dan] Motive for this case still troubles me.

I don't know if it's retribution

through the drug trade

or if the motive is sexual in nature.

Statistically they're sexual in nature.

[Mike] In this general area has the most sex offenders.

We've talked to well over 300 sex offenders

but once we started working the Seven Bridges area too,

we started reaching out

and doing a radius in that area.

[Larry] It's a difficult chore to go somebody in December

and say, "Did you see anything suspicious back in July?"

[suspenseful music] [birds chirping]

[Dylan] Did the investigators reveal any details to you

about how the girls died or anything like that?

[Dan] Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

[Misty] It was very hard for me to believe

that that was her,

because I've never seen any coroner's report

or not getting information

about how she died, how they know it's her,

you know, and I've never seen anything like that.

[Misty] I understand

why we can't know that information

but, you know, nobody said,

"oh, well, we did a dental record

or we did this and matched it to this

and that's how we know for sure

that that's your kid.

[Drew] I don't know what they went through

but I can only imagine.

That's something you sit and wonder about,

is like what did this bastard do to them girls?

[tense music]

[Dan] Iowa DCI does a phenomenal job.

They play their cards really close to their chest.

They don't let out to the public

what only the killer would know.

Only the investigators who are closest to this investigation

should have that knowledge.

[Kent] We had a number of false confessions,

people that would come in and claim responsibilities.

Some of them were people that had mental illness,

and there were a couple that were looking

for their five minutes of fame.

But we would have to ask them particulars

and some of the easiest ones were,

"What were the girls wearing?

What color were their bikes?"

There were a series of checks and balances in place.

[Larry] The other part of the equation

is you hope whoever did this, you know, hasn't done it again

and won't do it again,

and so all those thoughts go through your mind.

[tense music]

[suspenseful music]

[Dylan] Double abductions or dual abductions,

you know, there's only been 15 of them since the 70s.

Evansdale was number 16 and shockingly number 17

would happen less than a year later,

also in Iowa.

[tense music]

[Nicholas] Dayton was just like any other town

in America's heartland; a nice quiet small town.

We do have our national circuit rodeo every year.

In May 2013, there was myself as the only full-time officer.

Crime-wise, not a lot.

I would see Kathlynn every day,

if not every other day.

Always would see her walking, had a ball cap on.

She was typically holding a football

or some type of ball.

Dezi I... she was one that I'd never really had

much contact with prior to the incident.

We didn't really see her out too much.

But yeah, I do remember Kathlynn,

I'd see her quite a bit.

[Dylan] So tell me about Kathlynn Shepard.

[Dezi] She was the coolest person in the world.

Me and Kathlynn used to go to the bus together,

we used to come home together,

we'd hang out in my front lawn with my dog George.

Every time we were together, we were having fun.

She was always smiling, we were always laughing.

She had these little rubber bands on her braces

and I would say the stupidest things

to make her laugh, and she'd laugh so hard

her mouth would open too far and they'd snap.

So, she carried this little bag

of rubber bands with her,

she'd be like, "Ouch." [laughs]

And I'm like, "What?" She'd pull out the bag,

I'm like "Another one?" And then she'd just

keep doing it and it was the funniest stuff ever.

She was so outgoing, she was funny.

She was my best friend

when I was 12 and she was 15.

My best memory was Kathlynn would have to be

laughing on the school bus

and then every time we came home

she always grabbed me a Mountain Dew

and her a Pepsi.

And then we'd drop her stuff off,

I'd go to her house

and then she'd come to my house.

I can't drink Pepsi anymore.

[sad music]

[suspenseful music]

[Dezi] We were walking our normal route,

after the bus,

and then this man pulled up next to us.

We were not even a block away from our house

and he pulled up in a red truck

and asked if we were willing to make money to go mow lawn,

since it was a hot day, he needed help

and it was a lot of land, and we told him

we had to ask our parents first,

we're not even a block away, I was like,

"We're just gonna run home, drop our stuff off

and ask if that's okay."

He offered to give us a ride.

So, we got in the truck...

[dramatic music]

He told us, you know, like his name was Michael

and he offered to shake our hands.

He's a pretty big guy,

he's kind of like 250 to 280 lbs.

He started going the opposite direction

of our house and, you know, that kind of felt weird

and it was wrong really

but we've got to ask our parents,

we can't just go first.

He was like, "Well, you can just use my phone,

there's one at the house that you could use"

told us we were going to a house.

He took us like this weird way out of Dayton

and then he took the back roads.

He just kept driving and wouldn't turn around.

It just seemed more and more like...

unsettling the farther we got.

[car runs] [suspenseful music]

He took gravel as much of the way as he could,

which was weird to us 'cause, you know,

he could use the main road.

[tense music]

When we got there, there's two hog confinements

and there was a shed in front of the lawn.

He pointed and he's like,

"Oh, in there is the lawn mowers,"

and we walked in and then we're kind of looking around

and we're just like, we went to turn around

and he had a gun pointed at us.

[dramatic music]

Kathlynn felt really scared.

He told us to get on the ground

and to lay on our stomachs and he told us

just if we did what he said that he would let us go

and we just, you know, had to listen.

And so, we got quiet for a minute.

He zip tied us.

Our hands are on our backs.

He stepped on my leg and I said, "ouch"

and he apologized,

he like rubbed my thigh sympathetically.

People that act like that, you know,

why would you care if you stepped on my leg?

I didn't understand.

He put the gun down and he pulled out a knife.

We started to cry and she was looking at me

and we were talking and just like,

"We don't deserve this,

you know, just let us go home."

[breathes heavily]

[sighs]

[tense music]

[Dezi] He got mad at her for talking

and he grabbed her by her arm

and he ripped her up from the ground,

and as soon as she got around the corner,

the last thing she yelled was my name

and then she went quiet.

[cries]

I moved my arms underneath me and unfolded them

so they were in front and I grabbed the gun

and I ran as fast as I could.

[intense music]

When I got into the woods I hid behind a tree

and I checked the gun

to see if there was anything in it.

It was one of the hog like tranquilizing guns

or something like that and it was empty.

Next thing I heard was he had his truck

and he yelled [bleep] and then he got in the truck

and I heard the truck started moving

and I started to try to like hide farther down

into like the woods,

'cause I don't want to be seen.

[tense music]

[time ticking] [tense music]

So, we're in the...

the woods I had to run to. [cries]

To the right...

would bethe hog confinement

I was taken to with my best friend.

I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt

and I did have shoes on

but when I was running, they got stuck in the mud,

so my shoes and my socks came off running through mud.

There was a lot of, like, the raspberries bushes,

they had thorns all over them so I could feel

the blood going down my legs.

I could feel the blood but everything just felt numb.

My feet were cut open,

I still had thorns stuck in them.

I was tripping over everything,

I mean, there's no stopping and, I mean,

he was driving his truck around

and I could hear it and at times I could see him

driving next to the woods,

so I'd go further into the woods

so he couldn't see me.

It seemed like I was running for days.

It just, it didn't seem to end,

there was nothing but the same trees,

everything looked the same.

[tense music]

And then this is the farm I ran between,

the three red buildings, 'cause I could hear talking

and I ran to them.

I was talking so fast and like halfway screaming,

they couldn't understand me,

they tried to get me to calm down first.

I just kept telling them, you know,

"Like I need a phone, I need to call the police."

[911 Operator]911 Boone County.

What's the location of your emergency?

[Dezi] Can you please help me?

There's a... I need a... [cries]

[Patrick] What can I do?

[Dezi cries]

[911 Operator]What's going on?

[Dezi] This dude picked me and my friend up and he...

I'm [bleep] worried and I need help.

Can you call my mom?

[cries]

[911 Operator] Can I talk to the other person that you're with?

[Patrick] - If you will? [Dezi] - Yeah, here.

[Patrick] It's two miles north of Pilot Mound,

as a crow flies.

[tense music] [birds chirping]

[Patrick] Dezi comes running around the corner, she says,

"Help, help, I've been kidnapped."

And she had these plastic things on her wrists.

Her legs were scratched all up and she was crying.

She was so scared, I think she was

even scared of me, all humans.

She said, "I'm so worried about my friend,

he's gonna hurt her."

I told my friend to go get a gun

and go up to that hog farm and if that guy's there,

just keep him there, don't shoot him yet.

[tense music]

[Dezi] When Patrick's friend got back, he told us that,

you know, there was a pile of blood

but nobody was there

and he couldn't find the truck,

he drove around for a little while

trying to find the truck.

We waited for the police and everything to come

and I couldn't stand still, I couldn't sit,

I just, I wanted to find my friend,

I wanted to find Kathlynn.

[suspenseful music]

[Nicholas] Got a phone call

from one of our sheriff's deputies.

I went to the hog confinement

and by talking to the property owner

there at the farm,

I found out that his son-in-law

was identified as driving a red Toyota Tundra truck.

So, at that time

we identified the suspect as Michael Klunder.

[tense music]

[Dezi] I was in the hospital and a detective

and another police officer came in together.

They showed me a photo and they asked

if I recognized him and if that was the man,

and I said, "Yeah, you know, the one that just took us."

And they just said, "Are you sure?"

And I said, "Yeah, there's no second guessing it,

that's, that was him."

[Nicholas] Some of the deputies

found Michael Klunder's home address,

which was over in Stratford,

about ten miles away from where we were.

We arrived at Michael Klunder's house,

no-one was there at the time,

but then his wife came home and we were asking her

"Have you heard from him?"

She'd received a text message,

it went something along the lines of,

"I'm so sorry, I love you, I'm so sorry."

And I remember reading that and just knowing

that this wasn't gonna be good.

[tense music]

[Nicholas] So I came back to City Hall in Dayton

and starting setting up a command post.

We had Iowa State Patrol,

Iowa Division of Criminal Investigations,

a number of FBI Agents arrived.

We began just working

on trying to gather information,

started doing pings on Mr Klunder's phone.

Well, the same time,

Michael Klunder's father-in-law,

the owner of the farm,

he went to, started checking his other properties,

'cause he's got a number of different hog confinements

around this area,

and we received word

that they found Michael Klunder,

he had hung himself inside a machine

shed on that farm.

[tense music]

[Reporter] Authorities found the suspected kidnapper's body

and they say he committed suicide.

[Nicholas] Michael Klunder hung himself,

we couldn't ask him any questions.

The pickup truck was there,

they did locate some blood on the tailgate of the truck

but there was no sign of Kathlynn.

And now Kathlynn is still out there.

[Reporter] Locals volunteered to scour the area

in the search for missing teenager Kathlynn Shepard.

Authorities released this photo of Kathlynn Shepard

getting off a school bus

likely minutes before she was kidnapped.

[Man]Until we know differently

we're gonna assume that she's alive somewhere.

[Police Officer] If somebody sees something don't touch it.

[Reporter] Today, searchers fanned out

to comb the dense woods along the Des Moines River

in Boone County.

[tense music]

[Nicholas] There was an amazing search,

just the sheer number of people and resources

that were put forward.

I mean, we had probably

a hundred law enforcement officers here every day.

We had volunteers show up with horses,

a large number of ATVs.

It was the neatest thing I don't want to see again.

[Dezi] They started search parties

and I wanted to go find her and I kept asking

if I could go, I wanted to leave,

I wanted to go help, you know,

and everybody refused to let me leave the house.

I wasn't allowed to do anything.

I wasn't allowed to go help search, nothing.

[intense music]

[Nicholas] Looking at cellphone pings,

we tracked Michael Klunder's cellphone

over a 40-mile area of just driving around.

I think he took Kathlynn in the truck

and started driving around,

trying to figure out what to do.

Probably went into a state of panic.

You know anywhere

in between Point A, Point B and Point C

could be Kathlynn.

It's a huge area to check,

we're talking hundreds of square miles,

and you just want to hold out hope

that there is by some miracle

you'd find her alive somewhere,

sustaining herself somehow.

[Reporter] Late today, investigators recovered

the young girls' backpacks.

They were found in the town of Fraser,

in a ditch along the road.

[Nicholas] It appeared that they were

just thrown out of the pickup truck,

on a gravel road.

It kind of confirmed to us that okay,

we know for sure he was down on Juniper Road,

which turns into River Road here in Webster County.

Said okay, so, he's following the river

and he's following the river for maybe a reason.

So, you know, our boat teams went back out and,

you know, almost every day we had a boat team out.

[Dan] I was assigned with others to search an area

along the Des Moines River.

I couldn't believe how heavily wooded it was

and it was brutal searching it.

[Nicholas]48 hours had passed,

you want to stay optimistic.

Once we got into two weeks, two and a half weeks,

you know we've already checked 250 square miles

at that point in time.

[tense music]

We had every hope in the world

of finding her alive somewhere.

[suspenseful music]

[Reporter] After 18 days of searching,

we finally know the fate of Kathlynn Shepard.

Her body was found by a search team

in the Des Moines River last night.

The State Medical Examiner's report

says she died of multiple sharp

blunt force injuries.

[tense music]

[dramatic music]

[Nicholas]So Kathlynn was found

in the Des Moines River,

20 miles south of the hog farm.

[Dezi] I was told she was found by a fisherman

and she was wrapped in plastic,

and he threw her in the river.

Kind of just broke my heart, I didn't leave my room,

I didn't... I didn't want to do anything anymore.

[sniffs]

She was stabbed 27 times, her throat was slit,

she was punched in the head.

You kind of know after so long that they're not coming back,

but when you hear it's something like that...

[cries]

I don't know how people can do that. [cries]

Yeah, I don't want to know.

[dramatic music]

[Reporter] Kathlynn's father

issued a statement to the media.

An exert from it said,

"Today our family has lost part of its soul.

Not just the Shepard family,

but the families of Dayton and all of Iowa.

An innocent, caring, fun-loving child

was taken from this world long before her time.

Our daughter was torn from our family and murdered."

[Dezi] I talked with Kathlynn's family

a little bit, it was really hard.

I felt like they'd hate me 'cause I hated myself.

[Dylan] Why would you hate yourself over this?

[Dezi] 'Cause I couldn't do anything.

And even if I could have done anything,

I didn't try. [cries]

It's the one thing I regret most,

is I feel like I still should have tried.

[dramatic music]

[Nicholas] If Dezi would not have escaped

I wholeheartedly believe that she would have suffered

the same fate as Kathlynn.

[Dan] If that girl didn't get away,

Michael Klunder would probably still be out there,

getting away with it.

[Drew] Dezi's my hero.

And I feel I've got

a connection with her because...

[cries]

I know I just feel a connection with her

just because she did get away

and she was tough enough to get away.

[sad music]

[Dylan] Immediately after the Dayton case,

people started putting together the Dayton case

and the Evansdale case, I mean right away,

'cause the crimes were so strikingly similar.

[Reporter] Two Iowa towns, two pairs of girls,

similar ages, both crimes occurred on sunny afternoons

less than a year apart.

Both kidnappings happened

around a hundred miles from each other,

less than a two-hour drive down Highway 20.

[Mike] I think everybody, all of us were like,

"That's the guy."

[Nicholas] I didn't know who Michael Klunder was

prior to this incident.

I had pulled up his driver's license photo

once we'd identified him,

and I had seen his face before.

And it took me a little while to remember where I'd seen it;

prior to me becoming Chief of Police,

I worked for the Iowa Department of Corrections,

and Michael Klunder was one of the inmates

at one of the prisons I had worked at.

It was at the Newton Correctional Facility.

[dramatic music]

[tense music]

[Dylan] Michael Klunder has a heart of darkness.

From the time he was a teenager

he's been evil.

At the age of 15 he was convicted of intent

to commit sexual abuse.

He beat up a girl in a bathroom

to the point of he thought he'd killed her.

And in 1989, a judge ordered Klunder

to receive sex offender treatment,

while he served nearly two years in prison.

[Nicholas] Michael Klunder's got a violent past.

I'm aware of two incidents.

December 15, 1991,

Michael Klunder was following a young woman,

flagged her over under the pretense

of her taillight was out.

While she was out of the car looking at her taillight,

he gets control of her, grabs her

and puts her in his car,

drives her to another location.

Fortunately, she's able to escape.

Around that same time in Charles City, Iowa,

he abducted two toddlers from the yard of a daycare,

put them in the trunk of his car

and drove them to a state park.

That ended with him putting the two toddlers

in a dumpster and leaving them,

I'm assuming to die.

[Dylan] Michael Klunder, you know, abducted

two three-year-old girls.

It happened back in 1991

and it was his first double abduction.

[tense music]

[Steve] My name is Steve Castaneda.

I was Michael Klunder's prison counselor.

Michael Klunder I would say had a small group of friends.

He was reserved. He lifted weights a lot.

Michael could easily be intimidating

but also the dark side, he had an underlying

current of anger all throughout his time

that I dealt with him.

And I recall saying,

"Mike, you put two kids in a dumpster bin?"

And he said, "Yeah."

And it stuck with me for a while

that he really was short of any empathy.

[tense music]

[Graduation Presenter]Mike Klunder.

[clap hands] [cheering]

[suspenseful music]

[Fred] When someone walks in our door,

if they don't have a mandatory sentence,

which in this case did not,

for every day they serve, 1.2 days

comes off the back end and eventually they meet

and that becomes the discharge date.

[tense music]

[Dylan] He only did 20 years in jail

and they released.

[Dezi] He was supposed to do 40 something,

he should have never gotten out, period.

[tense music]

He got out on good behavior.

People like that don't change.

[sniffs]

[tense music]

[Drew] There's no reason

Michael Klunder should have ever seen the light of day.

[Dan]Klunder was a sick puppy.

This guy is the worst of the worst in our society.

I only feel bad about him killing himself,

because investigators weren't able

to get information out of him,

that possibly could have shed some light

on the Evansdale case.

[Steve] Klunder, I would not be surprised

if he participated in that abduction,

of the two Evansdale girls.

[dramatic music]

[Dylan] Since the 1970s through 2011,

there had only been

15 double abductions in the US.

The Evansdale case in 2012, made it number 16.

Number 17 was less than a year later in Dayton.

Now there's been three in Iowa.

Iowa comprises less than 1% of the population,

but accounts for three out of the 17

double abductions in the US.

Two of those three

we know were perpetrated by Michael Klunder.

[Kent] Michael Klunder

had taken two youngsters years before

and now he'd just done it again in Dayton.

What's the likelihood that he was involved

with our case in Evansdale.

[Heather] I was just hoping and praying like

we have our guy.

This has to be Michael Klunder.

[Dezi] I strongly believe

that that was one of his favorite things,

was taking two girls at once,

it just seemed like a repeated pattern.

[Dan] The parallels between the case in Dayton

and the Evansdale case are uncanny.

Two little white girls, pretty close

to the same age as Lyric and Elizabeth.

[Dylan] Eight and ten and then 12 and 15.

One is a larger girl

and the other one is a smaller girl.

We know Michael Klunder threw Kathlynn's backpack

and Dezi's purse out of his truck.

In Evansdale, whoever abducted Lyric and Elizabeth,

threw Elizabeth's purse over a fence.

In both cases, the abductors got rid of the victims' bags

while fleeing the crime scene.

[Dan] Michael Klunder

threw one of his victims in a river.

Lyric and Elizabeth, their bodies

were found near a river.

[Reporter] Investigators are examining

Klunder's work schedule and credit card purchases.

They're also looking at DNA evidence

and comparing the killer's MO in both cases

to determine if Klunder also murdered

the Evansdale cousins.

[Kent] I know what happened to the cousins

and I can't say whether

what Michael Klunder did is or is not

what we know happened to the cousins.

There are things that we know

but I can't say what they are

without tipping a hand that I can't tip.

There are things that happened in Evansdale

that only that person knows.

So, we worked hard doing interviews,

did he know anybody in Black Hawk County

or in Evansdale?

Did he know the victims?

Did he know the victims' families?

[tense music]

[Reporter] There are still no arrests

in the cousins' death a year later.

DCI continues investigating

a possible Michael Klunder connection.

[Kent] We were trying to do everything we could

to attach Michael Klunder to our case.

Were there ties to our community?

Were there ties to Seven Bridges?

[Dylan] When Klunder was in his teens

he went to a youth detention center

in Waverly, Iowa,

which is located in Bremer County.

It's just miles away from where Seven Bridges is.

Recently we had found out that at one point

while Klunder was at Bremwood he escaped

and when he ran he went to Seven Bridges.

That's relevant to this case

because that's where the girls' bodies were found.

[Reporter] Klunder's whereabouts on the day

Lyric Cook and Elizabeth Collins

disappeared last summer are still being investigated

by the Black Hawk County Sheriff's Office.

[Kent] We wanted Michael Klunder to be able

to be tied into our case.

We wanted the answers that we'd been seeking

for almost a year, and to know that we didn't have

a serial killer running on the loose anymore.

I wanted, in the worse way I wanted it to be him.

[tense music]

[Dylan] After the police investigated Klunder

for about a year,

they announced that he wasn't a suspect anymore.

[suspenseful music]

[Dylan] Can you say why he's ruled out?

[Mike] Um...

it goes to the information that we received

and whether or not it puts him in this area

at a particular time.

I guess without getting too specific on that,

there's a lot of data that you're able to collect

to really put a person in a certain spot,

and with Michael Klunder it would be,

it would be next to impossible for him,

based on the information we collected.

[Newsreader] It wasn't Klunder.

Evansdale Police say they have ruled him

out as a suspect.

They say for months they tracked his whereabouts

and that he was likely at work

during the time Cook and Collins were kidnapped.

[Kent] At the end of the day,

not only could we not find any ties,

but the physical timelines that we could definitively say

he could not have gone from where we knew he was

to Evansdale, abduct the girls,

take them to Seven Bridges,

commit the crime and get back in that time.

It's physically impossible.

There wasn't time.

Knowing that we still had someone out there

who's responsible for the cousins,

I've gotta be true to myself, I've gotta be true to Lyric,

I've gotta be true to Elizabeth

and their families,

and he's not our guy.

[tense music]

[Nicholas] I fear now going forward

is if Klunder didn't take the girls,

then who did and are they gonna do it again?

[Drew]They're gonna catch you.

You are as good as caught right now.

It might not be today, it might be tomorrow,

be ready for that knock on your door.

It's coming.

[tense music]

[Reporter]Two Carroll County girls

have gone missing

near the Monon High Bridge Trail in Delphi.

[Jeff] There's some cellphone evidence

where they were able to take a picture of a guy

walking along the trail that they had encountered

and there's audio.

We kind of hear part of the guy's voice.

[Suspect] [hiss]Guys, down the hill.

[hiss]Guys, down the hill.

[Dan] That's the killer on her cellphone footage.

[Police Officer]If you're watching,

we'll find you.

[tense music]