MURDERED: Joyce LePage Part 2

Part two of the Joyce LePage case works through the final three theories in the 55-year-old WSU murder. First, the meditation group: Joyce was planning to move into 400 Howard Street with the leaders of the Student International Meditation Society, Mike and Celeste Lindbergh, and their roommate Mark Wadley — a house just three or four doors from where her abandoned car was found. Mark noticed her car but 'didn't know' she was missing; Mike drove past his own house while an officer was there and only returned after police left. In polygraphs, Mike spiked on whether Mark was involved, and Mark's heart rate jumped when asked whether Joyce was still alive. Most damning, Ashley Flowers found a letter in Joyce's own handwriting saying she had discovered Mark once stayed at a mental institution for trying to strangle people — and no investigator, then or since, appears to have ever run that down.

A former roommate, Kay Garrison, told police Joyce seemed pale, thin, and frightened in her last week, saying she knew something 'too well' and was afraid of sealing someone else's coffin — possibly tied to the drug world around the meditation group, whose leader had a 1969 drug conviction despite the group's anti-drug stance. Then there's the roommate theory: Bruce Bierbaum, whom Joyce was actively avoiding, first told police he saw her asleep on the couch Friday morning — after the carpet had already been cut — then later denied ever saying it. Weeks into the disappearance he mailed her father a letter asking to be reimbursed about $90, and a friend found Joyce's favorite blue vase shattered, which Bruce attributed to an unexplained argument. Today Bruce is the primary focus of the sheriff's investigation, fueled by ex-wives' calls, a poem a family member says he wrote about a dead girl in a river, a 2014 domestic battery charge, and veterinary-license discipline for giving animal medications to his children. He refuses all contact with investigators and the show.

The episode closes with the Steve Solly theory — an unstable friend who had Joyce's typewriter, quit school mid-semester after she died, and passed a polygraph that isn't in the file — plus lingering threads: Sheriff Brett Myers now doubts Joyce was stabbed at all given the bloodless carpet, a campus cop tipped as a molestation suspect quit the force after Joyce vanished, and an unexplained long-distance call to Moses Lake sits unresolved. A $100,000 reward from Joyce's brother still stands.