We're Going In (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

The story opens in 2012 with a young man pulling a heavy, tied-up plastic bag out of a rain-made sinkhole in his West Virginia backyard, then rewinds two years to Saturday, April 24th, 2010. Kathy Goebel, a 64-year-old sales clerk at a high-end men's store in Charleston, spends her last known day serving Dr. Harry King — a wealthy, married radiologist she is secretly having an affair with while dating her boyfriend Fred Farrell — and fending off Jessica Fisher, a co-worker's daughter with a Xanax addiction whom Kathy refuses for the first time, triggering a screaming public argument. Rattled, Kathy has shoe salesman Charles March walk her to her car at closing, then visits her ailing ex-husband David McCartney, stops at Walmart, and drives to Fred's apartment to clean it while he is away fishing. On the phone with her friend Laura, her last words before hanging up are that 'we' are going in.

When Kathy misses work on Monday, her son Jason calls his childhood friend, Detective Brian Carper of the Kanawha County Sheriff's Department. Carper finds Fred's apartment scrubbed spotless with Kathy's phone, medication and spare keys abandoned on the counter, and notices Fred referring to Kathy in the past tense. Her SUV turns up 15 miles out of town with a breakdown towel in the window — but the engine starts on the first try and the tank is half full, which convinces Carper the scene was staged. The suspect list is long: Fred, the nervous Dr. King (whose wife ultimately confirms his alibi), the frail ex-husband, and Jessica Fisher, who admits the drug fight, agrees to a polygraph, and then vanishes. Forensics on the car come back clean, and with no body and no evidence of a crime, the case goes cold.

Two years later almost to the day, days of flooding rain unearth a dismembered body in a backyard on the edge of town — the same backyard from the opening scene. It is Kathy, strangled and buried by Charles March, the trusted colleague who had walked her out to protect her, a man with an undisclosed history of stalking women who was never once a suspect. Investigators concluded he had grown obsessed with her, lured her from Fred's apartment, and killed her when she rejected him. March pled guilty, got life, and died of cancer in prison in 2014.