The Rio Grande Murders

It is May 1935. The Great Depression is still exhaling its last, ragged breath across the American Midwest. Four people, two middle-class couples from Illinois, load up a 1929 Nash automobile and point it west on Route 66. They are going to see the Boulder Dam, Which is now known as Hoover Dam. They are going to see the future.

George and Laura Lorius from East St. Louis. Albert and Tillie Heberer from Du Quoin. Ordinary people. Decent people. The kind of people who send postcards home.

On May 22, 1935, they mailed their last postcards from Albuquerque. George signed his with his initials — "G.M.L." — the branding instinct of a successful businessman who couldn't stop working even on vacation. Albert wrote that everybody was fine. No trouble of any kind. They were going to Boulder Dam.

They never arrived. Within five days, a nervous young man with a scar on his cheek was driving their car across Texas, forging their traveler's checks at every gas station and hotel between Socorro and Dallas. The car was found abandoned, bloodstained. The man — who called himself "James Sullivan" — was never found. The bodies were never found.

●     Source citations: KRQE News 13 / Larry Barker investigation (August 2025)

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to Fifty Shades of Fear, the podcast that steps into the darkness, case by case, and talks about the grim facts that most people are too afraid to face. Every episode, we explore the stories behind the headlines. The disappearances, the crimes, the unanswered questions, and the lives forever changed by violence, secrecy, and silence. This is not just about what happened. It's about who was lost, who was ignored, who kept fighting, and what it cost to uncover the truth. Some stories end in justice, some end in mystery, and some never really end at all. But in every case and every state, we follow the evidence, the human impact, and the fear that lingers long after the story is supposed to be over. So lock the doors, turn the lights down low, and stay with me. Because in this world, fear has many faces, and tonight we meet another one. Let's travel back in time, and let me tell you about the American road trip. In 1935, it was not a casual thing. It was not a long weekend or a playlist and a podcast, though I appreciate the irony of saying that to you right now. In 1935, a road trip was an event. It was planned in advance. You saved money for it. You mapped it out on paper, like actual paper maps, and you talked about it at dinner for months before you went. You told your neighbors, you told your barber. And when the day came and you loaded your bags into the car, there was something in that moment, something almost sacred, about the idea that the road was there, and it went somewhere, and you were going with it.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Jimmy, you can hardly miss getting those seven-inch rackets under the big sandwich spinning correctly. And what's going to do after that? Nothing but press one button.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Route 66 had been open for nine years by the spring of 1935. It ran from Chicago all the way to Los Angeles. The Great Diagonal slashed across the heart of the continent. 2,448 miles of promise. Even in the Great Depression, especially in the Great Depression, people drove it because the road didn't care how much money you had. The road just went west, and west in 1935 still meant possibility. George and Laura Laureus were from East St. Louis, Illinois. George owned the Majestic Coal Company. He was the kind of man who kept gas receipts and odometer readings throughout the entire trip. Organized, meticulous, deliberate, a man who measured things, a man who liked to know where he was. Albert and Tilly Herbert were from DuCoyne, Illinois. Albert was a barber. He'd been cutting hair on North Oak Street for years, shaping other people's appearances, listening to their problems, making them look good. Albert was the kind of man who wrote postcards to his friends and family. On the morning of May 22nd, 1935, a Wednesday as a matter of fact, Albert sat down somewhere in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and wrote a postcard to his brother Philip back in Illinois. He noted the time at the top, 11 a.m. He wrote that everybody was okay, no trouble of any kind. They were headed to Boulder Dale, the great engineering marvel of the age, newly opened to the public. The thing everyone wanted to see. George Laureus wrote one too. He signed it the way he signed everything. GML. Even his leisure time was branded. They mailed them at the downtown Albuquerque post office. The postmark reads May 22nd, 1935, 1230 in the afternoon. Those postcards made at home. The four excited travelers did not. You may know New Mexico by its license plate, the land of enchantment. You may know it by its particular blue skies that don't exist anywhere else on the earth. Or you may know it by its red chili peppers or its turquoise and its long, sun-bleached highways that goes on past the edge of everything you can see. What you may not know, what almost nobody knows anymore, is that in 1935, the brand new New Mexico State Police, not yet a year old, opened their very first criminal case. Case number one. And they never closed it. Four people, one tank of gas, and a desert that keeps its secrets like other people keep promises. Imagine East St. Louis in the spring of 1935. The depression is not yet over, but for George and Laura Laureus, the worst of it has passed. George owns a coal company, the Majestic Coal Company, and coal, even in lean years, is something people need. He's done well enough, well enough to take a vacation, well enough to load up the 1929 Nash and point it at the horizon and drive. He has been planning this trip for months. You can tell by the way he travels, with a notebook, with receipts, with odometer readings noted at every gas stop. George Laureus does not go anywhere without a record of having been there. He is the kind of man, if you asked him where he went on vacation, could tell you exactly how many miles he drove and what the gas costs at every station along the way. That's not anxiety, it's competence. This is a man who built a business by paying attention. Laura Laureus, his wife, is packing her reading glasses, those delicate rimless ones, into her case. She's packing the things a woman packs for a long drive. Her calling cards, her personal effects, a silver thimble because she sews when she travels, and a small pot of Vic's vapel robe because it's spring and you never know. She is ready and she is excited. Down the road in Descoin, Albert and Tilly Herbert are doing the same. Albert is a barber. He has a shop at North Oak Street that he's attended for years. The kind of place where men sit in a chair and tell you everything because the barber shop is one of the last genuinely intimate public spaces in American life. Albert knows his town the way a barber knows his town, by the back of everyone's head. Tilly carries her calling card. It is a small rectangle of social identity. This is who she is. This is where she lives. In 1935, a woman like Tilly Herberer doesn't leave home without it. The two couples meet up, the Loreuses and the Herberers, friends and traveling companions, and point the Nash West on Route 66. Route 66 in 1935 is almost nine years old and already legendary. It runs from Chicago all the way to Los Angeles, the great diagonal cut across the middle of the country. The shortest, best, and most scenic route from the Midwest to the Pacific, or so the US 66 Highway Association tells anyone who will listen. And people are listening. Even in the Depression, especially in the Depression, Americans are driving Route 66 because the road is there, and because movement, even purposeless movement, is its own kind of hope. But this trip is not purposeless. They're going to see the Boulder Dam, now known as the Hoover Dam. Boulder Dam has just opened. It's the largest dam in the world. It is four million cubic yards of concrete poured into a canyon on the Colorado River. And it is, and this is not hyperbole, one of the greatest feats of engineering in human history. The government has been building it since 1931. And now it is done and people are going to see it. It is the engineering equivalent of going to the moon. You simply have to see it. You would tell your grandchildren you saw it. Albert Herber, Barber of Descoin, Illinois, is going to see the Boulder Dam. He's writing a postcard about it before he even gets there. May 21st, 1935, the Nash pulls into Vaughan, New Mexico, the Vaughn Hotel. They sign the register. This is a small town. The kind of town that exists to serve the highway that runs through it. A place to stop, to eat, to sleep, to fill the tank and push on. George notes the odometer. He keeps the receipts. The next morning, Wednesday, May 22nd, 1935, they are in Albuquerque. This city is the largest in New Mexico. Not large by Midwestern standards, but alive with the particular energy of a place that Route 66 runs directly through. There is breakfast somewhere. There is probably a conversation about the drive ahead, how far to the dam, what route to take south through New Mexico toward the Arizona border. At 11 a.m., Albert Herbert sits down and writes a postcard to his brother Philip. He knows the time. He's that kind of man. The kind who notes the time, who wants his brother to be able to picture exactly where he is at that moment. He writes, everybody okay, no trouble of any kind. Going to Boulder Dam. George Laureus writes one too. He signs it, as he signs everything, with his initials, GML. Even here, on vacation, there is the brand. There is the mark of the man. He seals it and they walk to the post office together. The postcards are postmarked at the downtown Albuquerque Post Office at 12 30 in the afternoon on May 22nd, 1935. And that's where the trail stops. No more gas receipts, no more odometer readings, no more postcards, no more hotel registers, no more of anything that comes from a living person moving through a world that notices them. The postcards made at home to Illinois. The four travelers, full of wonder and excitement, did not 12 30 PM, May 22, 1935. That is the last moment. That is the edge of the map. Beyond it, nothing that we know for certain. Only what was found after the fact in an arroyo in a Dallas warehouse, on hotel registers across Texas, in the handwriting of a man who wasn't who he said he was. May twenty third, nineteen thirty five, the morning after the postcards, six miles south of Socorro, New Mexico, a car appears on the side of the road. It has been wrecked. Not catastrophically, the Nash is still moving, still operational, but damaged enough that someone has to do something about it. And someone does. The someone is a young man, slender, about 21 years old. He has long hair. And let me pause on that for a moment because in 1935, a young man with long hair in rural New Mexico is not making a bohemian artistic statement. He's making himself visible. He is the kind of person that people looked at twice and remembered. He has a scar on his cheek, he has a tattoo, but the location and design isn't specified in any surviving records, but it's noted, always noted. Because people noticed him. They couldn't help it. He is nervous. Every eyewitness who encounters him used that word or some version of it. Nervous, anxious, jumpy. Not the easy confidence of a man going about his legitimate business, but the brittle alertness of a man who's carrying something he should not be carrying, and he knows it. The car is towed to a service station in Socoro. The young man waits while it's repaired. He doesn't run, he stays, and he pays the bill. He is considering what he is believed to have just done, remarkably composed. Or perhaps he's not composed at all, and the nervousness is simply all that's keeping him upright. That same afternoon, he wrecks it again, forty-four miles south of Socorro. A woman named Miss Clyde Cole encounters him on the road and helps him free the car from whatever situation it has gotten itself into. She too notes his manner. She too remembers him. He's the kind of person you remember. Here's the thing that makes this man so darkly fascinating. And I want to be precise about the word fascinating. I don't mean admirable or sympathetic. I mean the fascination of looking at a thing you can't understand and needing desperately to understand it. He crashed the car twice in one day. He's almost certainly carrying the knowledge of what happened the night before, what he did or what was done or what he witnessed. And he's still driving the car south through New Mexico. He's going somewhere, but where? We don't know. And he seems to barely know himself. A scar on his cheek, a tattoo, and long hair, which let me tell you, in 1935 was not the fashion statement it is today. He was the kind of man that people noticed, and I know I keep coming back to that, but that's what makes it more remarkable that he was never found. Let's talk about what we don't know. We don't know where he came from. We don't know how he came to be in possession of that car. Was he waiting somewhere on the road between Albuquerque and Socorro? Did he flag them down? Was there a breakdown? A false emergency? A simple kindness that George extended to a young man on the side of the road? Was this an ambush? Was this an opportunistic robbery that became something worse? Was he working alone? These questions have no answers, but they have weight. They have the specific weight of things that could have gone differently. If only the road had been emptier, or the hour different, or the young man's path had taken him somewhere else entirely. He heads south through El Paso into Texas. He is driving George's car with George's traveler's checks and George's identity and none of George's caution. He is in every respect, except the one that matters, becoming George Laureus, signing his name, occupying his car, and spending his money. The investigators, working backward, would find his fingerprints everywhere and yet find nothing useful. Smudged, always smudged. His handwriting was on hotel registers and forged checks that would survive, that would be studied, that would be measured and analyzed and compared. All to no end. It is the only record of him that exists ink on paper in a dead man's name. Investigators also found inside the Nash a single bullet. One bullet, not fired in the car, but there, present, suggestive. The bullet was never matched to a weapon because no weapon was ever found. The smudged fingerprints were never matched to a person because no person was ever identified. The handwriting was never matched to a name, because the name he gave was not his own. Every thread of physical evidence leads to the same place, the edge of what we can know and then nothing. The Nash rolls east from El Paso into the Texas interior through towns that barely warranted a pinprick on a nineteen thirty five roadmap. Colorado, Lorraine, Trant, Abilene, Cisco. At each one he cashes a check. George Loreus's check. In George's name, ten dollars, and then ten more. Then ten more again. In Depression Era Texas, a stranger with a traveler's check is slightly unusual, but not impossible. Not enough to detain, not enough to call the law. He is remembered everywhere he goes, and nowhere does he linger long enough to be caught. He is heading to Fort Worth, the Worth Hotel to be exact. On may twenty sixth, nineteen thirty-five, the Worth Hotel in Fort Worth, Texas, room eight zero two, three dollars for the night. He signs the register as James Sullivan, a name that is not his name either, and handwriting that will later be examined by federal investigators, and he goes upstairs and he sleeps. The next morning he drives to Dallas. Near the Dallas fairgrounds, another collision, another car. He pays the damage, five dollars, another forged check. He drives to a tire store and has the Nash washed and greased and given an oil change. And then he abandons it. The Nash is found near the Marvin Drug Company warehouse in Dallas, Texas, on May 27th, in 1935. It's abandoned, unlocked, and on the left car door there are bloodstains and hair. Human hair and bloodstains on the door of a car belonging to four people that no one has seen in five days. The mysterious James Sullivan is gone. He walked away from that Dallas warehouse and has never been seen again. Not confirmed by any eyewitnesses, not identified by any investigator, not caught by any law enforcement officer and any jurisdiction. He was twenty one years old in May of 1935, by most accounts, which means he would be 111 now, which is nature's way of resolving what law enforcement could not. But he's been gone for 90 years, almost exactly as long as the four people he allegedly killed. George Laureus was a careful man with money. That's not speculation. It's a documented fact of his character, established by his odometer records, his gas receipts, and his organized financial habits. When George and his wife, alongside the Herberers, left Illinois for their trip west, he carried with him $400 in travelers' checks. That was real money in 1935, roughly $9,000 in today's terms, enough for gas, motels, food, and the damn admission, with a comfortable margin for anything unexpected. George could not have anticipated how unexpected things would get. Of those $400, $160 were systematically forged and cashed across two states in a five-day period by a young man who couldn't drive to save his life and couldn't quite spell his own assumed name consistently. Sixteen checks, ten dollars each, a paper trail that crossed New Mexico and Texas like a broken dotted line on a treasure map, except the treasure was already gone. And what the line led to was a bonfire and a warehouse and a set of bloodstained car doors in Dallas. Let me walk you through the towns because the towns matter. Not because they're famous. They're not, but because they're real, and because in each one of them, in a depression-era diner or gas station or general store, someone looked at this nervous young man and handed him ten dollars in exchange for a signature that wasn't his. And he pocketed the money and got back in the car and drove on. Vaughn, New Mexico, the same town where the tourists had stopped just days before. He's retracing their steps in a sense. Or rather, he's moving through the landscape they had moved through. the landscape they had planned to pass through on their way to the dam. Instead, he goes south. He goes through El Paso, then Colorado City, Texas, Lorraine, Texas, Trent, Texas, Abilene, Texas, and Cisco, Texas. Small towns, working towns. Towns where ten dollars was a significant transaction and a stranger was noticeable, but not enough to cause alarm. Not in 1935. In the Texas interior where strangers pass through all the time, on their way to somewhere else. He was nervous at every stop. This is established by multiple independent eyewitness accounts. He's nervous the way a person is nervous when they know what's in the trunk. Except there was nothing in the trunk as far as we know. Whatever needed to be disposed of had already been disposed of somewhere in the desert between Albuquerque and Socorro, in an arroyo the investigators would not find for another month. He is a terrible forger this is important. He is not a professional criminal or if he is, he's a very bad one. The handwriting on the checks is analyzed by investigators later. It is consistent. It is his, but it is not a convincing reproduction of George's signature. In a depression era Texas town where no one knows what George's signature looks like, this doesn't matter. The check is good, or it appears to be, no one calls the bank, no one picks up the telephone and dials the Albuquerque authorities. He walks away with ten dollars every time. Back to May 26, 1935, Fort Worth, Texas at the Worth Hotel, a proper establishment, not a roadside auto court. He walks into the lobby with the Nash parked outside and asks for a room room number eight oh two on the third floor. He pays the three dollars with a forged check. He signs the register as James Sullivan. The hotel keeps the register. The FBI will find it later. His handwriting that careful insufficient forgery is preserved in the Worth Hotel's files, a ghost pressed into paper. He sleeps for the night and the next morning he gets back into Georgia's stolen car and drives towards Dallas. Near the Dallas Fairgrounds, a sprawling entertainment complex that in 1935 is hosting automobile shows and agricultural exhibitions, he collides with another vehicle. He pays the other driver five dollars from another forged check. The other driver takes the money and drives away. An eyewitness who remembers the nervous young man with the scar will later give a statement that goes precisely nowhere. And then he does the thing that at first glance doesn't make any logical sense unless you're a criminal covering your tracks. He drives the Nash to a tire store and has it washed for those of you in the back before abandoning a stolen vehicle belonging to four people he almost certainly murdered he had it washed and then greased. He had the oil changed he attended to the mechanic well being of a dead man's automobile and he made sure its exterior was clean before he walked away from it forever. Either he was meticulous or he was paranoid or both. Either way he was thinking he was thinking about the car thinking about what someone finding the car might find on or in it thinking about how to manage the evidence and that might be the most frightening thing about him not that he was careless but that he was careful. Crashing the car was careless. The forged checks were careless but the wash job that was intentional but it didn't work. The bloodstains on the left door survived whatever cleaning he did or did not supervise at the tire store. The hair on the door remained the evidence of four people was still there waiting to be found as it always is because violence is very hard to clean near the Marvin Drug Company warehouse in Dallas the Nash sits unlocked engine off abandoned. Whoever finds it first a warehouse worker a passerby a Dallas police officer on patrol they see a 1929 Nash parked where it shouldn't be and they look and they find the blood and they find the hair and they make the call. Dallas police contact Doria's family on May 28th. The family officially reports all four tourists missing. The investigation that has already been building in New Mexico now has a southern anchor. Four people vanished from New Mexico their car ended up in Dallas. Their money was spent across two states by a young man who is now gone in 1938 three years after the murders three years of investigation three years of leads that led nowhere a federal grand jury in Albuquerque indicted the mysterious James Sullivan alias John Doe for the interstate transportation of a stolen vehicle an arrest warrant was issued in his name his alias his description and his known movements the warrant was never served. James Sullivan has now been wanted by federal authorities for 89 years. He's been missing for ninety he vanished from the Dallas scene the same way he appeared on the road south of Socorro suddenly completely and without explanation just gone the black hole at the center of this story. Now let's talk about the size of what happened next three hundred law enforcement officers that's not a typo you're hearing it correctly 300 police sheriffs and federal agents state troopers and investigators fanned out across New Mexico and Texas in the weeks following the disappearance more than 2,000 civilian searchers joined them ordinary civilians who drove out to the desert and walked it on foot looking for anything that would tell them where the four people from Illinois had gone. The governors of New Mexico Texas and Illinois were personally engaged. Every major American newspaper was running daily updates. The Associated Press moved dispatch after dispatch the Rio Grande murders as the press had already dubbed them was front page news from coast to coast. This was the most talked about crime in the country in the summer of 1935. And in the middle of it Governor Clyde Tingley of New Mexico walked the desert himself he went out there the governor of a state in a suit in the May heat and looked for graves. He was, according to the historical record, pretty well convinced that they had been murdered and he was afraid not afraid of the desert or of what happened to the missing tourists. He was afraid of what the country's newspapers were already printing about his state tourism along Route 66 through New Mexico collapsed. Attendance at Santa Fe attractions dropped. Carlsbad Caverns reported a dramatic decrease in visitors. The land of enchantment had become in the national imagination the land of fear and violence. Governor Tingley offered $1,000 for information leading to the discovery of the bodies nobody came forward. The desert was not talking FBI special agent Albert Raymond Gear of the Albuquerque Field Office led the federal investigation. This was one of the first major applications of the 1934 Lindbergh Act which made interstate kidnapping a federal crime giving the FBI jurisdiction in cases where victims were transported across state lines. The Rio Grande murders fell squarely within that jurisdiction the four tourists disappeared in New Mexico and their car was driven through Texas. Gear was competent. Gear was thorough he interviewed every eyewitness he analyzed every check he studied the handwriting he photographed the car he catalogued the blood evidence. He had fingerprints lifted he had the bullet examined he had nothing or almost nothing. What he had was a description of a nervous young man in a name that was not real and a trail of paper that ended up in a Dallas parking area with blood on a car door. Late June in nineteen thirty five on the East Mesa of Albuquerque, a stretch of high, flat, empty land east of the city, where the road traffic thins and the arroyos cut through the landscape in deep, shadowed grooves, a cowboy finds something he finds a firesight recent enough to still be identifiable, and in it the remnants of things that were not supposed to be there. Let me go through what was found, item by item because each item deserves its moment in the ashes they found fragments of burned clothing mostly unidentifiable they found Laura Loreus's rimless reading glasses the lenses melted the frames fused into something that was no longer functional as glasses no longer anything really. Laura needed them to see the world and someone destroyed them so thoroughly that you could barely identify what they had been. Investigators photographed them and the photographs are haunting two melted discs of what was glass lying in ash Tilly Herbert's personal calling card the thing she carried to tell the world who she was charred at the edges her name still legible this is who I am from the ruins of an arroyal bonfire I was here George Loreus's pen embossed majestic Colco, the pen he carried because he was always always working the pen that signed contracts and invoices and God knows what else over the course of a business career. But it didn't burn completely and it was found and identified and it's the clearest proof that these were their belongings. The pen bore his company's name, his brand, his identity and there it is in the ash Vic's vapor rub, the small pot of it that Laura packed because it was spring and you never know evidence if evidence were needed that these were people who planned, who thought ahead and who took care of each other a silver thimble which belonged to a woman who sewed, who sat somewhere in Illinois in a kitchen or a sitting room in lamplight and repaired things she mended things the domestic precise careful labor of a woman who kept a household running and brought her thimble on vacation because she always had it and you never know when something needs to be mended someone threw that thimble into a fire in a desert arroyo assorted sets of keys but keys to what their homes? Their front doors in East St. Louis and Descoyne, Illinois The locks those keys opened were never turned again. The doors stood locked, waiting whatever rooms were on the other side of those doors a kitchen, a bedroom, a coal company office or a barber shop, those spaces never again received the people who held those keys, and the keys ended up in an arroyo bonfire and New Mexico postal cards and scenic pictures of the area they'd been traveling through the souvenirs of the trip, the images of Monument Valley and Albuquerque and Route sixty six that they'd collected as they drove west, the way you do, picking up pictures and postcards to send home, buying them at general stores and tourist shops. Evidence of joy, evidence of a trip taken enthusiastically by people who were looking at the world and finding it beautiful all in the fire. Someone built a bonfire in the New Mexico desert and fed it the evidence of four lives. They did not manage to erase everything though. The glasses survived their own destruction in a form that was still recognizable. The pen's metal was recoverable. The calling card's printing held through the heat but the attempt was systematic this was not a panic this was a plan. On july twenty seventh nineteen thirty five a handwritten note is found along a highway. It reads Tourists may be found at the College Dam. Investigators follow up immediately and go to what they presume the writer meant and head to Coolidge Dam in Arizona. They find nothing The note is another dead end or possibly a hoax or possibly something from someone who knew something but not enough. A rumor given a direction and no destination in 1938 the federal grand jury in Albuquerque does what it can. It indicts a man whose name is not his real name, whose description is all that exists of him for stealing a car across state lines. Not for murder because without bodies murder is difficult to prove and no bodies have been found just the car just the checks and just the arroyo the arrest warrant is issued the warrant is never served. The man who called himself James Sullivan is gone as completely as the people he took the car from almost ninety one years and not a bone not a button not a fragment of anything that can be attributed to George, Laura, Albert or Tilly with certainty. The desert kept everything or gave everything to the river or gave nothing at all the way deserts do. The desert does not explain itself at the New Mexico Department of Public Safety in Santa Fe there is a file. It is thousands of pages investigators notes, FBI dispatches, eyewitness accounts, photographs of the burned artifacts in the arroyo, photographs of the abandoned Nash in Dallas, photographs of the Arroy itself, that long, dry cut in the Earth's face where someone tried to erase two families and very nearly succeeded. All of it has been digitized. The state of New Mexico has taken care to preserve the record of this case. Even after ninety one years even after the principles are all long dead and the hope of prosecution has faded to the kind of theoretical possibility that lawyers discuss rather than pursue. But the original evidence boxes cannot be located. The actual physical evidence the burned glasses, the pen, the calling card, the symbol, the keys collected by investigators in 1935, cataloged and preserved in the expectation that they might one day be needed in a courtroom, those boxes are gone. The state has the record of what was in them, but it does not have the contents. The case is both preserved and lost simultaneously the digital ghosts of the evidence exists. The evidence itself has gone the way of the people it belonged to the irony is almost literary in its precision. New Mexico State Police case number one This designation is not ceremonial. It's chronological this was their first criminal investigation. Before this there was no investigations there was no case numbers there was no state police. A brand new law enforcement agency barely assembled was handed the most complex most sensational most nationally visible murder case in the state's history as its inaugural assignment. They did everything right given what they had. They mobilized they searched they coordinated with the FBI with the governors of three states with local law enforcement across New Mexico and Texas. They generated thousands of pages of documentation they followed every lead that presented itself they found the arroyo evidence they identified the check forgery trail they had the Nash examined by forensic technicians. They did not find James Sullivan they did not find the bodies their first case was also their greatest unresolved mystery not through incompetence but because the desert is vast in the 1930s had no DNA no cell phones no surveillance cameras no facial recognition no digital payment records no way to find a nervous young man who gave a false name and walked away from a warehouse in Dallas and was never seen again to save George and Laura and Albert and Tilly not in 1935. Not from the New Mexico desert on a day when four people simply vanished from a highway and left nothing behind but a postmark and an arroyo fire. Albert wrote to his brother that everything was okay no trouble of any kind going to Boulder Dam. He wrote that he mailed it to his brother he walked back to the Nash and got in and they drove within 24 hours by the most generous reconstruction of the timeline something happened something so absolute that within a single day four people were gone and a stranger was driving their car south through the desert. They were not okay and the trouble whatever the trouble was whoever caused it however it happened in the desert between Albuquerque and Socorro on a warm May night in 1935 the trouble was of the most final kind imaginable they were gone forever. Some roads take you places and some roads just take you away the desert is still keeping its secrets and somewhere out there in a field in an arroyo in the current of the Rio Grande itself four people from Illinois are still waiting to be found. I'm Ashley stay safe stay curious and remember all stories deserve to be told