(tense music)
- My sister, Wendy,
Cynthia, my niece,
and Lisa, my sister-in-law, went missing.
I just didn't know what to do except pray.
- Nobody wants to see a child go missing,
and Wendy suffers from MS,
so it was critical that we find them immediately.
- I desperately wanted to get them back,
a feverish, almost obsessive hope.
- But Wendy, Cynthia, and Lisa vanished out of thin air
and they could not find them.
- It consumes you.
You lie awake at night thinking about it.
- We need to get this case broke open and solved.
- But what we found was very disturbing.
- It made me sick to my stomach.
- Now you know who did it,
but it's not what you know, it's what you can prove.
- I still wanted to find out what happened to them,
and I never gave up trying.
Every day I see something that reminds me of my sister.
Every day.
(suspenseful music)
(tense music)
- [Narrator] The world looks a little brighter
for 23-year-old Wendy Camp,
since she's getting to see her four-year-old son,
for the first time in months.
She's been locked in a custody battle
with her ex-husband, Chad Noe.
- Chad made arrangements for Beverly Noe,
Chad's mother,
to drive to Oklahoma City,
pick Wendy up and bring her to Shamrock, Oklahoma,
where Chad was living at the time to visit with Jonathan,
their four-year-old son.
- Beverly had called and said,
we're gonna come and pick you up
to have a visit with Jonathan.
My daughter was ecstatic.
Oh, I finally get to go see him.
I finally get to go see him.
- Wendy was super excited to go, and her daughter,
she's six years old,
asked to go and she was permitted to go.
Wendy's current husband did not feel comfortable
with Wendy going alone,
so he had asked his sister Lisa to go with them.
Wendy reluctantly agreed, you know,
she really wanted to just go by herself
with Cynthia, her daughter.
- He asked Lisa to tag along,
because he was concerned about Wendy's safety,
because she suffers from MS.
(rooster crowing)
(tense music)
- They got to Shamrock
at about 1:40 p.m. on that date.
The first thing they did was stop
at a convenience store there
so that Wendy could call her husband, Leon,
let him know that they'd made it there.
From there, Beverly took them to Chad's house.
By all accounts, the visitation went well.
Beverly showed back up at the house at around 4:30
to pick Wendy and Cynthia and Lisa up to take them home.
They went to the same convenience store, and again,
Wendy called Leon to say, we're headed back home,
and that call was about four 4:40-4:45 p.m.
- Shamrock, Oklahoma is about 80 miles from Oklahoma City.
It should have taken an hour and a half
to two hours to get home.
- [Marty] But Wendy and Cynthia and Lisa
did not make it home.
- Wendy was the class clown.
She wanted to be a veterinarian.
She was amazingly smart, straight A student.
Everything that she did, you know, she picked up the flute,
picked up the clarinet, played the piano,
and with zero effort.
She really was my role model.
- Cynthia was a live wire.
I wished I could bottle that energy, I'd be a millionaire.
Very, very inquisitive, on anything and everything.
She loved to read, so very, very intelligent,
just like her mom.
- My niece's favorite thing
when my sister would get home from work
was bubble bath time.
I remember once Wendy even called and said,
did you get the bubble bath ready?
I'm almost home.
- Lisa, my daughter's sister-in-law,
was a young mother with two small children herself.
- My sister-in-law Lisa was a very, very docile sweet girl.
- Lisa Kregear was Leon Camp's sister.
She was also 23 years old in the spring of 1992.
- So we had a huge loving family.
(somber music)
- Leon was very, very concerned
when they had not made it home by eight o'clock.
- Wendy had multiple sclerosis,
and she needed her medications daily.
If she did not take the medications,
it would immediately throw her into an attack
from the multiple sclerosis
and could lead even to immediate death.
- But she never got home.
(phone ringing)
- [Narrator] Leon fears something is wrong,
and when he talks to Beverly, Wendy's former mother-in-law,
that fear deepens.
Beverly, who'd driven them to the visit,
dropped them off at a shopping mall,
45 minutes outside Oklahoma City
instead of driving them back home.
- According to Beverly,
Wendy was complaining the whole time,
so she'd finally had enough.
So she stopped at the Walmart parking lot in Chandler,
dropped the girls off there,
and said she figured they could get a ride from there.
- Beverly felt that leaving them in Chandler
would be okay, because they would be capable
of getting a hold of Leon to come and pick 'em up.
- You would expect that the first thing Wendy would've done
was call Leon, but that did not occur.
- Leon called me and said, Mom, they're not home.
What do I do?
I said, call the police and have them come out
and take a report on missing persons.
- The Oklahoma City Police Department
responded around midnight that day.
- It was excruciating agony,
because I didn't know what happened.
I had the feeling, deep down in my heart,
that it was not gonna be all right.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] The family waits by the phone, fearing the worst.
As the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, the OSBI,
starts searching for Wendy, little Cynthia, and Lisa.
- All of the people who had been working at the store
on that date were interviewed,
people in businesses in the area,
everybody was talked to,
and nobody reported seeing anybody like that.
They could have taken off walking down the highway.
They could have tried to reach out
to people in the parking lot.
You would expect somebody
would've had some contact with them.
- Maybe somebody offered to give them a ride,
and then something untoward happened.
Did they decide to strike out on their own
and maybe a car hit them?
Where did they go?
- It was imperative to find these three women
as quickly as possible,
especially given Wendy's medical condition,
and the fact that Cynthia's only six years old.
- Wendy and Cynthia and Lisa had disappeared.
My parents were just beside themselves, frantic.
Where are you?
(sad piano music)
My sister and niece, Wendy and Cynthia,
and Lisa, my sister-in-law, went missing at a parking lot.
- The longer you go without finding them,
the chances of finding them alive dwindle pretty quickly.
- With her MS,
if Wendy is not found immediately
and start taking this medication within three days,
she will start going back into a coma.
- There were searches of the whole surrounding area.
There were deputies on horseback
looking through the rural areas.
- Law enforcement even did aerial searches
to make sure that the girls weren't in a ditch somewhere.
(tense music)
- But nobody could find them.
- [Narrator] Special agents talked to Beverly Noe,
Wendy's former mother-in-law, about the ride back.
- Beverly was the last person
to see Wendy, Lisa, and Cynthia.
It is important to establish what could've happened.
- Beverly said that when she picked the girls up,
her mother, Ida Pruitt, was also with her.
They hadn't got a block,
and Wendy was just complaining about everything.
So Ida told Beverly, why don't you just take me home?
Beverly dropped Ida off,
and then continued on to Chandler, Oklahoma.
- When she reaches the Walmart in Chandler,
she said she had become very tired of listening to them,
so she just stopped and dropped 'em off.
Beverly was very cooperative with us,
answering all the questions.
Everything she was telling me was very feasible.
- [Narrator] The family wants to believe
that Wendy, Cynthia, and Lisa are still alive.
- There's still hope
that maybe they were somewhere
being held hostage or something.
- I just didn't know what to do except pray.
I literally turned to God and said, God, please help us.
Please bring them back safely.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Agents interview Wendy's husband, Leon,
and clear him.
That's not the case with Chad Noe, Wendy's ex.
Red flags pop up right away,
and they're connected to Wendy's illness.
- When Jonathan, my grandson, was three weeks old,
that's when she developed the multiple sclerosis.
Wendy could not walk or anything.
- She fell into a coma.
This vibrant, bigger-than-life personality,
now just lying there day in and day out
for a little over a year.
When Wendy was in the coma,
we found out that Chad had filed for a divorce
and for custody of Jonathan.
That was just one shockwave on top of another shockwave.
- [Narrator] But Wendy's family is grateful
when Chad's mother Beverly
steps in to help him care for the new baby.
- We did reach out to Beverly
and ask if she would take care of Jonathan.
Beverly loved Wendy.
It was a big relief.
Beverly was awesome.
Everything is gonna be great.
- When Wendy was recovering,
she reached out to Chad
to get visitation with Jonathan.
At first, the visitation went fine,
but then ultimately ended up in the courts.
- Chad wanted custody of Jonathan,
and Wendy had wanted custody,
and so they were fighting over him.
- We consider Chad as a suspect
because of the custody battle,
him being angry over it, and then he sets up the meeting,
which leads to their disappearance.
- Chad Noe was interviewed numerous times.
Chad's story matches up with Leon's story,
and with a lot of what Beverly said.
- We did a search of Chad's house looking for evidence.
However, we did not find anything.
- Chad was never ruled completely out,
but Chad Noe did not become the focus of this investigation.
- [Narrator] All the interviews and searches lead nowhere.
- It was good investigative work,
there just wasn't a lot to go on.
- It was very frustrating because we could not develop
any evidence that could tell us what had happened.
- When you get to the point where you have no more leads,
it consumes you.
You lie awake at night thinking about it.
What else can I do?
- I decided that I'm not gonna give up hope,
but I'll never forget what my mom said to me.
She said, I'm telling you right now that they're dead.
I, I know that they're dead.
(somber instrumental music)
- Personally, it bothered me
that we could not find Lisa and Wendy,
because of her medical condition,
and especially because of Cynthia.
Nobody wants to see a child go missing.
- I didn't know if somebody had gotten them
from the parking lot.
Unfortunately, the parking lot didn't have cameras.
- I think the investigators did look into the possibility
they were abducted from the mall or on the way to a phone.
Tragically, I've covered cases where that has happened.
- [Narrator] Then a possible lead comes in
from neighboring Missouri, an apparent abduction.
- There had been some women go missing in Missouri
under similar circumstances.
- Three hours away, in Springfield, Missouri,
there was a mother and daughter that went missing
along with the daughter's 18-year-old friend.
- You don't see three women disappear in Oklahoma,
and then the next month,
three other women disappear in Missouri.
Their stuff was still in their house.
Their cars were in their driveway,
and they vanished out of thin air too,
just like our mother and daughter and Lisa did.
They weren't living a high risk lifestyle.
There really was no reason
that they should have gone missing whatsoever.
- I contacted the investigator,
and we compared the the specifics of his case,
and we just could not make a connection.
- They could not find any evidence linking these women.
Just all six women disappeared
under suspicious circumstances.
- Random abductions do happen.
This is before cell phones, and it was a big mystery.
It was a terrible tragedy.
- [Narrator] The family's fear and pain grow
with each passing day.
- We prayed that as an innocent little child,
that maybe Cynthia survived.
Please, Lord, please
at least let my little granddaughter be alive.
I'm sorry.
- My mother literally could not function,
was sitting on the floor in a pool of tears, unable to move,
just screaming, where's my daughter?
I can't imagine the despair and hopelessness
that she felt at that moment.
I tried every day to reach out to news medias.
I started reaching out on the anniversaries.
Can you do a an update on Wendy or Cynthia's birthday?
But there was just no movement.
(dark music)
- [Narrator] A year and a half after the disappearance,
the TV show, Unsolved Mysteries, features the case.
Oddly enough, it is one of Wendy's favorite programs.
- Back in the day when Unsolved Mysteries just came out,
Wendy was an avid, avid buff.
How excited we would get
watching Unsolved Mysteries back in the early 90's.
- The OSBI decided to reach out to Unsolved Mysteries
because maybe somebody would see the show, recognize them,
and we could find them that way.
- They came out and did the interview,
and we felt that that could help solve the case.
- [Narrator] Something about the program
stands out to Wendy's sister.
In an interview, Ida Pruitt, Beverly Noe's mother,
strongly denies she or Chad Noe
had anything to do with the disappearance.
- Why would Ida get so upset
and claim on the Unsolved Mysteries segment,
that my sister was gripin' and a bitchin' about the past?
Her remarks do not make sense,
because my sister was struggling with memory.
I knew right then and there when I heard that statement
on the Unsolved Mysteries episode, that it was false.
I knew that the family was involved.
(somber music)
When the Unsolved Mysteries episode aired,
that's when the OSBI were saying
that the facts didn't line up.
Now, Beverly came out as the strong suspect,
the last person seen with them,
but I thought so highly of her.
Did Beverly really do this?
(tense music)
- At first,
they did have to take Beverly's statement at face value,
but at the same time, things didn't really add up.
- Beverly said she dropped the women and child off.
We checked.
We could not find any witnesses,
and if Wendy had a problem,
she was gonna call Leon.
- I guarantee you, in 1992,
she would've been able to find a payphone
outside that parking lot.
- And then I learned that Beverly
was very angry due to the custody battle.
- [Marty] But by all accounts, it went beyond that.
She basically wanted Jonathan for herself.
- But there was never any information
developed to implicate Beverly.
- You need to have probable cause,
and they weren't really anywhere close to that.
- At the time I retired in 2000,
I was disappointed that we had not located
Cynthia and Lisa and Wendy.
- I can't imagine what it would be like to know
that one of my family was missing
and we could never find them.
- [Narrator] Suspicions remain, but leads dry up.
And the case of Cynthia, Wendy, and Lisa
goes colder than a winter freeze in Oklahoma.
- The pain and anguish of not knowing,
it dominates their thoughts and their dreams.
- Maybe Cynthia, my granddaughter has survived.
That was a desperate,
feverish, almost obsessive
hope for me.
Yeah.
(sad music)
(siren blaring in the distance)
- [Narrator] Cynthia's family never gives up.
They connect with groups
dedicated to finding missing children.
- There was several organizations
that deal with human trafficking and that type of thing
that worked with us.
- The missing and exploited children
wanted to do a age progression photo of Cynthia.
- Somebody might recognize Cynthia if she was still alive.
- Maybe Cynthia would look like this,
and it just gave me more hope.
- I just saw how beautiful he would've been.
It rips your heart out,
knowing
that this is just images that aren't real.
They could have been.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] The case languishes for years,
but a suspicious fire might revive it.
Police charge Beverly Noe and Ida Pruitt with arson.
- Beverly and her mom, Ida, are in jail,
and I was like, what? (chuckling)
- Beverly and Ida set Beverly's house on fire,
and they were arrested.
- They did it for insurance money.
It just shows the corruption in their soul.
- I was ecstatic.
Maybe they can offer Ida a free card out of jail, you know,
get her to turn against Beverly.
And I got told by law enforcement in general
that that's not possible.
- Ida and Beverly spent some jail time for that case.
- [Narrator] Beverly and Ida do six months and are released.
Then four years later, Ida Pruitt dies,
giving the police a possible opening in their case.
- In 2011, Ida Pruitt passed away of esophageal cancer,
and by all accounts,
she was the one that held the family together.
- Now, maybe people are gonna start talking
and giving information up about the case.
- [Narrator] It takes two years,
but the hunch proves right
when an unnamed relative calls in with a lead.
(phone ringing)
- The tip had come in to investigators,
telling them that they needed to look at this case.
- This person's story was that the bodies
were buried under a cement slab
at a home where Grover Pruitt used to live.
Grover Pruitt is Ida Pruitt's son,
and Beverly Noe's brother.
So is Grover Pruitt involved in these murders?
(somber piano music)
(phone ringing)
- A tip had come in that we needed
to go talk to Grover Pruitt, Beverly's brother,
about Wendy and Lisa and Cynthia.
We were actually excited about it.
(tense piano music)
- The story was that the bodies were buried
under a cement slab at the house
where Grover Pruitt used to live.
You've got to check that out,
because the case had definitely gone cold.
You're looking for anything to kind of get it going again.
The tip was vetted out,
but no bodies were found.
Still, this did jumpstart the investigation again
on Grover Pruitt.
- We interviewed Grover at his house.
The strategy was just to see
if any of the other family members head to Grover.
Did he know where their remains were?
- Grover started telling 'em
about this other property he owned back then.
He kept saying, I don't know anything about this,
but if I was gonna look anywhere,
it would be out on that property.
- Grover had sold five of those acres to his mother, Ida.
She had asked him to dig her a hole to put a septic tank in.
Shortly after that, Wendy, Lisa, and Cynthia went missing,
and Ida told him to cover that hole up.
Grover said that maybe the girls
could have been buried there.
- And Grover pointed out a depression in the ground
where the hole for the septic tank had been.
That got us really excited.
- If Wendy, Lisa and Cynthia were in there,
we didn't wanna disturb any of the evidence
when we started digging.
Also, if we found them,
we wanted to preserve their remains.
- [Narrator] Excavation on the hole begins,
and it's a slow and careful process.
- Even though we had a piece of heavy equipment out there,
a backhoe, we had to have a special bucket on it.
You basically wanna scrape away a little bit at a time.
- It was not a quick process.
Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday,
we hadn't got anything but dirt.
- And since it was dug for a septic tank,
this hole was eight feet deep.
- [Narrator] Police ask Wendy's family to stay away
until the work is done.
- They just told us that they would let us know the results.
- And I said, I wanna be present if they do find the bodies.
- They said, all right, well,
you can come to this little town,
but you gotta wait at the police station.
- As we got further down, we began to find layers of trash.
- After the trash,
there was another layer of dirt
where we didn't see anything,
but we were still digging and very hopeful.
And then we saw a little sneaker.
- When the bucket of the backhoe scraped across the dirt,
we could see something that looked different.
The first thing that appeared
were the soles of Cynthia's tennis shoes.
Believe me, it was, it was very somber.
- In the hole there were what appeared to be
two adult skeleton remains,
and then a smaller child skeleton remains.
We may actually have found them.
- The clothing was exactly the same
as what Wendy and Cynthia and Lisa
were wearing on the last day they were seen alive.
- There was a Ruger 357, two kitchen knives in the hole.
There was a backpack with Cynthia's name inside,
and there was a purse with Wendy's medical card.
(dramatic music)
- When they came in and told us that they had found them,
all we could do was just cry and pray and walk.
We couldn't even, we couldn't even sit down.
- [Narrator] When the news reaches Leon Kemp,
Wendy's husband,
it makes a real impact.
- Just imagine your wife and your sister
and this girl who had been part of your family,
and they never come home.
Last time I talked to Leon,
he was working at a hospital and he had found some peace
in knowing that they were at rest and not a mystery.
- [Narrator] Investigators have finally found the bodies
of Wendy, Cynthia, and Lisa.
Now they have to solve a second mystery
that has eluded them for 21 years.
- We're still gonna have to go out
and find the evidence of murder.
It's not what you know, it's what you can prove.
- You can't just go on hunches.
You have to have evidence to file charges.
- You know who did it.
The hard part is being able to make somebody
pay for what they did.
- We had found Wendy, Lisa and Cynthia's remains,
but what happened to them after they left Chad's house?
We needed to tie Beverly to the homicides.
(somber music)
- When we saw the picture of them in the grave,
the first thought that came to my mind was,
this will be the last photograph I ever see of them.
They are gone.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] As agents slowly remove
Cynthia, Wendy, and Lisa's remains,
they make a gruesome discovery.
- It was readily apparent that
Cynthia had duct tape covering her face,
including her nose and mouth.
That was very disturbing to me.
You're talking about a six-year-old girl here.
- Looking at the duct tape on Cynthia,
it's just, it's a sickening feeling.
- Cynthia had duct tape wrapped around her head,
and I think that she was left to suffocate.
- An autopsy was performed.
Wendy Camp had sustained gunshot wounds,
and sharp force trauma, likely a knife.
Lisa Kregear had multiple gunshot wounds to the torso,
and Cynthia by homicide,
by undetermined means.
But who pulled the trigger?
Who held the knife?
Those kind of things, we're still gonna have to prove
that Beverly Noe did it.
- [Narrator] The OSBI special agents turn to the person
who helped them find the bodies,
Beverly Noe's brother, Grover Pruitt.
- We asked him if he would wear a wire
and go talk to his sister about Wendy, Lisa, and Cynthia,
and Grover agreed reluctantly.
- We attached a recording device to him,
and told him to specifically
mention something about guns.
- Grover told Beverly that OSBI wanted his 357,
and Beverly said, I don't know why they'd do that.
We threw all the guns in the hole.
And he shut her down.
Grover definitely was sabotaging the effort
to get information from Beverly.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Grover's attempts to protect his sister
don't stop the authorities.
- With the discovery of the bodies,
and everything that we'd learned
with Beverly's statement on the recording about guns,
we decided it was time to arrest Beverly.
(gavel hits)
Beverly was charged with three counts
of first degree murder,
but she never admitted to any of this.
- [Narrator] The evidence against Beverly Noe is shaky.
Prosecutors aren't sure they can convict her
of first degree murder.
- Who actually killed these three girls?
It could have been Beverly or Ida, either one,
but Ida had died.
So Beverly ultimately pled guilty
to three counts of accessory to murder,
because she claimed that Ida had done it.
We don't have enough evidence
to say exactly where any of them were killed,
whether they were killed standing next to the hole,
or in the hole,
or whether they were killed before they got there.
So ultimately, it would be nice to know that.
Beverly Noe was given 15 years in prison for this,
because of Beverly's age.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Then less than five years later,
the family faces one final injustice.
- Beverly's back out in society.
It's crazy.
- I can't say for certain why she got out early,
but I think it had to do with some health problems
she was having.
Does it anger me? Yes, it angers me.
- I feel that my family members got no justice whatsoever,
simply because of the fact Beverly is out of jail
after four and a half years.
What's the justice?
Where was the justice?
And to this day, 30 years later,
Jonathan is still living with Beverly.
(soft music)
- Every single day on this,
I miss my daughter,
the intimate memories and the closeness and being able
to hug her or kiss her or call her on the phone.
I miss family,
family.
- If I had a chance to just spend some time
with Wendy and Cynthia, that I would just say, I love you,
and you really impacted my entire life.
I'm grateful and I never quit loving you.