The Man Who Drove Away in Her Car - Episode 37

The Wrong Side of the Fence: The Disappearance and Murder of Lyric Cook Morrissey and Elizabeth Collins

Two girls rode their bikes to a lake on a Friday afternoon and never came home. When Elizabeth's father found her Hannah Montana purse on the wrong side of a metal fence — pointing away from the water, away from everything — her mother said she knew in that moment. The purse held Elizabeth's cell phone. The bikes were locked on a peninsula. And for 145 days, no one knew where the girls were.

In this episode, we explore the impossible placement of two bikes on a gated peninsula while a purse appeared on the opposite side of a fence pointing in a different direction entirely, the sealed autopsy that investigators have refused to release for over a decade, and a registered sex offender with a documented history of double abductions who escaped from a juvenile facility — and hid specifically at the location where the girls' bodies were eventually found. Was the killer someone with deep knowledge of a remote wildlife area most locals had never heard of, or did law enforcement clear the strongest suspect too quickly based on a single piece of phone data? The forensic science and the geography do not yet agree.

Case Details

Victim: Lyric Cook Morrissey, age 10, and Elizabeth Collins, age 8 — cousins and close friends from Evansdale, Iowa.

Date: July 13, 2012 (disappearance); bodies discovered December 5, 2012.

Location: Evansdale, Iowa and Seven Bridges Wildlife Area, Bremer County, Iowa, USA.

Case Status: Officially unsolved as of 2024. No arrests have ever been made, no suspects have been publicly named, and the medical examiner's findings on cause and manner of death remain sealed by investigators.

Episode Key Points

- Elizabeth's Hannah Montana purse was found on the opposite side of a metal fence from the lake — pointing away from the water — with her cell phone still inside, a placement that contradicts any theory of voluntary entry into the lake.

- The only registered suspect ever seriously considered, Michael Klunder, had escaped from a juvenile detention facility in 1986 and was found hiding at Seven Bridges — the exact remote location where both girls' remains were discovered 26 years later.

- Klunder was officially cleared based solely on cell phone tower data placing him 100 miles away — but a former cellmate stated on camera that Klunder was physically present in Evansdale in the summer of 2012.

- The autopsy results for both girls have been sealed by investigators for over twelve years and have never been released to the public, leaving the cause and manner of death entirely unknown outside law enforcement.

Lyric Cook Morrissey, Elizabeth Collins, Evansdale Iowa double abduction, Seven Bridges Wildlife Area, Bremer County homicide, unsolved murder 2012, Michael Klunder, investigation, forensic science, homicide, true detective, criminal minds, morbid, true crime English.