The Girl Who Asked for Directions and Never Came Back - Episode 61

The Witnesses Who Still Won't Talk: The Unsolved Deaths of Thomas Beerson and Geetha Angara

A freshman's body was found six miles from campus, in a different state, missing a shoe and a phone — and the last people who saw him alive have never taken a polygraph. A senior chemist was pulled from a million-gallon water tank with deep bruising on her neck, and five medical examiners all agreed: someone put her there. In both cases, the investigators know who to look at. The problem is the witnesses.

In this episode, we explore a cryptic 1:30 AM tweet sent from a dead man's account naming a specific person, a broken grate at a water treatment plant that left no fingerprints, and a Law and Order episode filmed at the exact facility where Geetha Angara died — one year before her death — that describes how chlorine destroys forensic evidence. How do two homicide cases with named persons of interest stay unsolved for over a decade? The forensic science is there. The profiles exist. Someone just isn't talking.

Case Details

Victim: Thomas Beerson, 18, freshman at North Dakota State University; Geetha Angara, 43, senior chemist at Passaic Valley Water Commission.

Date: September 19–25, 2014 (Beerson); February 8–9, 2005 (Angara).

Location: Fargo, North Dakota / Moorhead, Minnesota, USA; Totowa, New Jersey, USA.

Case Status: Both cases remain officially unsolved. Moorhead Police confirmed Beerson's case is actively pursued as of September 2023. Angara's case has no active public investigation update; Passaic County Prosecutor's tip line remains open.

Episode Key Points

- Tom Beerson's body was found five to six miles from his dorm, across a state line, in a different jurisdiction — despite cell phone pings drawing the search to that exact industrial area days earlier.

- A tweet sent from Tom's account at 1:30 AM named Jake directly; Jake's account of that night has almost no presence in any public reporting despite being the last known person with Tom.

- Geetha Angara's workplace had a documented 1993 incident in which an unknown person moved the same style of grate over the same water tank and increased chlorine fifteen times above normal — that case was also never solved.

- One of the three remaining suspects in Geetha's case refused a polygraph test; investigators have never publicly disclosed which suspect refused.

Thomas Beerson, Geetha Angara, Fargo North Dakota homicide, Totowa New Jersey water plant death, unsolved mysteries 2014, homicide, true detective, forensic science, investigation, criminal minds, murder, cold case, true crime English.