Beverly Whitaker Left Choir at Nine. She Was Found in Two Places.

Every April, Beverly Whitaker started tomatoes and green beans from seed in four beds she had built herself, and she wrote the variety on every pot before she handed the spares to her sister. She knew which bed drained fast and which one had to wait. On the second Tuesday in May she left choir rehearsal with a solo verse still to work on, bought a bottle of water and drove east. Three mornings later a road grader operator stopped for something on a gravel shoulder.

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Beverly Whitaker, thirty-eight, of Oster Road in Cresswell County, left choir rehearsal at the Caperton Community Center at about nine fifteen on the evening of May eleventh and never reached home. Her car was found in a pull-off near Pitchfork Line; her phone and handbag were gone. Partial remains were found on the road shoulder on May fourteenth and the rest in a drainage ditch three hundred yards north on May twenty-second. Doctor Francis Legg determined she had been strangled. Douglas Becker, forty-four, a mobile mechanic who had twice repaired her car, was identified from an elevator camera image and from a phone record showing that the ten twenty-one call came from his number, not hers. A warrant on a storage unit rented in a relative's name produced a prepaid phone and a driving license belonging to Patricia Holst, thirty-one, missing from Kearney County for eight years. With his lawyer present, Becker admitted both killings and marked the locations, including the ditch where Patricia Holst's remains were then recovered. The defense challenged the storage-unit search and the reliability of his statements; the court allowed the evidence to be heard. A jury convicted him of both murders, and he received two consecutive life terms without parole, one for each woman.

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Today's story is fiction. The people, the two counties, the investigation records and the trial testimony in this episode are invented; nothing here is drawn from a real case.