Melissa Anderson's Handwriting Paid a Bill in August. She Died in July.

Every Thursday, Melissa Anderson drove out to her mother's place to help her brother sort family photographs. He wrote the labels; she supplied the names his memory could not hold. When they disagreed about one, they set it aside for their mother. By the end of July 2010 a small pile was waiting beside an unfinished album, and Melissa never came for the next Thursday. For sixteen days, the only sign of her anyone outside the family registered was a utility bill in her handwriting, clearing without a single question.

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The case, as this episode tells it. Melissa Anderson, 23, was found dead inside her rented house on County Road 7 outside Delwood on August 14, 2010, sixteen days after she was last seen alive at a gas station on July 29. The medical examiner determined she had been strangled. Thomas Bishop, 37, who had worked briefly at the agricultural cooperative where Melissa processed the payroll, was arrested on August 26 after her debit card was recovered from a tote bag in his truck. He confessed on September 18, then pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in Pickard County Circuit Court and received life without the possibility of parole. There was no trial by jury. A 2008 death in Barton County that investigators compared with this one remains open, and Bishop was never charged in it. One other question was never resolved: the sheriff's office could not produce any record of a deputy acting on the welfare check Melissa's mother requested more than a week before her daughter was found.

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This episode is an original dramatization written for True Crime 24 Hours. Melissa Anderson, Thomas Bishop, Pickard County and every name, date and document in the story are invented. Nothing here is drawn from a real investigation or a real family.