The Two Minutes That Stole Everything - Episode 68

Five Women. Five Systems That Failed Them.: The Unsolved Disappearances of Terry McCulley, Alyssa McLemore, Kendra Botello, Kit Mora, and Abigail Andrews

A teenage mother was found in a soybean field with a shotgun blast to the face — and police had a suspect with matching ammunition within months. A wellness check on a missing minor was closed in six sentences, with the body camera off. Across five cases and four decades, the same question keeps surfacing: who decides when a missing person is worth looking for?

In this episode, we explore how a 20-gauge shotgun shell batch linked a named suspect to Terry McCulley's 1983 murder — yet no charges were ever filed, how Alyssa McLemore's FBI profile listed her race as Asian for seven years after she vanished, and how Kit Mora's school quietly dropped a missing teenager from the roster for unexcused absences without alerting a single authority. Five Indigenous women. Five separate systems. One pattern that refuses to stay quiet.

Case Details

Victim: Terry McCulley, 18; Alyssa McLemore, 21; Kendra Botello, 24; Kit Mora, minor; Abigail Andrews, 28 — all Indigenous women or girls reported missing across the United States and Canada.

Date: Cases span September 1983 through July 2022.

Location: Iowa, Washington State, Oklahoma, British Columbia, Canada.

Case Status: All five cases remain unsolved as of the date of recording. No criminal charges have been filed in any of the five cases. Several are classified as cold cases with intermittent investigative activity.

Episode Key Points

- The 20-gauge shotgun shells found in Terry McCulley's suspect's car matched the same brand and batch as the pellets recovered from Terry's body — yet the county attorney declined to prosecute in 1984 and again circa 1990.

- Alyssa McLemore's FBI NCIC missing persons profile misidentified her as Asian rather than Native American from 2009 until 2016 — seven years during which Jane Doe comparisons may have been wrongly excluded.

- A wellness check at Kit Mora's mother's apartment was closed after six sentences with the officer's body camera off — and Kit's name never appeared once in records from a follow-up child welfare visit six months later.

- Abigail Andrews' family received texts from her phone after she vanished that contained no correct answers to questions only Abigail would know — and RCMP has publicly stated they believe a specific suspect has spoken to others about what he did.

Terry McCulley, Alyssa McLemore, Kendra Botello, Kit Mora, Abigail Andrews, MMIP unsolved cases, Missing Murdered Indigenous Women, Indigenous homicide investigation, cold case 1983 2009 2022, forensic science, homicide, investigation, true crime, criminal minds, true crime English.