Deborah Mason Signed In at Her Reunion. A Fisherman Found Her at Dawn.

At eighteen minutes past four on the afternoon of November thirteenth, Deborah Mason texted her sister that she was ready, and actually excited, which she had not expected. She had already asked her neighbor to feed her two cats in the morning, because she meant to drive straight from her class reunion to the second day of her daughter's volleyball tournament. The neighbor fed the cats twice the next day. Sixty-one people had signed in at the reunion. The group photograph held sixty-two faces.

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Deborah Mason, forty-four, a dental hygienist of eleven years at the same clinic in Peoria, attended her twenty-fifth high school reunion at the pavilion on the south shore of Cutter Lake on the evening of November thirteenth. A fisherman found her in the shallows the following morning, thirty yards from the pavilion dock. The medical examiner determined that she had drowned, but could not establish which body of water had killed her. Her left shoe and her evening bag were recovered in the pavilion's utility room. A two-hundred-dollar payment from a prepaid card, filed under the reunion's own booking and accompanied by a request for a facility equipment check, had bought someone a private appointment inside the building two days before the party. Raymond Walker, forty-nine, of Downs, Illinois, was arrested on November twenty-eighth after a woman he had attacked in a Decatur hotel corridor in two thousand sixteen recognized his face in the reunion photographs. He was never identified in that earlier case. In March of the following year he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life without parole. He admitted arranging the earlier visit, tampering with the service door and killing Deborah. The Decatur attack produced no additional conviction; that report was retained for its own investigation.

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Today's story is fiction. Deborah Mason, Raymond Walker, Cutter Lake and everyone else here are invented, and no real person or real case is described. The episode follows the fictional file the way investigators assembled it: the photographer's three hundred and forty images, the recreational district's booking and payment records, the caretaker's calendar, a seven-year-old police report from Decatur, and the interview in which Walker gave his account.

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This episode includes an account of an earlier assault on an adult woman who survived it. Deborah's seventeen-year-old daughter is part of the story and is not otherwise identified here.