Every day of your life you think about it.

Every time they found a body, I thought, it's that moms.

You feel that if justice is not done,

then she died for nothing.

Doesn't matter how many years, you still need that.

It was like my head spread and this horrible darkness left. From A&E, this is Cold Case files, the podcast.

August 16th, 1974. It's Friday night in a Denver suburb.

Brett Ludwig is 15 years old and plans to spend the evening watching TV with his mother Dorothy Britt.

Then at 10 PM, Dorothy receives a phone call. She tells Brett the plans have changed and she's going out

Although she doesn't tell her son who was on the line

Brett believes that his mother has agreed to meet her ex-husband,

Larry Britt. A man Dorothy had divorced two months earlier, after an abusive three-year marriage.

A man Brett Ludwig had hoped was out of their lives for good. Larry was a brutal drunk, as how I would put it, And he, their relationship was one of beatings, through bouts of drinking, all night drinking, all day drinking, and more drinking drinking and more beatings.

Later that night, Brett hears Larry Britt's custom pickup truck outside his bedroom window.

So it made a very distinctive sound and I knew it was his truck.

So I knew she was meeting with him.

He could jold her into one last drink or something.

At 9 a.m. the next morning,

Brett wakes to find that his mother has not come home.

The teenager is concerned. His mom has never

stayed out all night and never missed a day of work. At 930 the phone rings.

It's Larry Britt on the line asking of Dorothy's at home.

...