Last season when we covered the case of Darlene Hulse, there was a lot I had to leave out.

In almost 40 years of case documents, you can't include every detail, even in an 18 episode series.

Most are red herrings anyway.

But there was one tip that I kept coming back to, mostly because it seemed so fantastical

it couldn't be true.

But it was interesting.

I always referred to this tip as the Sheila letters.

In a series of letters to law enforcement, a local citizen named Sheila proposed a theory

that Darlene's case was connected to the deaths of other women in the area around the same time.

Sheila didn't have insight into the cases. She was just working off newspapers,

but she said there was a pattern, the women's initials.

All the women had the last initial H

and the first initials were descending through the alphabet,

like AH, BH, C, C, DH, and so on.

Now, she didn't even have all the letters.

She couldn't find a CH.

So there weren't enough data points

to make the argument compelling.

Not for police back then because there's no record of them talking to her

and it didn't really make sense for us to chase that lead early on

when we had so many more viable ones that needed work. But we did put out feelers. We tried

unsuccessfully getting in touch with Sheila and I began looking at the other

...