Our card this week is Lisa C. Stays, the jack of diamonds from Wisconsin.

In the winter of 1976, Lisa Stays was trying to figure out what exactly she wanted to do with her life.

Like so many 20-year-olds, she'd just moved out of her parents' house and started classes at a community

college. She was embracing her independence as a young adult. But no one ever got to see how

Lisa's life would unfold because that same year, she disappeared. It took nearly two years for

investigators to figure out that Lisa had been

murder. But in the 49 years since, they're still trying to uncover why, and most importantly,

who murdered her. And now, more than ever, it is a race against time. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. On the afternoon of January 14, 1976,

Michelle Laudman and Kurt Ron were out going from bar to bar on Rush Street in Chicago.

But they weren't looking to drink, dance, or party.

They were looking for their cousin Lisa, who had been in town visiting on her college

break.

The night before, around 6 p.m., Kurt last saw Lisa at a bar called Mothers.

She said that she had hit it off with this guy that she met inside and she was thinking

about going home with him.

So she asked Kurt to wait around for about 30 minutes,

and if she didn't come back out by then, he could just head home. So when that half hour passed,

he did. But when Lisa hadn't returned home by the next day, the cousins began to worry.

They couldn't find anyone at the bars on Rush Street who could tell them what might have happened to Lisa.

So just after 10 p.m. that night, Michelle called the Oak Park Police Department to file a missing persons report.

From Oak Park's original incident file, it looks like that night officers put Lisa's information into NCIC, a law enforcement database.

And they checked for accidents in the area.

...