Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And we are back with part two of our episode on the mysterious death of Joanne Matuke Romaine.

This is possibly one of the most twisty stories I've ever come across in our four years of doing this show.

So I'm telling you, you cannot just jump in here. Go back and listen to episode one.

But here is a quick recap because I know there's a lot to process.

In January 2010, police say Joanne Matuke Romaine went to a prayer service, then walked across the street down this snow-covered cement embankment into the freezing lake to take her own life.

Mind you, she would have had to walk two football fields out into the water in those heels of hers to get deep enough to drown. But that doesn't seem to bother any of the officials.

It also doesn't seem to bother then that despite their extensive search the very night she went missing, Joanne's body was discovered 70 days later, 35 miles away.

Even though there was no current that could have taken her that far. And there wasn't a single disturbance or scuffmark on her shoes.

Finding her body just confirmed police's theory of a suicide. But the family was resistant and hired their own PIs and did their own autopsy and got all the records which just opened up a floodgate that raised a zillion questions.

The private autopsy, which by that time was the third autopsy, showed Joanne had died of a dry drowning, meaning there was no water in her lungs.

She had contusions on her left arm, the same arms usually carried her purse on, which was found torn. And then there's the timeline.

All of the digital records show that police learned about Joanne's abandoned car half an hour after a full-on search was started. It all feels staged.

Embryt, you ended the last episode with a great question. And here I'm actually going to play the end of the last episode so everyone gets it exactly.

I don't like any of this, but just for the sake of argument. What if he said this was all some terrible clerical error, digital error, human error, ever across the board, whatever.

The times are wrong. What's important is that they got the search crews out there as soon as they knew all of them was missing.

Because the times really even matter that much?

Well, I think they do combine with everything else we know. Police looking for Joanne and not Michelle, who again the car was really registered to.

The missing keys turning up that no one can explain. And what if I told you that there was another missing persons report from that same day, same church parking lot, same lake that got zero attention.

Listen, all of the facts in Joanne's case are baffling. But of all of the stuff that has been reported and re-reported, somehow this tidbit doesn't get the attention I think it deserves.

Because this is the one thing that I read that made me scream from the rooftops that nothing makes sense besides some big conspiracy.

So let me read you a direct quote from Scott Bernstein's second article in the Gross Point News from back in 2020.

It says quote,

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