This is the fall line.

This episode is part two in a series. Please listen to the prologue before you start this one.

This is the story of Jeanette and Jeanette Milbrooke, twins from Augusta, Georgia, who disappeared in 1990, on their walk-home from a convenience store.

27 years and there's still no trace of them. In their case was closed, and why?

It depends on who you ask. At the time, the twins' family was told point blank that it would be closed because they had turned 17.

And in the state of Georgia, they couldn't then be forced to return home.

Then later, when they spoke to representatives from Nick Mick, the National Center for Missing and Exploded Children, they were told the case had been closed because the twins had been found.

Still later, someone at the Sheriff's Office told Jeanette, the twin sister, that they'd been foster care and eventually adopted out.

And then when the case was reopened in 2013, the Augusta Chronicle quoted in Officer Peoples as saying the case had been closed on hearsay, with the implication that the department had been told the twins had been found through some sort of second or third-hand account.

No officer claimed on paper to have put eyes on them, especially not the original investigator.

So, there's the official record, and then there's the truth.

We begin with the problem. The twins' original case file is gone. What happened to it? No one is precisely sure, or if they are, they're not telling.

There are two major theories, though, offered by officials at different times. In 2017, the podcast was told that flooding might be the culprit.

But also, we were told that the file might have been destroyed. In fact, maybe it was shredded, which is less ominous than it sounds.

Not a conspiracy, but the natural conclusion of too many stored files, not enough room, and the joining of two departments with limited space.

This was likely not intentional, but it wasn't pack full. To our knowledge, we are the first people to ask for this file.

It's an active case, so who knows what's in there. This is Georgia and the laws are strict. When we made our request, we got an incident report, two sheets long on each twin.

These reports are dated June of 2013, and here's where it gets complicated. This information, though it was collected by the cold case investigator, Ashley Pledgeur, who was briefly assigned in 2013, isn't new.

It's copied from the original 1990 report, and wasn't that destroyed? We don't know. Perhaps it's somewhere else altogether.

After all, the reporting question is specifically listed as a juvenile report, and the specifics of that choice have remained unclear.

Sources have told us this was the usual approach for missing persons under the age of 17, but we've also been told that it was standard for runaways.

In any case, the trouble starts here. This is the first official document that misnames the twins, who have no S on their last name.

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