This episode contains graphic content that may not be suitable for all ages.

Listener discretion is advised.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available.

Call or text 988 or chat with someone at 988 lifeline.org. Those outside of the U.S. reach out to someone at your local crisis center or hotline. Please do not suffer in silence. On August 12, 2003, officers from the Berkeley Police Department in Missouri arrived at a small rental house on Graham Lane, a quiet residential street located just a stone's throwaway from St. Louis Lambert International Airport.

They were there to conduct a welfare check.

Family members of some of the home's residents had been calling, increasingly frantic,

unable to reach their loved ones for weeks now.

When investigators entered the house, they expected the worst. They were bracing

themselves for a crime scene, but what they found was somehow more unsettling. The house was empty,

but it did not look like the occupants had moved out. There was food still sitting in the microwave.

Dishes were piled up in the sink.

Clothes were even mid-cycle in the washing machine. A closet was still full of expensive women's

shoes. The personal identification documents of all four adults who had been living there were left

behind. Berkeley police major Steve Rung later told the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

It was like they left to go to the store and were coming right back.

There was no reason to believe they were abandoning their home.

But they were gone.

All of them.

Four adults and two toddlers just vanished.

There was no sign of forced entry, no evidence of a struggle or anything violent

having occurred there.

There was just an eerie stillness, a home frozen mid-routine, as though its occupants

...