This episode is part one in a two-part series.

This series includes discussion of violence, sexual assault,

child abuse, murder, and crime scenes.

Some outdated terminology for sex work is used in the context of quotation and legal documentation.

Listener discretion is advised.

This is the Fall Line.

On October 4, 1978, a telephone lineman was laying cable in a rural area of Lyon County, Iowa.

He was out on a stretch of Highway 182 in the northwest corner of the county,

not much there, outside of fields and a few houses.

A school sat just a few miles away.

Dishes ran alongside the highway.

Some were six feet deep, the Sioux City Journal would later report and overgrown with weeds.

That's probably why no one, not until the lineman came through with his cable, found the body.

The tall weeds had obscured her remains.

Per the Sioux City Journal, when officials made it to Highway 182, they saw her,

quote, the nude body of a young woman, who the Sheriff's Department described as

20 to 30 years old, approximately 5 feet 5 inches tall, with long dark blonde hair, and weighing 100 pounds.

She was clad and only light colored boots.

Later reports would describe them as white gogo boots.

Enter pants and underwear, they were found tangled around one of her legs.

According to another Sioux City Journal article, initial test estimated she'd laying in that ditch for six to eight weeks.

But that wasn't for certain, because a later article would mention an approximate post-mortem interval of two weeks to a month.

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