April 12, 1994. Carlisle, Pennsylvania. While driving from Oklahoma to New Jersey to see

your friend Melissa Sheppard, 23-year-old Karen Denise Wells checks into a motel. Denise

phones Melissa and asks her to come meet her there, but when Melissa arrives, Denise has vanished.

Later that morning, Denise's abandoned rental car has discovered 35 miles away on a rural road

with an empty gas tank and there are 700 miles on the vehicle's odometer which cannot be accounted for.

Descrepancies eventually open up in Melissa's story, leading to speculation that she is withholding

information about Denise's disappearance, but no trace of Denise is ever found. After that,

the trail went cold.

Hello everyone and welcome to the latest episode of the trail went cold.

I'm your host Robin Warder and we've got a very bizarre missing persons case to cover today.

The 1994 disappearance of Karen Denise Wells. This case is a suggestion from a listener named Jason,

and since I recently saw a thread about it on the unresolved mystery subreddit, I thought it would

be an ideal time to do an episode. This isn't a particularly well-known missing persons case,

but it's a pretty baffling one. It involves a woman who embarked on a lengthy road trip from

Oklahoma to New Jersey to see a friend until she disappeared after checking into a motel in

Carlyle, Pennsylvania. I'm always fascinated by cases in which people go missing or wind up dead

at locations they had no reason to be at, and this is one of the stranger ones. In this story,

the victim's movements don't seem to make a lot of sense. As before she arrived at the motel,

Denise was spotted in locations which were much closer to her destination in New Jersey,

so there was no apparent reason for her to circle back and wind up in Carlyle.

But the strangest detail is that when Denise's abandoned rental car was discovered,

investigators were able to add up all the mileage and determine that there were around 700 miles

...