September 1st, 1974.

Jackson County, Oregon.

28 year old Richard Cowden, his 22 year old wife, Belinda Cowden, and their two children,

5 year old David and five-month-old Melissa, are in the midst of a camping trip near Carberry Creek when they suddenly vanished from their campsite, leaving all their possessions behind.

Seven months later, the entire family's remains are found at a remote location seven miles away,

and it turns out they were the victims of foul play.

A local resident named Duane Lee Little pops up on the radar as a suspect

and eventually goes to prison for another crime, but without any hard evidence to

implicate him, the Cowden family murders remain unsolved.

After that, the trail went cold. Oh, uh, and uh, and uh, uh, and uh, uh, uh, I'm not. Hello everyone and welcome to the latest episode of The Trail Went Cold.

I'm your host Robin Warder and since we just passed our third anniversary,

this episode will officially kick off year four of our

podcast and unfortunately it's one of the most disturbing cases we've ever

covered, the Cowden family murders. It involves a disappearance and subsequent death of a couple named Richard and

Belinda Cowden, as well as their two children. The entire family was abducted and murdered

by an unknown perpetrator while they were on a Labor Day weekend camping trip, and it would

be months before the remains were discovered.

This case was actually suggested to me over a year ago by a listener named Abbey, and I confess that I had never actually heard of this story before.

One year after this crime happened, legendary true crime writer and rule wrote a column about it in the New York Daily News, and would later devote a chapter to the case in her book, but I trusted you.

Once I started delving into the case, I found it to be one of the most frightening and senseless crimes I've ever researched,

and I can't imagine what the motive might have been, particularly since it involved the murder of two children,

one of them a five-month-old infant.

...