When a Mississippi girl turns 13, she's allowed to stay home alone briefly for the first time.

This simple rite of passage turns nightmarish when her mother returns home to find an empty house and signs of a struggle in this episode of Last Seen Alive.

Music Seen Alive. Thanks for listening to Last Seen Alive. I'm your host, Leah, prime analyst by day and true crime

storyteller by night. And as always, I'm your co-host, Scott. The recent advent of Hurricane

Ian got me thinking about this case, a case where an innocent young

woman disappeared beneath stormy skies as a powerful hurricane swept over the coast of her home

state, and while the extreme weather event may set the background for this case, make no mistake,

what happened to Lee Ochi was no act of nature. The cause of her

disappearance was very human and undoubtedly criminal. Lee Ochi was last seen alive on August 27, 1992.

Lee was 13 years old and lived with her mom in Tupelo, Mississippi, a town of about 38,000 people

located in the northeastern part of the state. Although Tupelo was closer to its neighboring

states of Tennessee and Alabama than it is to Mississippi's own coast, on the day of Lee's

disappearance, the weather was expected to be stormy

thanks to Hurricane Andrew, which had recently struck Florida and Louisiana as a tremendously

powerful Category 5 hurricane and was sweeping westward toward Mississippi.

Although Tupelo wasn't a coastal town, it was expecting rain and wind as a result of the storm,

and it was on this dark and stormy day that 13-year-old Lee would be allowed to stay home all by herself for the very first time.

Spooky. Right? The school year hadn't quite started yet, and her mom, Vicky, had work,

so after breakfast, Lee would have the house to herself, at least for a little while. The plan was

for her grandmother to pick her up from the house that morning, approximately an hour after her mom

left for work. Together, Lee and her grandmother

would attend an open house at Lee's school, where she'd be starting the eighth grade in just a few

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