When an Iowa woman lists some furniture she no longer needs for sale,

a calculating killer responds to her ad.

All leads are exhausted by frustrated investigators,

and the case goes cold in this episode of Last Seen Alive.

I'm going to... Thanks for listening to Last Seen Alive.

I'm your host, Leah, crime analyst by day, and true crime storyteller by night.

And as always, I'm your co-host, Scott, and I have to say, I thought we were doing a

revisited episode here, because this sounds oddly reminiscent of one of our other cases given

the intro. This is a totally new episode. We've never covered this case before, but there's a reason

it sounds

so familiar and we certainly will get into that. Meanwhile, this episode contains discussion

on the topic of sexual assault. We won't go into any graphic detail, but still, please listen

with care. Patricia Geron was last seen alive on May 26, 1998. She was 45 years old at the time and lived in Woodbury

County, Iowa, just south of Sioux City. She was a lifelong Iowen and had lived in Woodbury County

for many years. It was the place where she'd married her husband, Jean, where they'd raised

their family, and where she'd enjoyed a decade-plus long career

with the local school district. She'd started out with the school district as a library aide and

had worked her way up to the position of middle school secretary. She'd even been a member of the

school board for several years. That's pretty cool. And for Patricia, her job with the school

hadn't just been a way to make ends meet.

She'd genuinely enjoyed working there, mostly because she genuinely cared for the kids.

According to what one of Patricia's friends, a teacher at the school, told the Sioux City Journal,

...