When three women are killed with a knife inside a small town Montana beauty salon,

investigators are nearly as stunned as the citizens they serve.

A truly unusual crime remains unsolved 20 years later in this episode of Last Seen Alive.

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

night. And because Scott. Special thanks to Chelsea, who reached out to us from Florence, Montana on the

20th anniversary of this triple homicide, which occurred in her hometown and still haunts many of its

residents to this day. Without her, this episode wouldn't

have happened. Brenda Patch, Cynthia Paulus, and Dorothy Harris were last seen alive on November 1st, 2001.

On that day, they all found themselves at the Hair Gallery salon in Florence, Montana,

each for a different reason. Dorothy owned the salon,

which operated out of a detached one-story brick building that had originally been a post office.

Brenda worked at the salon as a manicurist, and Cynthia was there that morning to have her nails done

in preparation for an outing to a basketball game. The three women led low-risk lifestyles and were longtime members of their community.

And that community was very small, with a population of just 901 people at the time of the

year 2000 census.

Yeah, that's a pretty small town.

Yeah, in fact, Florence isn't technically a town, but rather a census-designated place

that lies in the beautiful, mountainous country of western Montana near the Idaho border.

Each of the women had families there, Dorothy and Cynthia, 62 and 71 years old, respectively,

were grandmothers, and Brenda was a 44-year-old mother. So you can imagine how

in such a small community, the brutal murders of these three women had a seismic impact. Between

their families, friends, and neighbors, the grief that followed in the wake of their deaths

...