This is Hidden Killers with Tony Bruske.

Here now, Tony Bruske.

A nine-year-old vanishes.

Her mother rents a car, drives halfway across the country, and comes home alone.

No one's seen the girl sensed.

No arrest, no clear answers, just a wig, a road trip, and silence.

Jennifer Coffindaffer joining me this afternoon.

She's worked federal missing child in abduction cases.

She knows how these disappearances really unfold behind the scenes.

And this is another one of these cases where we have the missing child and the mom saying,

nothing, I'm not going to cooperate.

We've seen far too many of these, and they don't tend to end well.

Let's start with what we know for sure.

Melody Buzzard nine years old reported missing October 14th in Lompoc, California.

But the last confirmation image is from October 7th at a car rental

counter with her mother, Ashley Buzzard, wearing a hood and what investigators are calling a wig.

Ashley then rented a white Chevy Malibu, drove about 1,500 miles towards Nebraska, and returned

alone on October 10th, and that is the last

physical trace. The school finally noticed that they hadn't seen her in a few months.

Hmm, maybe we should do something. And that's when the sheriff and the FBI got involved.

Before we go into the theories of what's going on here, Jen, from your experience, when you see a gap like this, months of absence before anyone

even files a report, what does that tell you about the system failure and the timeline reconstruction

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