Still a Mystery

I was just listening to the radio,

and apparently, they found a girl

by the side of the road.

It was the impression of the most experienced officer on the scene

from the get go that it was not a hit and run.

The jacket that she was wearing had no blood on it.

It appeared to have been

maybe placed on her after whatever happened to Laura.

There was no way in the world

that Laura would leave Samson

and go off in the middle of the night.

It's hard to describe it.

It was just completely shockingly evil

that a person would do this.

I just couldn't comprehend that two people were dead.

My heart stopped.

My whole world froze.

One of the things that an investigator needs to ask,

"Okay, who benefits from this murder?"

October 26, 1996,

Kahoka, Missouri,

a small city in the northeastern corner of the state

not far from the Iowa and Illinois borders,

a young mother is left for dead

on the side of a road in the middle of the night.

Somebody done something to her.

They killed her.

The tragedy triggers a desperate search for her killer

and leaves a heartbroken family

struggling for answers for decades.

This case won't be solved until somebody decides to talk.

I think it's unfortunate that 25 years later,

we don't know more about what didn't happen as well as what did happen.

I wouldn't rule out anything in this case

because there isn't anything that explains all the facts.

Born in 1975,

Laura Van Wyhe is a brilliant young person

who loves life and excels at just about anything she puts her mind to.

When Laura was a child, she was very exuberant.

She had her hands in just about everything.

She loved animals. She loved dance, theater.

Laura was extremely unique.

She had her own sense of everything.

She was very funny and had a goofy sense of humor as well.

Growing up in Iowa City, Iowa.

Laura's intelligence sets her apart at a young age.

Her standardized testing was beyond belief.

She was just off the charts,

and she just wasn't made

for the usual grind of...

of study.

Feeling unchallenged by high school,

Laura drops out and gets her GED,

achieving the highest score in Iowa State history.

She moves in with her sister

and soon starts dating a man named Donnie Knight.

I guess she was probably 17 or 18,

and they had a pretty whirlwind romance.

At some point, they ran off to California together

and then Hawaii for a while.

Laura and Donnie relationship is bumpy,

but they keep getting back together.

At 19, she becomes pregnant.

Her relationship with Donnie wasn't very stable at that point,

but she really wanted to have the baby.

And... and she did.

In 1995, she has a son named Samson.

She was so over the moon about Samson when he was born.

She was the most devoted mother

that you could ever imagine.

Soon after Sampson is born,

Laura and Donnie's relationship ends,

seemingly for the last time.

Laura moves in with her mother in Iowa City.

In the fall of 1996,

Laura celebrates her 21st birthday.

A few days later, on October 25th,

her ex-boyfriend, Donnie's family

throws a party at their home in Bonaparte, Iowa.

So Donnie picks up Laura at her mother's house in the afternoon,

and they drive to Bonaparte.

They arrive at Donnie's parents' home around 7:30 p.m.

Shortly after 11:00,

Laura and her 14-month-old son leave with Donnie's sister

and brother-in-law Sarah and Tony Bergman

to spend the night at their trailer in nearby Kahoka.

They got to the trailer in Kahoka,

and they decided to set up a bed on the floor of the trailer

for Laura to sleep in with Samson and their older daughter.

Tony goes to bed.

Sarah says she stays up with Laura

for about half an hour and then she goes to bed.

When Sarah gets up at 6:50 the next morning,

Laura is gone.

She comes out to the living room of the trailer,

and she sees, first of all, no Laura.

And she does see Samson,

and she describes quite vividly

Samson's naked bottom.

Samson's not wearing a diaper.

Sarah stays behind and gets the kids ready

while Tony goes to try to track down Laura.

So he goes to Ayerco, which is a convenience store gas station

a few blocks from their house.

And he asks if anybody's seen Laura, no one has.

He goes to his parents' house

and a cousin of his is over at the house and tells him,

"Hey, I was just listening to the radio

and apparently they found a girl by the side of the road."

The girl is spotted on a local highway

at 1:50 a.m. by a trucker

who notices something strange on the side of the road.

He stops and dials 911.

Police arrive at 2:00 a.m.

and find a woman lying on her side unresponsive

but still alive.

Emergency responders rush her to the hospital,

but she dies 3 hours later.

When Tony gets to the police station at 9:00 that morning,

he sees a full description of the victim.

And what jumps out at him about this description

is that it describes a black satin jacket

with Mike Sanders Masonry written on the back.

Tony knows immediately that that's his jacket and says,

"I think the person you found is Laura Van Wyhe."

Tony tells police

that the jacket had been hanging in his closet the day before.

He and Sarah head straight to the morgue

to identify the body.

It's Laura.

Samson's father Donnie drives to Iowa City later that morning

to deliver the devastating news to Laura's mother.

When he walked in...

I said, "What's wrong?"

And he said, just flat out, "Laura is dead."

And my reaction was, "That's impossible.

I had just seen her and now she's dead?"

You know, my mind could not accept that.

It appears she's been hit by a vehicle,

given where she's found.

But from the beginning, officers sense something is off.

It was the impression of the most experienced officer on the scene

from the get go that it was not a hit and run.

The officer immediately told me

that something was very wrong about this,

that there was...

a...

mystery.

The scene didn't look like

what we would call a typical traffic accident.

There was no debris, whether it be vehicle debris

or parts of the body along the roadway whatsoever.

One of the first things police notice

is that Laura is wearing an extra layer of clothing over her own.

So she's wearing size 16 burgundy sweatpants,

which I don't think those were hers.

And this black satin jacket, which we know isn't hers.

She's found with her left hand,

lightly grasping a bottle, a sip-top bottle.

There's a baby blanket stuffed under her jacket.

There is also a folded paper plate with rice on it.

And then in her right jacket pocket,

Laura was left-handed, but in her right pocket,

there is an open pocketknife.

As police try to make sense of the strange scene,

they received some potential leads from the public.

A mechanic in another town

calls the police and says,

"I've got a car here that looks like it hit a person.

There's blood on it. Its fender's all dented up."

But investigators quickly determined the driver hit a deer.

Then a tip comes in from a hospital worker about a patient

who visited the emergency room the morning Laura died.

The owner of a local radio station,

he shows up in the emergency room

with a serious stab wound in his leg.

The doctors stitch him up,

but the police, knowing that Laura had a knife in her pocket

at the time she was found,

are clearly quite interested in this.

Police interview him.

But it's another dead end.

Turned out to be just a coincidence.

But it's a coincidence that takes up a lot of law enforcement time.

Meanwhile, an autopsy reveals

the brutal extent of Laura's injuries.

The autopsy did find that

she had died of blunt force trauma to the head and legs and massive blood loss.

Investigators are stumped.

If Laura lost so much blood, where is it?

The jacket that she was wearing had no blood on it.

We actually checked the scene

for a quarter mile each way from where Laura was lying.

I can tell you, she never lost a lot of blood along that highway whatsoever.

Her clothing doesn't appear to be scraped or dirty,

including the black satin jacket.

Had she been struck by a vehicle and knocked to the ground,

there would have been abrasions on the jacket.

There was none found.

It appeared to have been maybe placed on her...