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CHAPTER 27

Indianapolis, Indiana Sunday, July 28, 2024

RYDER HILLIER SAT IN THE TERMINAL OF THE INDIANAPOLIS INTERNATIONAL Airport. She was the host of Unsolved, the most popular true crime podcast in the country. She dropped one new episode each week that was downloaded millions of times and listened to by hoards of adoring fans. Ryder mostly covered obscure cold cases whose victims her listeners had never before heard of. But she occasionally tackled well-known stories like the JonBenét Ramsey murder and the tragic death of Julian Crist, the American medical student who fell to his death under suspicious circumstances in St. Lucia. Her biggest story to date had been breaking, covering, and then playing a crucial role in solving the Westmont Prep killings in 2020. The murder of two prep school students in Pepper-mill, Indiana, had taken the country by storm. The solving of the case, due to evidence Ryder uncovered through her podcast, captivated the nation and made Ryder Hillier a household name. Soon after, and riding a once-in-a-lifetime wave of popularity, Ryder signed a lucrative deal with the world’s biggest streaming service for the exclusive rights to Unsolved. Since then, she’d become one of the biggest podcasters in the country, and Unsolved showed no sign of slowing down.

Along with the big contract came a big promise: Ryder would deliver edge-of-your-seat content and would continue to solve unsolvable cases. She’d come a long way since writing puff pieces for the Indianapolis Star. But her success did not come without effort. She poured her heart and soul into her work, which was why she was sitting in an airport terminal on a Sunday, working on no sleep, and on her umpteenth Red Bull.

What made Unsolved so wildly popular, and a big part of its allure, was that Ryder enlisted the help of her listeners to solve the cold cases she featured on the podcast. She recruited her army of fans, termed Unsolved Junkies, to help her find answers to crimes that had long been written off by police and detectives. She relied on her audience of armchair detectives to provide tips about unsolved cases, and one hell of a tip had come in the previous afternoon. A woman named Zo? Simpson had slipped into her DMs to tell a fantastic story about the missing Margolis family from the ’90s. So fantastic, in fact, that Ryder hadn’t believed it. But thirty-six hours of fact-checking changed her mind.

Zo? Simpson did work for the FBI field office in Charlotte, North Carolina. And Special Agent John Michaels was, in fact, her boss. Ryder had confirmed these details, and more, about Zo? Simpson, and then closely read the FBI brief the girl had sent her. If it was true—and so far, despite Ryder’s best efforts to prove otherwise, it appeared to be—baby Charlotte Margolis, who up and vanished with her parents nearly thirty years ago and set off one of the biggest media storms in history, had resurfaced in Raleigh as a woman named Sloan Hastings.

Ryder received her contract, and the millions of dollars that came with it, because she promised to break huge stories like this one. But a story this big would not stay quiet for long, and Ryder was determined to be the journalist who broke it. She was headed to Raleigh to find Sloan Hastings, aka baby Charlotte, and convince her to appear on the podcast.

An airline employee’s voice came over the gate’s speakers. First-class passengers were invited to board. Ryder stood from her seat and walked toward the jetway, prepared to break the biggest story of her career.