Murder Road

In July 1995, April DelRay (soon to be Carter), 26, and Eddie Carter, 27, are newly married and on their honeymoon. April thinks back to meeting Eddie six months ago in February. She was renting a house with some roommates in Ann Arbor, and Eddie was a friend of theirs.

Now, it’s nighttime and they’re driving down an old country road, headed for a motel near some cabins along Lake Michigan for five nights before driving back to their apartment in Ann Arbor. They’re a little lost and they see a woman walking down the side of the road. They offer to let her get in the car, saying they’re headed for their motel, the Five Pines Resort.

The woman’s name is Rhonda Jean, and she’s headed for Coldlake Falls, a few miles ahead. Then, April notices that Rhonda is bleeding, just as a truck pulls up behind them. Rhonda tells them she’s sorry and that “he’s coming”. They speed up to try to get her to a hospital. Meanwhile, the truck continues to follow them. By the time they pull into the hospital, Rhonda has passed out.

Officer Khalid “Kal” Syed asks them to come inside to talk. Eddie tells April not to mention the truck that was following them. He asks for their ID and asks about Eddie’s history in the military. He’s questioning them when the state police interrupt, attempting to take over. Detective Quentin and Detective Beam say that the girl they dropped off has died with multiple stab wounds, so now it’s a murder case. They say that they’ll take them somewhere they can get some rest, but that they’re confiscating their car for the time being so they can’t leave. They’re taken to a house of a woman named Rose Jones to stay for the night.

When they’re alone, Eddie says he didn’t want to mention the truck because he saw something — the body of the girl in the bed of the truck. Eddie sees thing sometimes. He’s worried that if they mention the truck they’re going to look into it. think he’s crazy and look into their histories, which could be a problem.

At 7 AM the next morning, they’re picked up by two officers — Kyle Petersen and Chip Chadwell — and brought to the parking lot of a grocery store. Detective Quentin and Beam are waiting for them there, along with a few other officers. They ask Eddie to point out on a map where they’d been driving, but he’s not sure since they were lost. It’s clear from the questioning that they suspect them of murder. Eddie guesses based on their responses that there have been other murders in the area.

They’re driven around, and when they turn on to a certain street, April recognizes it from the night before. They tell the detectives that they think Rhonda was picked up around this area, but they could be wrong since there were no landmarks or signs. The detectives tell them that Hunter Beach, a private beach that’s open to public use, is nearby which is why they get hitchhikers on this road from time to time. As they look around, some flowers and a card on the ground catches April’s eye. It says “In memory of Katharine O’Connor. March 2, 1993″.

April and Eddie are brought in for more questioning and eventually brought back to Rose’s. April think about Eddie’s past. He was given up by his mother when he was six, but adopted by a good, kind couple.

Rose comes to talk to April and asks what the officers, Kyle and Chip had said about her, and April admits that Kyle joked about her having killed her ex-husband, Robbie, who had been a cop — though Chip had clarified that it was actually a heart attack. Rose then continues to chat about having been around Coldlake a long time and running this B&B.

April asks Rose about Katharine O’Connor. Rose says she was picked up hitchhiking, strangled and left for dead at the side of the road. Rose said that it’s happened on that road before. In exchange, April tells Rose about what they saw. When pushed, she tells Rose that she thinks they were followed, which is not something she told the police. Afterwards, Rose tells them that she knows they confiscated their car, so they’re welcome to use Robbie’s car to get around.

Alone in Robbie’s car, Eddie says that he thinks he saw something else. He says he saw a man go into Rose’s backyard, but then when he followed him back there, there was no one there.

They arrive at Hunter Beach and see some teenagers there. The kids know Rhonda and are shocked when they’re told she’s been stabbed. They say that she’d been here for a few weeks and was staying in Gretchen’s tent. Rhonda’s full name was Rhonda Jean Breckwith, and she was from Baltimore and hitchhiking around the country.

Gretchen said she was leaving last night, though Eddie finds it odd she chose to leave in the middle of the night. Gretchen gets mad at her friend Todd for not using his van to drive Rhonda to the bus stop, but Todd says she never asked. One of the teenagers, Mitchell, speaks up and says that he saw Rhonda leave around midnight that night. She didn’t say bye to anyone. Instead, he saw a black pickup truck coming down the road, and Rhonda put out her thumb to hitch a ride. He watched her get in.

Gretchen says they’ve all heard the stories about the “Lost Girl” which they explain is a legend about someone who haunts Atticus Line (the street leading up here) and kills hitchhikers. The legend says that the Lost Girl herself was a hitchhiker who was killed. You can feel her presence sometimes calling to you or as a light between the trees. But if you see actually see her visage walking down the side of the road, then it means you’ll be the next to die.

Gretchen says that, like the rest of them, Rhonda was a transient, but she didn’t fit in at this camp and was headed to a different camp in Nevada where they were hiring summer staff. When Gretchen realizes the police will probably be showing up here soon, she decides it’s time to leave. She gives April a silly group photo with Rhonda in it to have or to give to her parents if she comes across them.

Leaving the camp, April is upset, thinking about how she relates to these other transient kids. She and Eddie talk about how April’s mother had to leave her father in the middle of the night for her own safety. After that, they’d wandered around for years, with her mother doing various jobs like waitressing. They kept moving to stay safe. When she turned 18, April was on her own.

They also discuss how Quentin is too busy trying to pin the crime on them into look into these things, so they need to do it instead. Their next stop is the local dollar mart, which they figured many of the kids would have stopped at. They show the checkout girl the photo and ask if she recognizes any of the people in the photo. She says some of them were in here a few days ago, talking about a beach party they were having. Then, she points to Rhonda and says that she remembers her crying.

They’re interrupted by the sound of the bell on door, but no one comes in. Instead, they feel a cold draft and then April sees the a black pickup truck pull into the parking lot. Eddie runs out and yells at the driver to come out, but the driver has no intention of doing so. In the back, April sees it, the visage of a dead, pale girl lying down in the truck of the bed, clutching the side. They hurry into Robbie’s car to follow the truck as it guns it out of the parking lot.

The truck manages to lose them, but they drive around, until they see a black pickup truck pared outside an old farmhouse with the name “SHANDLER” printed on the mailbox. They don’t see the the ghostly girl in the truck bed anymore, but there is a backpack in the back with a Lollapalooza patch on it. In the farmhouse, they can hear a phone ringing, unanswered. Then, they see the ghostly girl standing outside the barn. Eddie tries to approach her, but then a man comes sprinting out of the barn completely bypassing her and tackling Eddie. The girl vanishes.

As Eddie tries to subdue the man, April runs into the farmhouse and goes for the phone.

Shortly after, Eddie and April find themselves situated in front of Detectives Quentin and Beam again. They explain what happened with the truck and the backpack, and the man who attacked Eddie, who turns out to be someone named Max Handler. Detective Beam tells them they he thinks they killed Rhonda and then stashed her backpack in the back of Max’s truck.

Detective Beam also notes how there’s very little documentation about April’s past. Beam continues to question April about her past until Quentin interrupts and tells April that she’s free to go. Rose shows up, saying she’s here to pick them up. Rose tells them that the police thought it was them, but they don’t anymore and that’s all they need to know.

They ask Rose about Max. She says that Max has been around for a while and hasn’t ever been trouble. She’s skeptical he could be the killer, since it’s been happening since the seventies and Max is 28.

Very early the next morning, they receive a visit from Officer Kal Syed. He says that Max Shandler has been charged with the murder of Rhonda Jean. He says he’s surprised because he’s known Max for a long time and never thought he was someone who was headed for trouble. Max claims he has no memory of that night, but there’s blood on the backpack and in the back of the truck. Also, the jacket that Rhonda was wearing when she died belonged to Max. They’ve also found a knife in the grass along the road, which they’re testing for forensic evidence now.

Kal also says that they’re looking into whether Max could have killed Katharine O’Conner as well. The previous victim before that was in 1991. He says that there’s been a lot of pressure to find Katharine’s killer, since she wasn’t a transient. She was from an upper-middle class family and was taking a year off to travel.

Eddie and April tell Kal about how Mitchell mentioned that he saw Rhonda leaving and get picked up. Kal wants to ask them more questions about it, but Eddie says they’re done participating in the investigation and they want to take their car and leave.

Eddie and April help clean up at Rose’s place, and they get ready to go as they wait for their car to be returned. April is taking a nap in the late afternoon when she is awoken and feels a chill. There’s no one there, but it feels like someone has been there. The house is quiet and her head feels fuzzy. She looks out at Rose’s garden thinking about how Robbie had died back there of his heart attack. She notices how nothing grows in that garden.

Her thoughts are interrupted by a knock. Kyle has come by to return Eddie’s car. The car is a mess from the police’s fingerprint dust, but she gets the key and goes to get Eddie.

All packed up, Eddie and April head out of town as they encounter a storm. She notices that they are driving down Atticus Line yet again to get out of town. There’s a light in the trees and April insists they just ignore it and drive past it. Suddenly, there is a girl in the middle of the road, and Eddie swerves to avoid hitting her. They end up spinning out onto the shoulder of the road. Eddie upset, now knowing what is going on, but April tells him that she saw her too.

Then, the Lost Girl some running toward April, screaming. April remembers that her window is open. She screams for help and grabs for Eddie. He jerks away and the drive off while she continues screaming. They keep driving but Eddie points out that they’re headed back in the direction of Coldlake Falls.

April and Eddie end up back at Rose’s place. They’re not sure what to make of any of it. No one else has reported what they experienced with The Lost Girl, and April senses she wants something from them. Sitting in a diner, April knows that Eddie wants to find her and try to help her, so she agrees it’s what she wants too. They know the Lost Girl was murdered in the seventies and never identified. Unlike other people, they’ve seen her and know what she looks like.

As they chat, they’re interrupted by a nosy girl, Beatrice Snell, 16, who recognizes them from the newspaper story about Rhonda’s death. She peppers them with questions about it. She also tells them about Carter Friesen, the 1991 victim who died on August 27, 1991. He was also 18 and a hitchhiker who was stabbed. Beatrice says that collecting information about the hitchhiker cases is her hobby. She invites them over to her house.

Her parents aren’t home, but Beatrice’s sister, Gracie Snell, is there. Gracie is also interested in the hitchhiker cases. Beatrice gets out her files and explains that there have been six hitchhiker cases, with the first one beginning with The Lost Girl in 1976. The newspaper clipping on it, dated April 30, 1976, merely says that she was between 20-30 years old and found on Atticus Line. She died from several blows to the head and the coroner believes she was dead for around a month when they found her. They also found a high school letterman jacket for Midland, a town a few hours away, nearby a few weeks later.

She runs through the full list of victims: “The Lost Girl was 1976, and she was the only unidentified one. Tom Monahan was killed in 1982. Stephanie Wolfe was killed in 1989—she’s the only Black victim. Carter Friesen was killed in 1991, then Katharine O’Connor in 1993, and Rhonda Jean Breckwith two days ago.”

Eddie notes that the methods of killing are slow and often messy: “Beaten with something curved, possibly a tire iron. Stabbed with something resembling an ice pick. Beaten on the back of the head with something large and blunt, possibly a branch or rock.”

They also ask the girls about the ghost stories, but they’re both dismissive of the stories. Afterwards, Eddie and April talk about how there doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern to the crimes except that they all take place on the same road and that they were all going to or coming from Hunter Beach. The Lost Girl is the only unidentified victim, and Eddie hypothesizes it could be because she was the only one who knew the killer and so he didn’t want her to be identified. Eddie notes how the tag had been ripped out of her t-shirt.

April thinks about how Eddie says that he started seeing things that weren’t really there when he returned from Iraq. He went to doctors but couldn’t afford any fancy treatments so he learned to live with it. He also told her about having a feeling of rejection even as a child after his mother left him when he was six. April meanwhile told him about the abuse she and her mother had suffered with her father before they left. They changed their names and identities and disappeared, so her name wasn’t really April Delray. When Eddie and April met, she found someone who had also left pieces of their past behind and whose “darkness mirrored my own”.

The head out to check out Midland, about three hours away, for clues about the letterman jacket. As they drive, April reassures the Lost Girl that they’ll be back. While in Midland, April goes to the bank to find out that all the funds in her account are gone. She knows there was around seven thousand in there before. She feels a rush of anger as she knows who it was.

As Eddie looks for missing people notices from around that time period, he finds one for a Shannon Haller. They track down the person who put up the ad, Carla Moyer, who knew Shannon from rehab. Shannon had a baby and was trying to get sober, but the baby got put in foster care. The father of the baby was a random hookup that she never saw again. Shannon had been clean for three months when she decided to take a trip, saying she was going to find herself and then go get her kid back. Carla thinks Shannon is likely dead since she never saw her again. Carla says Shannon had a letterman jacket from some boy in high school.

They’re exhausted by the time they return to Coldlake Falls. With their allotted honeymoon time running out, they both call their respective jobs to let them know they’ll be gone longer.

April calls home to her mom to ask about the missing money. There had once been around $20,000 in the account, which April figures came from her father’s life insurance. Half of the money was spent on appeals for her mother. Her father was abusive, and the night of his death when April was 12, her mother had bludgeoned him to death with a baseball bat and then they’d left. When April was 18, her mother was taken back to California to stand trial for his death. Since then, April had spent the money sparingly to serve as a safety net, but now her mother has withdrawn the rest, saying that her lawyer wants to appeal again.

Over the phone, her mother asks if she’s with anyone, but April lies. She worries about what her mother would do if she knew about Eddie. She also thinks about how she never should’ve left the money in there and that it was a mistake to trust that her mother wouldn’t screw her over like this.

Later, they talk about neither knows how they ended driving down Atticus Line. April thinks she dozed off in the car, and Eddie says his memory of that drive is hazy. April asks about Eddie’s mother, and Eddie says he thought about the same thing when Carla mentioned that Shannon had a child that was sent to foster care. However, Eddie says that math doesn’t work out. Shannon’s child would have been an infant and he was 8 or 9 when that would’ve happened.

Having dinner with Rose that night, they tell Rose about Grace’s theory that the Coldlake PD know who the killer is and are covering it up. Rose is dismissive. She’s heard Grace’s theory before and knows that Grace suspects Detective Quentin. However, her late husband Robbie worked for the police and she knows he would rather die than help them cover up something like that.

Later that night, April feels someone touch her shoulder, but no one is there. She then gets a feeling of dread just as Detective Quentin shows up wanting to talk to them.

Detective Quentin and Beam have questions for April. They say that they know that there was a call from her phone to someone in prison, Diane Cross who is currently imprisoned for the murder of her husband, Ron Cross in 1981. Caught in this situation, April tells them the truth, that she called her mother. They then say that Diane seems to have been involved in a number of thefts and scams, and they reference Aprils birth name, Crystal Cross.

When Eddie gets angry, Quentin then turns on him. He says that he knows that when Eddie was discharged from Iraq there were a number of incidents on his record involving psychiatric incidents and various behavior problems. He was also stationed at Fort Custer, a few hours away from here, and on authorized leave around the time of Katharine O’Connor’s death in March 1991.

Eddie doesn’t respond, and Rose tells the officers to get out of her house. Afterwards, Rose talks about how much she hates Quentin. She says that he mistreated Robbie when he was alive, and that he’s never defended her when people joke about her murdering Robbie despite knowing it was a heart attack. She says that Quentin is cold and just sucks people dry.

April knows that the news about her mother has also revealed to Eddie that she’s been lying about her being dead all this time. In that moment, April thinks about how she needs to fix things with Eddie, but that she needs to deal with the Lost Girl first.

When Eddie goes out for a job, April drives out to Atticus Line, determined to find the Lost Girl. She then gets out and goes on foot. When a car approaches, April puts her thumb out, and a woman pulls up next to her. April says she’s headed for Hunter Beach and asks for a ride. The woman, Trish Cho, is a 40-ish Asian woman with children’s toys in the backseat of her car. She lets April in, but as they’re chatting April starts to feel the air grow cold.

April then notices that Trish starts to sound distracted. When April asks to be let out, she doesn’t respond, and April sees the Lost Girl sitting in the backseat with an evil smile. The Lost Girl then disappears and Trish’s eyes have become glazed over black pools. Trish stops the car to get something from the trunk.

April then realizes that the Lost Girl has tricked her and that she’s been possessing people to get them to commit these murders. The reason these murder weapons are so random is because the perpetrators were never planning on committing murders, they simply grab whatever is available at hand. Trish grabs a tire iron and swings at her. April runs off and tries to talk to the lost girl, referring to her as Shannon.

April can see that Trish is struggling to fight off the Lost Girl’s influence. She throws out the tire iron and gets Trish into the driver’s seat. Trish manages to drive off, and eventually they get to April’s car and April returns to Rose’s house.

When April returns, she tells Eddie what she’s learned. They also talk about what happened with the detectives. April admits that she lied about her mother being dead. Eddie brings up how they mentioned that he had a gun, and he’d been considering using it kill himself because he was having dreams about terrible things.

Their conversation is interrupted when they hear a noise. They go outside and see a copy of Seventeen magazine with Alicia Silverstone’s face on the cover. When they bring it inside, Rose suggests it was probably one of the Snell girls who left it for them. Inside the magazine, they find a missing person’s report filed by John Haller in December 1977 for Shannon Haller, saying she’s been missing since March of 1976. There’s also an address in Midland penned in at the bottom, which they assume is John’s address.

In response, April writes a note about Trish and what she knows about her and asks the girls to find out if she’s okay. She tucks the note back into the magazine and leaves it in the mailbox for the girls to find.

July 1995 Issue of Seventeen Magazine

Eddie and April immediately head out for John’s address in Midland, but they notice that Officer Kal Syed is tailing them. They talk about why Quentin confronted him with that information about one another, and they suspect that Quentin is trying to get them to turn on one another. When they stop for gas, they talk to Kal, and they admit that they’re trying to track down the Lost Girl’s father in Midland. Kal admits that he’s been tasked with following them, and he wonders what they’re doing and why, but they decline to answer his questions.

They pull up to the house indicated by the Snell sisters. They finally clue in Kal on what they’re doing, and he says that he should be the one asking the questions to John Haller. He goes in to talk to John. When he comes out, Kal reports back that he’ll see what he can do about tying the unidentified body to Shannon Haller, but it’s going to take some time and there’s nothing else that Eddie and April can do.

Kal suggests that they tell him what exactly they’re thinking so he can help, but April and Eddie know how crazy the ghost story sounds, so they decline to say anything. When Kal heads out, Eddie then declares that he’s going inside. April tries to stop him, but he’s adamant.

In the house, they find a photo of Carla and Shannon together, and right away April knows it’s her. She recognizes the Lost Girl immediately, since she saw her in the backseat the night before. Then, she sees another photo of Shannon with a young boy. April is confused because she thought the boy would have been an infant, but the boy in the photos looks at least 4 or 5. She realizes that Carla was mistaken about when Shannon had her child. The kid was already a young boy when they Carla and Shannon met.

They hear a noise and rush out of the house, but Eddie pockets a roll of film before they go, saying he senses there’s something on it. They head back to Coldlake Falls. April gives Eddie some flak for breaking into the house, but Eddie says that the Lost Girl is in his head. They notice Beatrice’s car in front of a drugstore, and they run into Beatrice who beams at them. She says she wants to join whatever they’re doing.

They get together with the Snell sisters and give them an update on what they’ve learned at John Haller’s house as well as the encounter with the ghost on Atticus Line. The girls say they don’t trust the guy at the local photo development place, but Grace tells them she can get into the school’s photography room to get the film developed. Meanwhile, they also agree to track down Trish to make sure she’s okay.

They make their way to the school’s darkroom and work quickly. There’s a cold presence outside the door, and they know the Lost Girl is out there. In the end, they end up with four photos. The one Eddie looks at is of Eddie as a child with Shannon. Eddie says he recognizes her face. It’s his mother. There’s also another photo of her at Hunter Beach with a backpack and a letter jacket from Midland High.

The next morning, April and Eddie tell Detective Quentin the whole story, excluding the part about Trish’s attack, since they didn’t want to drag her into this. Eddie tells them that Shannon is his birth mother, and he thinks the photo of Shannon at the beach proves that his father saw Shannon at least once after she left home, which is why Eddie believes John Haller was the one who killed his daughter.

Finally, Quentin says that he doesn’t have time for ghost stories and legends. He thinks that April and Eddie should go home to Ann Arbor. Back at Rose’s, they bid her farewell before packing up their things to leave.

April goes into the bedroom and she sees a ghostly older black man (Robbie’s ghost). He screams at her to get down. As soon as she does, gunshots go through the window. Outside, John Haller is shooting at them, screaming at them about taking Shannon’s film.

Eddie manages to knock the rifle out of his hands, but he also has a handgun on him. As the two face off, Eddie asks why he did it. John says it was an accident. Shannon had called him to come pick up up, but then she changed her mind. Instead, he tried to force her back into the car, but there was an altercation and Shannon ended up dead.

As the two men face off, John realizes that Eddie is Shannon’s child, who he refers to as Jeremy. He says that Eddie looks just like Shannon. They’re interrupted by Officer Kal Syed coming in and telling them to drop their guns, but John lets off a shot.

Three months later, April and Eddie are on their way back to Coldlake Falls. Eddie’s arm was shattered by the bullet but is now almost healed and he no longer needs the cast and sling. Kal ended up shooting and killing Haller after Haller shot Eddie. They don’t know why Haller did what he did, since he didn’t have a record of impulsive, violent acts. His autopsy did show he had brain cancer that could have impaired his judgment. Eddie hasn’t had any more nightmares the last few months, though he still struggles with knowing what has became of his mother.

In Coldlake Falls, they meet with the Snell sisters, who update them on Trish. Apparently, she’s fine and seems to have no recollection of the events. Apparently, Max Shandler also has brain cancer. He’s still charged with murder, but is too sick to go to prison. Oddly, he’s in some type of expensive private institution, though it’s not clear who is footing the bill.

Kal also established that the Lost Girl, was in fact Shannon Haller, as confirmed by dental records. They’re meeting today at the location of her new headstone. The Snell sisters tell them that a local organization called the Officer Robbie Jones Memorial Foundation paid for the headstone, and it’s implied that Rose runs the organization.

They meet up with Rose, and April tells Rose about how she saw Robbie and that he protected them. After that, they get ready to head out of Coldlake Falls, but Eddie wants to make a quick stop at Detective Quentin’s house out of curiosity. Quentin sees them and talks to them.

They ask him why he was so focused on them for the murder investigation. Quentin says that there was a man dying of cancer who, in the final moments before his death, told the nurse that he remembered something that happened when he picked up a hitchhiker and then proceeded to kill him with an ice pick. The man also had a rush of memories that only Shannon Haller would have known about. Quentin said the case always interested him, which is how he ended up at Coldlake Falls.

When he heard Eddie and April’s story, he felt that they were called here somehow, though he didn’t know exactly how they were connected. He tells them now that Max is in the private facility being watched as he dies. Max has no recollection of his murder, but Quentin believes that he will in the final moments remember the details, and Quentin also believes he’ll be able to to be in touch with Shannon Haller in those final moments as well.

Quentin asks if there’s anything Eddie would want to say, and he says just to tell her that he’s fine. Meanwhile, April says to leave Trish alone. Quentin also encourages them to drive down Atticus Line before they leave. He says that he believes Shannon is not there anymore, but he thinks more bodies will be found.

They do as they’re told and that see that a mall is being constructed in the area soon. April wonders why Quentin wanted them to drive down, but Eddie says it’s because they’ll likely have to dig to build a mall, so he’s letting them know that more bodies will likely be found soon, so more lost persons will be put to rest.