Hi, crime junkies.
It's Ashley.
And after years of covering cases on this show, I know that the story doesn't stop once the headlines fade.
There are always more questions to ask, more voices to hear and more context that can reshape our understanding of a case.
In fact, that's one of the reasons I started my other podcast, The Deck.
Every episode goes a layer deeper through original reporting and conversations with the people who know these cases best law enforcement investigators and families still searching for answers
Listen to the deck wherever you get your podcasts
Hi, Crime Junkies.
I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.
And I'm Britt.
The story I have for you today is one I can't believe I'd never heard of.
But it came to us straight from the investigator who's trying to solve this mystery.
And he needs your help.
Because the truth of what happened to one Wisconsin woman back in 1989 might be right in front of him in two important clues he holds.
But he needs the help of our crime junkies to interpret them.
One of you might be able to help solve the mystery of what happened to Carrie O'Brien Kruger.
It's December 1989 in Wisconsin.
And with the holidays right around the corner, 19-year-old Molly O'Brien is getting into the spirit.
She's spending the chilly night curled up in her Milwaukee dorm room watching The Nutcracker with her roommate and her boyfriend.
Suddenly, her landline rings.
And it's her brother-in-law, Tracy Kruger, which isn't strange.
He's married to Molly's 32-year-old sister, Carrie.
And Molly's close with both of them.
But what he's asking is odd.
He wants to know if Carrie is with her.
Now, Molly spends plenty of time with Carrie, Tracy and their three-year-old daughter, but it is always at their house, an hour away in Burlington, Wisconsin.
Carrie doesn't just like randomly stop by her dorm room.
So she tells him no.
And that's when Tracy starts laying it all out, why he's concerned.
The night before, this would have been Tuesday, December 5th, 1989, he says that Carrie got this call at around 8.30 p.m. Tracy thinks it was maybe her manager Jim calling.
Carrie works in PR for Gander Mountain, this like hunting and sporting goods company.
And when she hung up, she told Tracy that she had to fill in for somebody the next day at this trade show in Wyoming.
And that would have been this day, like the day that he's calling Molly, Wednesday, December 6th.
Now, Jim was supposed to swing by and drive them both to Chicago so they could catch an early flight.
Tracy says that Carrie got up super early, left before dawn, like 4 or 4.30 in the morning after a goodbye kiss and a reminder to take good care of their daughter while she was gone.
But a few hours later, after Tracy had gotten their daughter off to the babysitter and he was at work, he got a message that Jim was trying to reach him.
And what Jim said was really weird because he wanted to know why.
Where Carrie was.
She had pulled a no call, no show at work for the first time ever.
And Tracy says that he's like confused.
He's like, what do you mean?
Where is she?
Like she's with you in Wyoming.
Yeah.
But Jim had no clue what he was talking about because it turns out there was no trade show.
And Carrie would know that.
Tracking the trade shows is literally part of her job.
Now, the more Tracy talks, the sicker Molly feels because there is one thing that Molly is sure of.
Carrie would never leave her daughter.
So if no one can find her, she's sure right then and there that something bad happened.
But Tracy tries to keep her calm.
He's like, listen, don't worry.
Maybe she just went somewhere.
I'm going to start calling around.
I'm going to start checking with everyone.
And he's already sounded the alarm to another O'Brien sister, Kathy.
And even though she lives far away in New Orleans, she knows what to do because she's a prosecutor.
So Thursday morning, the moment she hears that Carrie still isn't home, Kathy brings their parents in the loop and instructs them to make Tracy file a missing persons report with the Burlington Police Department.
Like, do it now.
Do it today.
So Carrie's parents bring Tracy to the station where he runs through it all again.
The 11th hour work call, the early trip, and how nobody can reach Carrie now.
But while her family seems to be frantic, officers are like...
You know, meh, not so much.
They put out a bolo for her, but, you know, she's an adult.
She might just need some space.
So they give it to her until they realize that space might even be dangerous.
Because a couple of days later, Tracy brings them a note from Carrie's doctor saying that she had been treated for depression and she might be suicidal.
So that is what escalates things, at least enough so that she gets entered into the NCIC database.
Now, what the doctor's note didn't mention, though, is the real health problems she had been suffering from over the last year and a half.
Severe, unexplained stomach pain, including nausea, vomiting, weight loss.
And nobody could figure out why.
At one point, her sister Kathy even asked her point blank if she thought she was being poisoned.
And Carrie had like joked to a friend that maybe Tracy was the one doing it.
That's a joke that nobody is laughing at now that she's gone.
But at the same time, nobody could look at Tracy and be like, yep, saw this coming.
If he did something to her, it would be a huge shock.
I mean, don't get me wrong.
Their marriage definitely wasn't perfect.
Like before she worked in PR, she was a journalist, which is how she met Tracy.
And in the early 80s, they both worked at a local newspaper.
And the two got engaged fast.
Then Carrie called it off, unsure if, like, this is really what she wanted.
But Tracy kept pursuing her.
And in 1985, they tied the knot.
She was already pregnant with her daughter Megan at the altar, which caused a rift with her conservative Catholic parents, especially her mom.
But they had patched things up since then and everything seemed to be fine.
But the couple's relationship had been rocky lately.
Carrie had confided in loved ones that she and Tracy weren't having sex and that he'd been cold and distant.
She suspected that he was cheating.
He was always pulling late shifts at the same paper where they met.
He ran circulation and worked in the darkroom.
Sometime in the past year, I guess Carrie had drawn a line.
Fix things or she was going to be done done.
And Tracy agreed.
He told Carrie that he was seeing a counselor, but then she found out he wasn't.
And when she confronted him, her family says that he deflected, claiming that he had a brain tumor.
Which he did not.
I'm sorry.
No, there are like little white lies.
And then there are big like life lies.
Right.
If you can lie about a brain tumor, like you're willing to do anything but the right thing.
Like, I agree.
Girl, get out.
Carrie didn't.
And as bad as those lies were, there's also a big difference between a lying husband and a dangerous one.
And to what I was saying earlier,
Nobody had ever put Tracy in that column, the dangerous column.
Like to Molly, Tracy's basically another brother.
She told our reporter Nina that he had taught her how to drive.
He was there to cheer her on at her like grade school basketball games.
And after all that time together, Molly trusted him completely.
But even still, his story isn't sitting right with the family.
Like, it's just too bizarre.
And every time they poke at it...
Another hole opens up, including a big one that opens up on Monday, December 11th, when Carrie's family searches the Kruger house for themselves.
According to Racine County investigator Tommy Sherritt, who's working the case now, when Carrie's family goes to search her house, they see that Carrie's purse and her ID are gone.
But damn near everything else she owns is there, including a bunch of stuff that Tracy said she had taken with her.
Her briefcase is tucked under a desk.
Her wedding ring is there in this like dish on the dresser.
And her curling iron, her new makeup, her stomach medication is there.
She didn't even bring a winter coat, just her all-weather jacket.
And, I mean, its heavy removable lining is still hanging in the closet.
So even though she, like, brought a coat, she didn't actually bring the part that, like, keeps you warm?
And she's in Wisconsin, she's going to Wyoming, and all of this is happening in December.
Well...
But I mean, she obviously isn't going to Wyoming, right?
There was no trade show.
Somebody invented that trip.
But more concerningly, of all the things I mentioned, there is this big brown suitcase that Tracy said she packed.
That's in the attic along with all of her other luggage.
But when Kathy points that out, Tracy kind of backpedals and he's like, no, no, no, no, no.
She didn't take her suitcase.
She took one of mine.
Meanwhile, the only money missing is $500 that Tracy says they kept in an emergency stash hidden in a basement air duct.
But say she grabbed the $500 and his suitcase and a light jacket because she was maybe headed somewhere warmer.
How did she get there?
There is no
No flight record that they can find in her name.
She didn't take her car and no one saw her leave that morning with anyone.
Although there is one thing.
Their next door neighbor noticed a small black car outside her own house at around 4 or 430 a.m.
This is about the time that Tracy says she's leaving.
And outside of that car, there was this man standing beside it.
But this neighbor can't say for certain whether it was for sure Wednesday the 6th or maybe it was like some other morning that week.
And importantly, she never saw Carrie get into that sitting car.
So even if this was the same day, it might not mean anything.
Right.
And with so little to go on, the question shifts from where Carrie went to whether she went anywhere at all.
And her family can't help but look squarely at Tracy for answers.
I mean, his story just isn't adding up.
And investigators are fully asking those questions now, too.
Problem is, the more times they ask, the more versions they get of the same story.
Tracy can't seem to keep straight who called Carrie that Tuesday night or what exactly they said.
I mean, at one point he says maybe the trade show was actually in Montana, not Wyoming.
In some versions, her manager, Jim, was supposed to pick her up.
Right.
But like in at least one version, Carrie apparently wanted to borrow his truck to get to the airport because her car was in the shop.
How would he have gotten anywhere while she was gone?
Yeah, that's why he said that he couldn't lend it to her.
And sometimes Tracy like half remembers hearing a car outside that morning, other times no car because he was like, you know, sleepy or whatever.
And depending on who he's talking to, Gary was due home any time from Saturday, December 9th to Tuesday, December 12th.
And listen, maybe you could chalk all that up to a foggy memory.
Last minute plans, a husband who is distant and half listening.
But here is the real clincher for me.
It's what Tracy's own father tells police, which is that Tracy mentioned to him.
Carrie's Wyoming trip on Monday, December 4th.
This is a full day before Carrie supposedly even got that late night call telling her that she needed to fill in.
Right.
So that alleged Tuesday night trade show call is looking less and less like the start of all of this and more and more like something Tracy constructed as he worked backwards to build a timeline of Carrie's movements.
So can anyone verify if Carrie got any calls that night?
Well, no, because in 1989, their phone company only itemized long distance calls and Jim's call, if it came in, would have been local.
So that ends up being a dead end.
But detectives can still try to pick apart Tracy's other claims about that night to see where else they might find gaps, starting with Carrie's car.
So Tracy had left her car at the shop in early December, claiming that it wouldn't start.
But mechanics couldn't find anything wrong with it.
He also told the dealership not to release the car to anyone without calling him first, even though it is Carrie's car.
Now, at the time, Tracy had been driving a new Ford pickup, and he had told pretty much everybody that that truck was a loaner from a buddy.
And that seemed to be even what he told Carrie, because the weekend before she disappeared, she and her sister Molly were in the truck with Tracy when he got in a fender bender.
And afterward, Carey worried how his friend was going to react to this.
Well, come to find out, when police run the plates, they learn that Tracy actually bought the truck back in June in both his and Carrie's name.
This is too many lies.
Now, when he is pressed on the truck, he said that Carrie did know and keeping the purchase secret was her idea.
Trouble with that is investigators learn that she wasn't with him when he bought it.
And so they think that her signature on the paperwork doesn't match her other signatures.
So they think it was forged.
And Carrie's family doesn't think that she would have wanted a new truck anyway.
The Krugers were already stretched thin financially, and Tracy had just made it worse.
Detectives find out after that he had been skipping shifts and padding his time cards regularly.
The paper had also recently knocked him from salary to hourly, so he was one warning away from getting fired.
Did Carrie know that?
I mean, she knew money was tight, but Tracy's job troubles, all the rest of it, I don't know.
Also...
Where is he going if he's not going to work?
Like you said, he was like padding his time card and stuff.
No idea.
But I can tell you an excuse that he leaned on when he wanted out of something.
He would tell people Carrie is away for work.
He has to watch their daughter.
Interestingly, a few different people reportedly heard some version of that excuse, and they only learned it wasn't true later when they would apparently ask Carrie, like, hey, how was Alaska?
And she would be like, what do you mean Alaska?
She had no idea what they were talking about.
So that lie was unraveling like before she was even gone.
Yeah.
And Tracy actually pulled the same stunt days before she vanished.
When Carrie wanted to cancel a December 4th doctor's appointment, he suggested like just tell them that you're going to be out of town.
So investigators have every reason to doubt Tracy, which is why they work backward from the last time anyone besides him saw Carrie.
And that would have been Tuesday, December 5th.
Gander Mountain kept its own phone records.
And unlike the phone company, which only logged those long-distance calls, theirs show that Carrie made a string of short calls home that morning.
Now, it's not clear why, since Tracy was supposed to be at work.
I mean, maybe that's why.
She's trying to make sure he's where he's supposed to be, which is not at home.
Well, you know, maybe that's that or like him going hourly.
Maybe she knew he was home.
I don't know.
But at some point, I do know that he does go to work because she eventually did reach him at the newspaper.
Now, this next bit comes from Tracy, who didn't explain it until after the phone records came to light.
But he claims that Carrie asked him to bring over an envelope that she had forgotten at home.
So he says he drops it off at her job, but he isn't sure what was in it because it was taped shut.
And he can't remember if he left it with Carrie or if he left it with a receptionist, except no one from her job remembers him stopping by that day.
So like TBD to all of that.
But we know for sure, though, through her coworkers, that Carrie is at work that afternoon and didn't leave the office until 530, maybe 545.
Which, by the way, contradicts part of the story Tracy had already given them.
According to him, Carrie got home at 5.30, and then five minutes later they ate dinner, spaghetti that he'd made earlier.
And at 6.05, he had left to run errands, and...
He can rattle off every stop, hardware store, grocery store, liquor store, two trips to his office.
And he was home by 7.30.
Megan was in bed by 8.
And then he took out the trash.
And then at 8.15, he heard Carrie on the phone gushing about how beautiful Wyoming is.
I mean, or maybe Montana.
Yeah.
So she then tells him about the trip.
So then at 830, he got her suitcase for her from the attic.
Maybe, but it's fair.
She showered, packed and then was in bed by like 1005.
And he's got it down to like a five minute window.
That's like really specific.
I know, especially for what should have been like a pretty ordinary night.
Right.
But then he gets to Wednesday and his black box becomes just like a blur.
He sort of remembers Carrie leaving, but he like didn't get up to see her off.
Can't tell you the exact time, only that it was still dark.
Thinks maybe he heard the back door close and that's it.
Not a word from her since.
So did anyone say how she was at work on that last day?
Like, was she upset?
Was she happy?
Like, was anything like happening in her life?
Could they tell?
Well, it sounds like it was kind of a crappy day for her.
She had been upset about a mistake in an ad and a colleague noted that she seemed distracted.
And then she left later than usual, late enough that one of her co-workers teased her about like her watch being broken.
McCary just said that she'd been busy and told her, I'll see you tomorrow.
Except there is no tomorrow, at least not one anyone can account for.
Now, when Christmas passes with no word from Carrie, it seems like detectives are coming around to what the family has feared all along, that Carrie met with foul play and Tracy might be behind it.
So as 1989 winds down, they bring their top suspect in for a polygraph.
But the morning of the polygraph test, Tracy says that he's not feeling good.
Carrie's sister, Kathy, babysitting Megan while he is at the station, isn't buying that.
To her, it is a flat-out act.
But he takes the test anyway, and the results are inconclusive.
So they schedule a second test, one for January 5th.
But then Tracy cancels.
And they would never get another chance to give him an additional polygraph.
Because something unbelievable happens.
Something unbelievable.
I haven't seen play out in any other true crime case ever.
Okay, everyone, the Crime Junkie Summer Collection is now available, but time is running out to shop.
These limited-time summer favorites won't be restocked, so if you've had your eye on the beach towel, the lawyer tote, or a new go-to tea, now is your chance to grab them before they disappear.
Visit shop.audiochuck.com to shop the Crime Junkie Summer Collection before it's gone for good.
The day after Tracy's never taken second polygraph.
He is at work when he glances at a newspaper article about his missing wife, and he just collapses.
He's taken to the hospital, but the Tracy who arrives there says that it's 1979 and that the last 10 years of his life are just gone.
What do you mean, gone, gone, gone how?
The way he tells it, in his mind, it is literally 1979.
He's a teenager, which means what wife?
He and Carrie didn't meet until 1982.
And their daughter... What kid?
Meghan wasn't born until 86.
But it is only that one decade he lost.
Everything before and everything that is to come, picking up at the hospital, he says is perfectly intact.
So, to be clear...
No, you got it.
You can repeat it, but you got it.
The only part of his life he can't remember is the part that actually matters to this case and this missing woman who...
He was married to, but doesn't remember.
Doctors run a battery of tests, but they can't find any physical cause of this memory loss.
There is no sign of a stroke, nothing.
They do notice Tracy seems to think that he's getting treated for a crushed finger.
Like that's why he thinks he's at the hospital.
And it was an injury that he had gotten like years earlier.
Years like, I don't know, 1979.
Literally, it was.
But believe it or not, the people evaluating him are mostly in agreement that he's not faking it.
They think he has what they refer to as hysterical amnesia.
And they're hopeful that his memory will return in time, basically.
And they say it's already starting to, like a couple stray flashes of him, Carrie, and Megan.
And to one of his counselors, that's exactly what makes it seem so real.
Like the way that his memories are surfacing tracks so closely that the counselor believes that he would have had to research
Like how this type of memory loss would work for like thousands of hours to fake it so convincingly.
I mean –
To be fair, he apparently had a lot of time off of work, so like...
But she doesn't think that he's capable of hurting Carrie either.
Like, to her, he just seems sad and confused by the whole situation.
But Tracy himself isn't even totally ruling out the possibility that something happened or he was involved.
What?
According to police reports, he tells a doctor that like maybe he was involved in Carrie's disappearance.
He just can't.
Can't remember.
But it's not like he's confessing.
The doctor's read on it is that Tracy is just like afraid of that possibility because he can't remember.
Right.
Now, investigators, despite what doctors are saying, like they're not buying a word of this.
Medical staff can insist all day long that this kind of amnesia is real, that after something traumatic, the brain can shut down to protect itself.
And police still land in the same place.
The timing of this is just too convenient.
Yeah.
But they put Tracy's hospital stay to good use and they finally get a search warrant for the house.
Wait, what have they been doing this whole time?
I don't know why this part took so long, but by the time they get in there, Tracy had already done some redecorating.
So, you know, because they waited, he had swapped out their barely used mattress for a waterbed.
Never mind that they had redone that whole bedroom like months earlier.
Never mind that Carrie hated waterbeds.
He had talked about getting the carpets cleaned, too.
But you can't scrub a whole house.
And detectives cover every inch with a camera rolling.
We actually got the video of this.
Now, you don't see much that's like, you know, incriminating.
And the walkthrough is almost entirely silent as they pan across a very lived in house frozen in time.
Highlighting.
Anything that they think is important, like a Hustler magazine that hit newsstands after Carrie vanished with an article about a hitman who refused a polygraph.
And a couple of shotguns in the basement, one loaded.
They also scrape a red, sandy residue off the ceiling of Tracy's truck.
They grab some documents.
And in the bedroom, they peel away strips of wallpaper marked with suspicious reddish-brown colored stains.
But more important than what they find is what they can't find.
So remember the $500 that Tracy says Carrie took from their emergency stash on her way out?
That money that they kept in the basement air duct.
It's not there.
I mean, so that tracks the money isn't there.
No, no, not the money.
There is no air duct the hiding spot doesn't even exist and you know what else is missing any sign that carrie was planning to leave it is the opposite
There is the decorated Christmas tree, a half-finished pinecone wreath that she was making, and a long handwritten list of gifts that she still wanted to buy for everyone, including her daughter Megan.
And speaking of Megan, while Tracy is hospitalized, the O'Briens are trying for temporary custody.
But he won't sign off on it.
Who's he?
Like Tracy won't sign off on it.
Like he says that he's just a teenage boy basically and he needs his parents to help him handle this complicated adult situation.
I mean, he doesn't even remember having a child.
So like, why does he have any say in who's taking care of her, where she lives?
Amnesia or not, he's still legally her father.
And so like by the book of the law, that apparently outranks anything that the O'Briens can claim.
So he gets supervised visits, and once he's out of the hospital and back at his parents' place in late January, Megan is with him.
Carrie's family tries to stay in her life, but the few visits they managed were rare, brief, and honestly, awkward.
So within a couple of years, even those stopped.
And they don't just lose Megan.
As time drags on, they also lose faith in the Burlington Police Department.
And I'm not trying to Monday morning quarterback, but during our reporting, I kept noticing this bizarre dichotomy.
On paper, detectives were clearly suspicious of Tracy, but there was a lack of urgency with certain things as if they had already decided that he was telling the truth.
Like, for instance...
A second mortgage, they find out, was taken out on the Kruger home in October of 1989.
We're talking just like months before she goes missing.
And it was taken out in both Carrie and Tracy's names.
The paperwork was slow, so it didn't hit Carrie's social security number until after she vanished.
That was a heart stopper because activity like that like could have signaled that she was actually out there using it.
But then the police like traced it to the loan and they figure like, OK, mystery solved.
But it seemed like they breezed past the obvious question, did Carrie actually sign it?
Yeah.
Did Carrie know about it?
The O'Briens don't think so.
They believe that her signature might have been forged.
But they will probably never know because Burlington PD didn't pull the documents or even bother to talk to the notary.
Well, and they had a forgery suspicion already about the truck paperwork.
Right?
Like, why would you not follow up on this?
It is baffling.
And by the way, the truck is a whole other problem because by the time the department requested those sales documents from the DMV, it was too late.
The originals had been shredded.
So they were stuck with copies of them.
So handwriting analysis were all inconclusive.
You generally can't authenticate a signature off of a copy.
Right.
You know, like how hard it was pressed.
There's like a lot of like specific things.
And paperwork isn't the only thing that was fumbled.
A few months after Carrie vanished, deputies in a neighboring county found bloody men's clothes, including pajamas and a pullover.
This is like 16 miles from Burlington.
Right.
The PJs had two bullet holes near the underarm, and the crime lab determined a gun had been fired at close range.
Now, Carrie's sister thought that the top looked like one that Tracy might wear, and she believed that Carrie sometimes wore his pajamas.
Although I don't think that was ever actually confirmed, to be fair.
Either way, that evidence is gone too.
There is no record of the blood being tested and it doesn't seem like Burlington even kept the evidence.
Oh, and you know what else is gone?
That red sandy substance that police found on the ceiling of Tracy's truck.
But this one is different because we know exactly how it disappeared.
A detective just threw it out.
What?
He said he was cleaning house, getting rid of things that police didn't need for the investigation.
Okay.
Don't need it.
How would he know what they need or don't need?
It's an unsolved case.
And it hadn't been tested.
Like literally.
To be clear.
Anything could be important.
Anything could be relevant.
You know, to add to this, there is a rumor that that same detective was a family friend of the Kruegers, like Tracy's family.
So you can imagine how that sits with the O'Briens.
Especially since, like I said, he tossed it before it was ever tested.
And the family had actually lined up a soil expert to test it.
So the family lined up the soil expert.
Yeah, because they're basically working the case themselves.
They spearheaded search efforts.
They keep an eye on Tracy.
Kathy even puts her prosecutor job on hold and moves home for months to run point on this.
They hire a P.I.
And Carrie's mom collects thousands of signatures petitioning the attorney general to move the case to a different agency.
And they do get some help from the state, but it doesn't sound like it was much of an upgrade.
According to Carrie's sister, Colleen, an agent suggested Carrie ran off to join the circus or the ice capades because women do stuff like that.
You know, Ashley, we've covered a lot of missing persons cases and a lot of those missing persons are women.
Have we ever considered looking at like...
Ice Capades rosters?
We should.
I hadn't thought of it.
What a brilliant idea from this man.
I'm sorry.
I'm assuming it's a man.
Sorry.
But also, what?
I know.
I know.
Now, listen, tips do come in occasionally that will get looked at.
And there actually was one tip about Tracy's brother that I thought was interesting.
Apparently, he had been telling people that Tracy, quote, blew her away.
And when police confront him about this, because you gotta, he admits he said it.
But he swears it was just a tasteless joke.
He agrees to a voice stress test, and I know it's not the most reliable tool, but I think it's worth noting.
They ask him if he helped get rid of Carrie's body.
And if Tracy ever told him that he killed her, he says no to both.
He passes the first one.
Did you help get rid of her body?
He fails the second one.
Did Tracy ever tell you that he killed her?
Hmm.
Now, this next thing isn't like a tip.
In fact, I don't really know what it means.
But every so often, something strange lands in the O'Brien's mailbox.
Most of it's like harmless junk.
But one delivery, they get this fake severed finger.
I'm sorry, what?
Whether this is a sick prank or a real threat, nobody can say.
But even like with this stuff coming in, like nothing moves the needle.
So years pass.
Tracy and Megan get a fresh start eventually a few hours away.
He remarries.
Life keeps moving forward for him.
Well, Carrie just stays frozen in time.
The O'Briens have no doubt that she was murdered.
But Tracy tells Journal Times reporter Jane Ryder that he thinks Carrie is out there somewhere.
Although he still can't remember the disappearance or, like, anything from the decade before it.
So his memory never came back?
He says no.
And...
He blames it on a stroke.
Which, by the way, like to be clear, I said this earlier, but in case you missed it, a stroke was ruled out by the doctors.
I don't get how he's saying anything if it's like all a blank.
Like how do you know she ran off even if you truly don't even remember knowing this woman?
Well, with his memories gone or no memories of his own, he says that he's relying on what his loved ones have told him.
And he basically just doesn't think that he's capable of whatever they're accusing him of.
And listen, his daughter Megan believed that.
I mean, she still does as far as I know.
And listen, honestly, I cannot begin to imagine what it's like to walk in her shoes.
She declined to speak with us for this episode, which I understand because there is no good outcome for her in this case.
And it's not a case to her.
This is her life.
You are innocent until proven guilty.
I don't want to sugarcoat the facts, but try to put yourself in someone else's shoes for just a minute.
She is up against a world where most people don't see this case the way that she does.
And it's not her job to fight.
She has to do what is best for herself.
And I believe that with every fiber of my being.
Like as a mother myself, if I were Carrie, if I were gone, all I would want is for my baby to be okay.
So Megan has to do what will make her be okay.
And listen, she was really little when this happened.
So I don't know if they were even able to talk to her or any of that.
But I know that as she gets older, she does speak with investigators.
Because around 2013, the O'Briens finally got their wish.
A Burlington officer transferred to the Racine County Sheriff's Office and ultimately took Carrie's file with her.
Now, unfortunately, Carrie's mom didn't live to see it.
Neither did her father or some of her siblings.
But at least now there are real resources behind her case and a team ready to dig in.
Like Lieutenant Brian Van Sock.
And if that name rings a bell, it's because we have worked with him before.
He's the reason that you are hearing this story now.
He asked if we would cover it.
The way he sees it, Carrie's family deserves answers.
So to go back to 2013, one of the first things these investigators do is they go back to the people closest to Carrie.
And that means sitting down with Megan.
And she tells them that she barely remembers her mom, but she had a childhood full of love with her dad.
Tracy was a good father, she says, and that's what she has to base things off of.
And according to police reports, the little her dad did share with her about her mom wasn't good.
He told Megan that her mother was cold and uncaring, that she got tired of being a parent and walked out.
And Megan didn't question it.
He rarely brought Carrie up at all beyond that, and Meghan didn't push, so most of what she knows, she has pieced together online.
Meanwhile, the one consistent in her life was her dad, Tracy.
He is the one who took care of her and moved them somewhere new when Burlington got to be too much.
But I will say, that move wasn't random.
They landed in the same spot as Tracy's old counselor, that woman who was so sure that his amnesia was real.
What?
Here is what the Racine County case review report says about that interview with Megan.
Quote, Megan said that Tracy had moved to La Crosse a few years after Carrie went missing to get away from it all.
Also, his therapist slash friend was moving up there and he moved up there to be closer to her.
In fact,
They have homes on the same piece of property to this day.
Megan says she even called the counselor mom for a while.
Okay, and homes on the same property?
Yes, but it does not seem like they were romantically involved.
And just to be clear, she is not the woman that he like went on to marry later.
They described the relationship more like a surrogate family.
But Carrie's family didn't get that kind of place in Megan's life, though.
Tracy told Megan that the O'Briens had stalked and harassed him.
He even claimed that they'd broken in and stolen her mom's wedding ring.
But here is the lie we can outright catch him in.
Because in 2015, on the 26th anniversary of Carrie's disappearance, Tracy speaks with a sergeant and he admits that he pawned both of their rings when he needed cash.
Now, we reached out to Tracy for this episode and he never got back to us.
But I want you to hear him tell his story in his words.
So let me play parts of that 2015 interview for you.
Okay, everyone, the Crime Junkie Summer Collection is now available, but time is running out to shop.
These limited-time summer favorites won't be restocked, so if you've had your eye on the beach towel, the lawyer tote, or a new go-to tea, now is your chance to grab them before they disappear.
Visit shop.audiochuck.com to shop the Crime Junkie Summer Collection before it's gone for
Good my impression is that she was a very wonderful person
Okay and where did you get that impression from
From friends and family okay so where would megan have gotten the impression that she was kind of a cold uncaring and selfish person
Um, that I'm not sure.
I don't know.
You'd have to ask her.
Well, we did ask her.
Mm-hmm.
And she said that that's kind of the impression that you had given her.
Well, I don't know how she interpreted that, and I'm not going to pit myself against my daughter.
Everything I know about the case is after the fact.
Right.
There's nothing, I have no memory from before that.
So everything had to be relearned.
When you were getting a handle back that that was your reality, what were you thinking?
What were your feelings about that?
Um, very overwhelmed.
Okay.
You know, you know,
It was all so new to me.
I mean, just even the fact that I had a wife and child was astounding.
And do you think that you kind of recalled some of that, or is that stuff that you're saying that only people told you?
Well, after I had the stroke and everything, everything that was told me was astounding.
Okay.
I was just baffled because I didn't believe I was at that age.
This is all in your report.
It's all in the interview.
I know.
I know that it's all in interviews, but it's been 26 years.
I'm sure that you've been asked this question repeatedly through the years.
What do you think happened?
Why would she leave?
We don't know.
Looking back and talking to people after the fact, I think there were some psychological issues that she was suffering from.
Okay.
I think maybe manic depressive.
And granted, psychologists cannot diagnose a person without
Okay.
But what do you think happened to her after she left?
I mean, she's never used her Social Security number.
She's never used a credit card.
She's never gotten a driver's license.
I don't know, but obviously if she did, she didn't use that given name.
I mean, at that time it was so easy to do.
My feeling is if she were dead, somewhere that body would have shown up someplace or another.
Somewhere there would have to be a body.
Now, again, we know that doctors confirmed Tracy did not have a stroke in 1990.
But that is the story he's sticking with.
So investigators decide that they're going to put this to the test again.
They hand his old hospital records to a new neurologist for a fresh read.
And she agrees with the 1990s clinicians.
No stroke, no medical reason for any of it.
But she disagrees in another part.
She thinks that he could be faking.
A forensic psychiatrist goes even further.
To him, this all sounds like BS.
Sure, trauma can do a number on a person, but it doesn't just reset a grown man's memory back to his teens and keep it blank for now decades.
And the amnesia isn't the only thing back under a microscope.
Because Tracy's also still leaning on this idea that Carrie was in the middle of a depressive episode.
A manic depressive, he said.
Right.
Though these days we would call that bipolar disorder.
And remember, after she went missing, he had brought police a note from Carrie's physician saying that she was being treated for depression and she might be having suicidal thoughts, right?
Like that's what cranked everything into high gear.
Well, guess what?
Apparently, nobody ever asked that doctor if he actually wrote that note because when new investigators go check, he's like, no, definitely not.
I never treated anyone for depression.
But Tracy won't let this idea go.
Even before he lost his memory, he was telling Carrie's family that she was depressed.
And then there's the counselor who would go on to live on the same property as Tracy.
Back in 1990, she told police that she had Carrie's diary and that it showed a lot of anger towards Carrie's family, her mom specifically, going all the way back to when Carrie was younger.
And when is this diary from?
That's the thing.
Tracy actually hands the diary over himself eventually.
Like he wants police to have it.
He thinks it proves that Carrie was unhappy with her family.
But when they look at the diary, it's from Carrie's senior year of high school.
So we have grown older.
Mm hmm.
But I would love your read on this.
I just had a senior in high school in my home.
Everything is drama.
And I know you know this.
We were reading my, granted, sophomore journal on the plane when we were on tour.
Not senior year, but pretty damn close.
Mm-hmm.
And there is literally our favorite part.
There's one page that says like, oh my God, I had the best day ever.
Things are amazing.
My life's going to be amazing.
I am like, I am on such an upward trajectory.
And you literally turn the page.
And what does it say, Ashley Flowers?
I...
I, without any reservations, wish I was dead.
In like sharpie laughing.
That's the only thing on the page.
And then you just turn the page and you're like, so I was talking to so-and-so the other day.
Can you imagine if like I go missing and Eric takes that to where he's like, obviously she wanted to die.
Like that's what?
It's bonkers.
So, the note from the doctor is not real.
Stroke's ruled out.
Stroke is ruled out.
The amnesia is now in serious doubt.
Which, to be honest, has been for me since day one, but okay.
Yeah.
And still, Tracy won't budge from the theory that he has pushed since day one.
His wife left on her own.
The way I see it.
There are two versions of Tracy that cannot be reconciled.
One murdered Carrie, faked amnesia, then raised their daughter on the cruelest possible lie, that her own mom abandoned her.
The other is a man who is innocent but has been unfairly living under a cloud of suspicion ever since she disappeared.
But across that divide is Megan.
Who's slowly reconnected with some of Carrie's siblings and they have gotten to show her a different side of Carrie not a mom who got tired of motherhood and left but one who loved her daughter more than anything
I mean, talk about a rock and a hard place for her.
I mean, either Tracy killed her mom and lied to her her entire life or Carrie really did choose to leave.
Or not so fast, there is a third option that somebody else could have murdered Carrie.
And that might sound like out of the blue, like some kind of Hail Mary password, like sure, anything's possible.
But is it probable?
Well, hold your horses.
Because it turns out there was a man who lived just a few doors down from the Kruegers who police believe may have been a serial killer.
Okay, everyone, the Crime Junkie Summer Collection is now available, but time is running out to shop.
These limited-time summer favorites won't be restocked, so if you've had your eye on the beach towel, the lawyer tote, or a new go-to tea, now is your chance to grab them before they disappear.
Visit shop.audiochuck.com to shop the Crime Junkie Summer Collection before it's gone for good.
I want to back up because this thread started decades ago, back in January of 1990.
We're talking weeks, a month tops after Carrie disappeared.
That is when police got a call from a state parole slash probation agent.
She had been watching the news segment about Carrie when this familiar face just like flashed across the screen.
It was Carrie's close friend and neighbor, this woman named Audrey.
And this agent knew Audrey because she was shacked up with a violent felon on this person's caseload, this 48-year-old man named Philip Andrew Fox.
And Phil was no joke.
His record stretched back to the early 1960s in California when he shot and killed his own uncle during an argument.
Then, according to the Torrance Herald, he abducted a teen at gunpoint and he got caught.
But while out on bond, he tried to rob a gas station and shot the attendant who survived.
Now, he pled guilty to manslaughter and attempted robbery and got out of prison in the early 1970s.
But by the time Phil moved in down the block from Carrie, he was a suspect in five other murders, including his wife's.
She, his wife, had been killed in what looked like a robbery in Dayton, Ohio in 1988.
But police strongly suspected Phil and his nephew because nothing about the robbery seemed random.
Phil's wife managed this fast food restaurant and she had been robbed before while making a deposit.
And she told friends that she thought Phil was behind it.
So her company moved her to a new location.
But then months later...
She was dead, shot multiple times in the chest and face.
And by the way, no one is pulling this stuff out of thin air.
Phil's nephew actually admitted to pulling the trigger on what he said was Phil's orders.
But the confession got tossed out on a technicality.
Now, the O'Briens didn't know most of this back then.
The world was a wild place without the internet and your ability to Google your neighbors.
But Phil was a hard guy to miss.
He was quiet, but he dressed loud.
He and Audrey spent time at the Kruger's.
And Carrie's sister Molly still remembers his three-piece suits and the rings that he wore on every finger.
But it wasn't Phil's personality that made the parole officer wary.
Not even his criminal record.
It was what Phil did on December 5th, the last day anyone saw Carrie alive.
This officer said that when she called Phil, he sounded nervous and he said that he had to get to Virginia right away to take care of his mother.
But then a couple of days later, that story shifted.
Now it was Ohio and Virginia for like some business deal.
So Phil left that night, came back within the week, and then spent months bouncing between Wisconsin and other states.
Carrie's brother Pat told us that Phil and Audrey even showed up at his parents' house around New Year's while the family was deep in the search for Carrie.
Now, Phil eventually landed in West Virginia, where he married an older woman with serious health problems, sealing the deal with his dead wife's wedding ring.
And before long, her kids were convinced that Phil was after the family's money, allegedly poisoning their mother to get it.
And they all noticed the same pattern, like she would get violently ill, go into the hospital and recover, and then crash again the moment she came home to Phil.
She eventually had a heart attack, survived though, and after Phil attacked one of her daughters, she divorced him.
Then he took a job at an adult daycare.
Do they not run background checks?
And a 63-year-old woman went missing from that same center.
Phil wasn't on staff by then, but he had worked there while she was a resident.
So, I mean, they probably crossed paths, which puts him on police's radar for that too.
Now, in 2016, Phil got arrested in West Virginia on something totally unrelated, an arson and insurance fraud scheme.
And that is when Racine County sees their opening.
With Phil already in trouble, they make this trip down south to ask him about Carrie face to face.
But he's no help.
He claims he barely remembers her or Tracy, that it was all just so long ago.
Still, he swears he never hurt Carrie and turns it around on police, accusing them of trying to just like pin another crime on him.
But Racine has one last move to play, an extraordinary offer for him.
If Phil will show them where Carrie's body is, they will make his arson and fraud charges go away.
And they won't charge him with anything related to Carrie's death.
That's like two major get out of jail free cards.
It's a sweetheart deal.
Immunity in Carrie's case is no real gain, right?
Like he's not like charged with anything there.
But like to make the fraud and arson stuff go away, like that would be huge for him.
But through his attorney...
Phil turns that deal down.
He says, look, I wish I could take this deal.
I wish I could help.
I would if I could, but I didn't kill Carrie, so I don't know where she is.
And that's when the Phil Fox door swings shut, or at least on this case anyway.
If he was involved...
I think he probably would have jumped at the chance to help himself.
But if Phil does have any answers about Carrie, those died with him in 2025, which for law enforcement today puts them right back where they started.
Tracy.
Tracy.
As investigators Sherritt told us, every road leads back to him.
Carrie's surviving siblings feel the same way.
They don't doubt that Phil was dangerous, but to them, he was a red herring.
And the real threat to Carrie was inside her house, not a few doors down.
And most everyone seems to agree with them.
At least the people we spoke with.
They just can't settle on a how or a why.
Some wonder if Carrie's flu-like symptoms meant that she could have been slowly poisoned over time.
Or...
Maybe there was a fight that boiled over.
Her sister Molly overheard them arguing that last weekend it was low and tense.
Maybe Carrie found out about the truck that was bought in her name or his troubles at work.
Maybe she confronted him.
But that's all speculation.
Her remains have never been found.
So for now, no one can prove what happened or who's responsible.
But Carrie's case is still active.
Officially, she is a missing person, even though she's been legally declared dead.
And since nearly every Tracy-related theory centers on his truck or the Kruger's house, that is where investigators have largely focused their recent efforts.
They have searched the family's former home, and they've even tracked down Tracy's old Ford pickup.
They actually brought out the, like, goodest little boy with the best little sniffer to check out the truck.
This is a cadaver dog, mind you.
His name is Taser.
You have a picture of him.
I will do you one better.
The sheriff's office actually gave us the footage of like when they brought him out.
You can tell how excited Taser is to be on the job.
He's like circling around the truck and right at the front wheel well, he alerts.
He's letting his handler know like, hey, I can smell human remains here.
Lieutenant Van Sock called this hit the strongest indication he's ever seen.
And Taser does it twice more in the same spot.
Meanwhile, cadaver dogs also alerted inside the house.
Once in the stairs leading up to the attic and then again down in the basement.
And this past January, there was this tip from a guy who used to work for a flooring company.
And that tip sent them back to the same basement.
So get a load of this.
Around the time Carrie vanished, this contractor guy, he was sent to Burlington to lay carpet in a basement for Tracy Krueger.
When he got down to the basement, he says he saw something odd.
There was this like fresh patch of concrete about three feet by six feet.
And Tracy told him that it was like drainage repair.
But drain tiles run along the walls like this guy knows.
And this was like smacked up in the middle of the room.
Now, the carpet guy reported this to Burlington PD back in 1991.
But they brushed it off at the time because the company's records dated the job to November 1989, which is nearly a month before Carrie disappeared.
But here's the thing.
Even decades later, the tipster recalls what happened vividly.
And he still remembers how antsy Tracy seemed to just like get the floor covered.
How Megan wandered downstairs and got into his tools.
And when he hollered for Tracy to come grab her before she hurt herself, Tracy apologized and explained that he was busy cleaning out his bedroom because he was having a new bed delivered.
But Tracy didn't buy the waterbed until after Carrie was already gone.
Which makes investigators question those company records.
Maybe they're wrong.
Maybe the November date is when Tracy like first called for an estimate or maybe it's when he booked the job.
Who knows?
All they know is they need to go back to the basement, which they do.
This time they bring a cadaver dog and ground penetrating radar.
The dog alerts in multiple places, including two in the basement, and the radar gets a hit near one of them.
Something is there just a few feet beneath the concrete.
Watching it unfold, Lieutenant Van Sock and investigator Susan Conley are on pins and needles.
Years of bad leads, dead ends, searches that turn up nothing, but like here they are possibly standing right above Carrie.
Yeah.
But when they pull up the carpet, the floor is solid.
There's no patch.
There's no repair.
There is nothing that looks like what the man described.
So they bring the guy back to the house just to like see it for himself.
And he takes one look and he goes, well, like, well, there's your problem.
This isn't the basement that I worked in.
Then, sir, what basement did you work in?
That is the mystery everyone's trying to solve right now.
It's part of the reason that they were willing to share so much information with us so we could pass it on to crime junkies.
They think that there might be a house out there that they never knew to look at.
Maybe a relative's place, somewhere that police had no reason to search.
If this guy's memory is solid, that slab of concrete is out there somewhere.
We just don't know where.
Okay, but how does that align with the whole Tracy upstairs clearing out the bedroom thing?
I know.
That only makes sense if it's their house.
I keep spiraling on that.
The bed says that he's in the Kruger house.
The floor says he wasn't.
Both can't be true.
So Lieutenant Van Sock went and checked the basements at Tracy's.
Parents house grandparents places start with those
No match
He even sends the contractor photos of another relative's house
Still nothing
Wherever that basement is they haven't found it
So i had an idea
I was like, have him like sketch out the layout of the basement that he remembers.
And I actually have it to show all of the crime junkies.
I need everyone to spread this far and wide.
It'll be on the blog post.
I'm going to put it on social too so it'll be easy to share.
Maybe this will jog someone's memory.
Because it does not match the Kruger's basement.
So their basement is like a square that is like cordoned off into like four sections with areas of carpet, concrete and vinyl tile.
And the stairs kind of come like right down in the middle of the room.
Okay.
The basement that the contractor remembers is simpler.
Like, there are just two areas.
There is concrete on one side, carpet on the other.
The patch he keeps coming back to is inside that carpeted half.
And the stairs aren't in the middle at all.
They're like in the very corner with a washer and dryer and sink right beside them.
Like I said, I'm going to put these pictures up everywhere, blog, social.
I need you guys to share them.
And I need everyone's help with one more thing.
So Tracy's whole story hangs on this idea that Carrie's supervisor or someone called her that Tuesday night.
And for years, they always thought that those records wouldn't exist, like the phone records of that, because the phone company only recorded long distance calls, right?
Right.
And the manager's call would have been local.
He was like right there.
Except...
What they learned recently is that back then, the phone company drew its billing lines by municipal boundaries, not the distance.
So two neighbors could land in separate zones.
They sound like how it was zoned.
Yeah, and a call between them could count as long distance, meaning it would show up on the phone bill.
Mm-hmm.
The problem is...
If that's you or if you know somebody, this is your time to shine.
You could help the Racine County Sheriff's Office solve a case.
And they want to hear from you.
Actually, they would appreciate any information you have about Carrie.
And so you can call them at 262-930-8254.
And you can also call the Crime Stoppers of Racine County if you want to remain anonymous at 888-636-9330.
You can find all the source material for this episode on our website, CrimeJunkie.com.
And you can follow us on Instagram at Crime Junkie Podcast.
We'll be back next week with a brand new episode.
Crime Junkie is an AudioChuck production.
I think Chuck would approve.
When Danny's abandoned car was found, investigators thought that they were dealing with a missing persons case.
But then another attack happened.
And suddenly, the whole investigation became something much bigger.
It's one of those cases where every new clue changes what you think you know.
For the full story, listen to The Adirondacks on Park Predators wherever you get your podcasts.
