Show Notes
This week, we’re resurfacing an important old episode for you because we just learned more information about a person of interest who’s never been ruled out. His name is Mark Douglas Burns, and he's a terrifying individual. He came up in a Crime Junkie episode we dropped in the fan club in which Burns confessed to murdering a young mom in her home back in 2001. And the overlaps between him and Tonya’s last known movements cannot be ignored.
Re-listen to today's episode closely... and then go check out the episode on Sue Gunderson Higgins in the Crime Junkie Fan club and tell me what you think. Could Mark be the missing link?
Tonya Teske was a free-spirited 18-year-old who chose to live her life on the open road by hitchhiking around the mountain west. On August 13, 1997, she was last seen in Montana at a truck stop before her body was discovered two days later on the side of a highway in Idaho.
More from The Deck
Nearly 26 years after the eight-year-old vanished from his second-floor apartment in Clearwater, Florida, his whereabouts remain a mystery. Zachary’s case is Florida’s longest-running AMBER Alert. It is also a story we covered on Crime Junkie more than seven years ago.
When 15-year-old Tawnya first vanished into thin air on a cold winter’s night in 1996, law enforcement considered her a runaway, despite her family believing otherwise. Months later, answers did come… tragic ones… along with plenty of questions about some of Tawnya’s friends and the circumstances of what happened to her that night.
For more than three decades, the question of who killed 26-year-old Mary Kathleen Rodriguez has hung over the town of West Odessa, Texas. Known as Kathleen to those who loved her, the live-in nanny was found brutally beaten to death inside the home of the couple she worked for.
49-year-old Daniel Traina was hard to miss. The Six-foot-four happy-go-lucky guy was always bopping around the West Palm Beach suburb of Lake Park. … well known to bartenders, store clerks, and neighbors.
Thirteen-year-old Ilene Misheloff normally walked the same path home from school most days. And on January 30, 1989, all signs indicate she took that same route… and ALMOST made it home. But something… or someone intervened. And somehow, with all the traffic and houses that lined her route, no one saw the moment that Ilene Misheloff disappeared.