The Dry Shoe on Birchmore Lane: What It Hid for 31 Years

The Dry Shoe on Birchmore Lane: What It Hid for 31 Years

A dry pink canvas sneaker with a hand-drawn yellow daisy and a folded $400 bill tucked under the insole sat alone on a concrete platform two nights after a storm - and the house behind it had been empty for weeks. Thirty-one years later a partial fingerprint from that scene finally gets run through the right database, but what did the shoe, the money and the empty house really hide?

In this episode, we lay out the sequence of events from the morning the shoe was found to the disappearance and return of seven-year-old Megan Murphy, the anonymous $8,000 demand, and the overlooked decisions that shaped the investigation - could one small, dry shoe change everything about what was missed?

Person: Megan Murphy Date: June 22, 1991 Location: Ridgemont subdivision, Denton, Ohio Event: Disappearance and return (13 days) Amount: $8,000 demand in plain paper note

- The shoe found on July 14, 1991 was a size five pink canvas sneaker with a yellow daisy drawn on the toe. - Under that shoe’s insole were four $20 bills totaling $400, folded flat against the sole. - Megan Murphy, age seven, disappeared from her front yard on June 22, 1991 and came home thirteen days later. - An unpostmarked plain white-paper note demanding $8,000 was left in the Murphy mailbox two days after Megan disappeared, with a specific park, table, night, and an underlined warning. - On July 3, Dennis Murphy withdrew $8,400 from two accounts at First Federal Savings - $8,000 plus an extra $400.

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