Pod Insights The Binge Cases: Doctor Billions Killer Story | 4. Dead Body Waking About this episode Now Lyndal thinks she knows who is responsible for Sabrina’s disappearance. So she decides to confront him. Alone.
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0:30 Speaker 01 Listen to all episodes of Killer Story ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page, or visit getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen. The Binge: Feed your true crime obsession.
0:51 Speaker 01 The Binge.
1:00 Speaker 01 Previously on Killer Story.
1:05 Speaker 02 That's when I noticed the teardrop, a bloody tear.
1:09 Speaker 03 This woman tells me that her niece is missing.
1:13 Speaker 04 She goes, I just want someone to love me.
1:15 Speaker 03 And they told me, this nice man who seemed to be managing her career, Bobby Sue, that was like, you know, Christmas has arrived.
1:23 Speaker 04 She said that he tried to control what she did.
1:26 Speaker 05 And I told her, like, this guy's kind of full of shit.
1:29 Speaker 03 I looked down, it was just looked like a document, a boring document. But then I saw $400,000.
1:36 Speaker 06 And at that point, I said, okay, go for it, but be careful.
1:43 Speaker 01 This is Killer Story. I'm Steve Fishman, episode four, Dead Body Waking.
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3:05 Speaker 01 A few weeks ago, documents came over the fax at the current affair office and completely changed the narrative. For the past year, Lyndall Marx had been investigating the disappearance of Sabrina Kidd. And now, the fax delivered a copy of an application for a $400,000 life insurance policy on 17-year-old Sabrina. The beneficiary? Sabrina's landlord, Tom Preston.
3:36 Speaker 01 For months, this story has been Lyndall's clandestine operation. Now she believes she has a game-changing document in her hand.
3:46 Speaker 03 Here it is. Here's the motive.
3:50 Speaker 01 You don't need a degree in tabloid news to understand this motive: greed. One of the oldest in the book.
3:59 Speaker 03 This wasn't hearsay. This wasn't an interview. This was actual documentation, proof, that would take this to the absolute next level.
4:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, Lyndle's thrilled. We hear it in her voice. And we're rooting for her. But let's pause for a second. Lyndle says it's proof. But proof of what? It doesn't prove that Sabrina was murdered. It actually doesn't even prove Sabrina's dead. And without that, it's difficult to accuse someone of murder. Lyndle's aware of this.
4:36 Speaker 03 We didn't even know, you know? She still might just be missing.
4:40 Speaker 01 So Lyndle needs to locate Sabrina or her body. She doesn't have the resources to do that on her own. She needs help. The help of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. That's right. The same cops who've been indifferent to this case for years.
5:02 Speaker 05 I happened to be there, so they said, well, here, you're handling it.
5:08 Speaker 01 This is Detective Robert Leonard. He's the cop who's about to be interviewed by the reporter from New York with the funny accent. And he's not just any cop. He also happens to be one of the cops who looked at the case of the missing teenager four years ago and then dropped it. He's at his desk at police headquarters. He's wearing his usual billowy white shirt and thin black tie. An undertaker's uniform, more or less. And he's watching Lyndle march toward him with a film crew in tow. Camera, sound, the whole Hollywood works. Lyndle spots Detective Leonard across the floor of the detective unit. A big, open-plan office with bright lights overhead,
5:53 Speaker 01 which aren't particularly good for makeup on TV. A couple dozen desks are spread out. Phones ring.
6:00 Speaker 03 Homicide detectives all working in their little stations.
6:04 Speaker 01 Lyndle walks toward the detective and takes a seat in front of him.
6:08 Speaker 03 He kind of had short, cropped brown hair or a suit.
6:12 Speaker 01 Her first impression? Not promising.
6:16 Speaker 03 He kind of looked at me in like silence. He's one of these people that didn't say a lot.
6:24 Speaker 01 All right, so Detective Leonard is, let's call it, relaxed. And then, he's not expecting much. He did a look at Sabrina's case file when she first disappeared. To him, back then, Sabrina looked like a runaway.
6:38 Speaker 05 Just from her... Past history, you know, her arrest and then not wanting to stay with her mother, coming back to Las Vegas. That just kind of made it seem like she was, what would you call, fly by night, flitty? I mean.
6:54 Speaker 01 Runaways, you see a lot of them in Las Vegas. And Detective Leonard, he's busy with murder cases, thank you very much. So Detective Leonard stares absently at this journalist with the Australian accent, who, for some reason, has come to talk about this dusty old case.
7:16 Speaker 05 I meet her for the first time, and besides not being able to understand her, I mean, she talks 100 miles an hour.
7:26 Speaker 01 But Lindell has come with a plan to get his attention.
7:30 Speaker 03 I told him that a nurse had gone out to do a physical. He kind of raised one eyebrow.
7:37 Speaker 05 My first reaction was, oh, yeah, who'd said that?
7:41 Speaker 01 Meanwhile, Lindell's fingering some papers sitting in her lap.
7:45 Speaker 05 And then all of a sudden, she throws out this copy of the policy at me. I didn't know anything about this.
7:54 Speaker 01 His head swivels from the documents in his hands to look at Lindell. Some cops would resent being set up this way. Detective Leonard's detective brain switches on.
8:05 Speaker 05 Why in the world would someone who's not a relative or anything be taking out a $400,000 insurance policy on a teenage girl that, I mean, it was, it became very apparent that there was something wrong.
8:28 Speaker 01 Lindell got his attention, and now Detective Leonard climbs on board. He wants to know more. He wants to work together.
8:36 Speaker 05 She had put so much time and effort into it.
8:40 Speaker 01 I thought we were almost like a team at that time. They are an odd pairing. The morose detective.
8:49 Speaker 03 He doesn't show his emotions and he's, you know, just goes along, nothing stresses him out. He's at one level the whole time.
8:59 Speaker 01 And the speed talking Lindell. She is just bubbly all the time. I don't know how you can be bubbly like that all the time. Truthfully, Detective Leonard kinda likes Lindell's cheerful personality. Plus, she's already done so much work on the case. And he appreciates that, too. Did you ever say to yourself, why is this girl Lindell so interested in this case? I really couldn't understand it. Detective Leonard doesn't know about Lindell's personal stake, about the attack when she was a teenager. She keeps that to herself. And Leonard has things that he doesn't mention to his new partner Lindell.
9:43 Speaker 01 In his career, he's investigated over 200 murders. All those murders, he hates them. And he hates the murderers. But he bottles up that emotion. Well, you take it home, but you can't, can't discuss it. I mean, it's with you all the time. But you can't, you don't never talk about your cases. It just wasn't done.
10:08 Speaker 01 So. If you did anything, you go to the bar after work and you drink with your friends and try to forget.
10:20 Speaker 01 Okay, back to the investigation.
10:25 Speaker 01 She's like a bulldog. She just grabbed hold of it and wasn't gonna let go. The bulldog Lindell was definitely the team leader. Most of my stuff was just following up on leads that she would give me. So Lindell gives Detective Leonard his marching orders. Get me a body.
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11:59 Speaker 01 How do you find a missing girl? The first thing you want to do is to find the girl. If you can't find the girl, then, well, maybe there is a body. I mean, you were very tenacious on finding. Well, I was being pressed to do that by somebody else, too. He means by Lyndle. Um, I had a number of sources where I could get information from credit bureaus and Social Security and things like that, and I utilized all that I could. Nothing turned up. How about arrests since she disappeared?
12:43 Speaker 01 So she would probably be arrested, just like most of them girls were at that time. Checking, though.
12:52 Speaker 02 Came up with nothing. And that would raise your interest as to how she could have been gone for four years and not had contact with anybody or anything and be out and about still.
13:09 Speaker 01 Detective Leonard is saying Sabrina couldn't be out and about still.
13:15 Speaker 02 So then you start looking for bodies.
13:18 Speaker 01 The stakes are high here. If Detective Leonard doesn't find one, the case collapses. If he can't locate a dead body, it's unlikely a prosecutor will pursue a murder case. As they say in the murder business, no body, no murder. The detective gets on the phone, calls sheriff departments in and around Las Vegas.
13:43 Speaker 02 I checked, uh, nothing was shown that would have possibly been heard.
13:49 Speaker 01 So Detective Leonard expands the search area.
13:53 Speaker 02 There was nothing on our side, so then we checked with the Mojave County Sheriff's Office.
13:59 Speaker 01 That's in Arizona, just across the Colorado River from Nevada. And after weeks of swings and misses, a hit.
14:08 Speaker 02 Some fishermen had recovered a body, taken it over to one of the, um, uh, sites on the Arizona side of the river and then contacted authorities. Love me a fisherman. I've never thrown a fishing line in that river.
14:25 Speaker 00 Technicalities.
14:27 Speaker 01 Tom and Linda Percival, whose voices you heard in episode one, had come upon a dead female body while boating on the Colorado River. At the spot they found her, the Colorado River flows along the border between Nevada and Arizona.
14:44 Speaker 02 So anything that's found on the river could go to either Jitter Stick.
14:48 Speaker 04 Could be either one.
14:49 Speaker 02 So I think they just sent the closest one.
14:53 Speaker 01 Which was in Arizona, so a Nevada Jane Doe had been hidden away in Arizona.
15:00 Speaker 03 I remember getting the call from Detective Leonard, who said a body had been recovered from the river just days after this girl was reported missing. And I'm thinking, oh my God, this could be Sabrina.
15:16 Speaker 01 Could be.
15:17 Speaker 02 I had to identify the body as being Sabrina.
15:20 Speaker 05 Sabrina's in order to go to our case.
15:23 Speaker 01 That was the next challenge, identify the body.
15:27 Speaker 01 Detective Leonard showed the boaters photos of Sabrina, but they couldn't identify her. Uh oh. There are other ways to ID a body. At autopsy, a doctor had removed a portion of the jaw to check against dental records. Detective Leonard contacted Sabrina's dentist, but Sabrina hadn't had an appointment since age 12, when she had braces. Bobby Sue wasn't going to let Sabrina into the world with crooked teeth. But Sabrina's dentist said he couldn't be certain of a match.
16:03 Speaker 03 The dental records were incredibly disappointing.
16:07 Speaker 01 They tried DNA, but techniques were rudimentary back then, and a pair of water lock hands didn't yield the quality needed. Another avenue is fingerprints. At autopsy back then, the practice was to cut off the hands below the wrist and store them until needed, which means that in some gray storage locker somewhere, hands float in jars waiting to be ID'd. First thing Detective Leonard puts the prints from the Jane Doe through a national database of fingerprints.
16:41 Speaker 05 They did not come up with any matches for the fingerprints. She was a juvenile, so that would negate a lot of her possibility of having been fingerprinted.
16:53 Speaker 01 Sabrina had been arrested for shoplifting, but as a juvenile, juvenile records are closed. And so Lindell is distraught. Will another perpetrator skate free? Without identification, is this as far as Sabrina's case can go?
17:12 Speaker 01 Bubbly Lindell turns fearful.
17:15 Speaker 03 Then I'm going to be silenced. I'm going to be silenced because, and I'm going to lose the story. These are the things that are going through my mind. How am I going to do this? How am I going to tell this story?
17:28 Speaker 01 The team of Lyndall and Detective Leonard convene once again at the sprawling Las Vegas homicide offices. Every avenue they've walked down has hit a dead end. Any ideas, anyone? Detective Leonard takes out some photos of the bloated body. Perhaps there's a clue there. They leaf through them.
17:51 Speaker 03 I remember just how hideous it is seeing the bloated body and bloated face and bits of skin that's just been eaten by various fish. Yeah. And how hideous that is to see a beautiful young girl has become this misshapen, bloated blob, barely human. A drowning, I think, is probably one of the worst things to see.
18:21 Speaker 01 For once, the hard-bitten detective chimes in.
18:25 Speaker 05 Well, it's obvious you haven't seen a burned victim then.
18:30 Speaker 01 So flipping through the photos turns out to be a diversion, horrifying and kind of intimate, but no help in identifying the body. They need something else.
18:41 Speaker 05 She kept talking about, was there some way to get fingerprints or something? We had no records of any fingerprints. They had no place to look.
18:51 Speaker 01 Or did they? Lyndall wonders, how about the mother, Bobby Sue? She must have something with Sabrina's fingerprint on it. The detective's view? All right, Lyndall, have at it. So she calls Bobby Sue in Texas.
19:09 Speaker 01 In the days after Sabrina went missing, her mother, Bobby Sue, kept in touch with Preston. He told her he couldn't understand why Sabrina would take off, and he wanted to help find her. He returned Sabrina's suitcase, one of two of her suitcases, on a Greyhound bus. And that suitcase was now sitting in Bobby's mother's home in Texas.
19:34 Speaker 03 I phoned them and I said, "Have you got anything, anything she may have touched?"
19:38 Speaker 01 It had to be a clean print, preserved unsmudged for the past four years. A long shot, to be sure. Bobby rummaged through the suitcase.
19:49 Speaker 03 They found this little math certificate.
19:52 Speaker 01 Sabrina's math achievement certificate, received when she was 13 years old. She obviously cherished it, a sign, however distant, that someone once saw potential in her. Sabrina had slipped it into a plastic sleeve in her photo album. She packed it in one of the two suitcases she traveled with, the one that happened to have made it to Texas.
20:16 Speaker 03 We didn't know, would it have a fingerprint or not.
20:20 Speaker 01 Detective Leonard sent the certificate to the lab. Technicians turned to the disembodied hands from the Jane Doe. That previous fingerprint wasn't usable any longer, and they faced a new challenge. An aged and waterlogged hand won't yield a usable fingerprint. But you could peel off the skin, slip it into a gloved hand, and usually get a clear print. You had one shot per finger.
20:50 Speaker 03 You know, the skin had been eaten by various creatures in the water and had been scaled back. So the skin had been really interfered with.
21:03 Speaker 03 But they were a perfect match for one clean fingerprint on that math certificate.
21:15 Speaker 01 Lyndle was beside herself. Detective Leonard raised an eyebrow. Very professional.
21:22 Speaker 01 Doesn't get carried away with emotion. But that couldn't last forever. Detective Leonard is in his seventies now. Things have changed nowadays. Nowadays, I think you're saying you're emotional every few minutes. Yes, and I don't know why.
21:43 Speaker 01 Every few moments, his eyes well up with tears and his voice gets full, maybe making up for lost time. That's been suggested. The Sabrina case was maybe one of those he was making up for. Soon after, he'd retire. And I was basically, to be honest with you, just sick of people and how they act.
22:10 Speaker 01 All I wanted to do was get away.
22:15 Speaker 01 After they found the body and identified it, now the investigation shifts. Now they can ask the crucial questions. What happened to Sabrina? Did she drown? Was she the victim of foul play? Was there in fact a murder? The ID'd body came with an autopsy report. This is Lori Miller. You heard her at the top of episode two. She reviewed the report. There wasn't any water in her lungs. She was she was dead before she entered the water. Had she drowned, her lungs would have been filled with water. A hyoid bone is a little like U-shaped bone.
22:55 Speaker 01 It is positioned in such a way that it would have to be a fluke or a really freaky accident for it to break other than someone's hands or a rope or something being wrapped around that area and it being compressed to the point that it actually fractures. She had died of a manual strangulation. This was no longer a missing person case. A full-blown murder investigation.
23:28 Speaker 01 Now, a grim duty informs Sabrina's mother and aunt. They'd clung to the hope that Sabrina had been kidnapped and was just missing. Lynda volunteered to make the call. Detective Leonard was happy to let her.
23:45 Speaker 03 They were absolutely devastated because now they knew that their daughter, their niece, was dead. And at the same time, I think there was a relief that after so many years, they knew, they had closure. I think, I think there's nothing worse than not knowing.
24:08 Speaker 01 Lynda thought of Bobby Sue and of TV. She flew Bobby Sue to Kingsman, Arizona, to the little cemetery, where the unidentified body of a young woman had been interned with a prayer for the deceased, since she had no name. At the gravesite, Bobby Sue trudged toward a headstone marked with the name Jane Doe. Tape was placed over it, and on the tape Bobby wrote one word: Sabrina. As she wrote, you could see her pink fingernails, just like Sabrina's. It was heartbreaking. And Bobby Sue's heart did break.
24:50 Speaker 01 Now she knew with cold certainty she'd never speak to her baby again.
24:59 Speaker 04 Bobby pretty much destroyed herself after Sabrina died. She really got heavy into drugs and everything else.
25:08 Speaker 01 That's Dewanna, Bobby Sue's niece, Sabrina's cousin. She'd moved in with Bobby Sue after Sabrina disappeared.
25:16 Speaker 04 Every time she cried, she blamed her own self for abandoning her daughter and not taking care of her daughter.
25:21 Speaker 01 What would she actually say? What were her words?
25:24 Speaker 04 "I am a failure. I failed as a mother. I let my daughter die."
25:28 Speaker 01 So much for the benefits of closure.
25:33 Speaker 01 The investigation didn't have closure either. The biggest questions were still unanswered. Who killed Sabrina and how to prove it? Detective Leonard had questioned people like the dodgy ex-boyfriend. Nothing came of those interviews. Everything he'd heard led Detective Leonard to target one suspect. It all pointed towards Preston. However, there wasn't a lot. Everything we had was circumstantial. Meaning the evidence didn't directly prove a thing. You could infer, you could draw conclusions from what they had, but there was no forensic evidence.
26:15 Speaker 01 Nobody had witnessed the crime. Detective Leonard brought the case to the district attorney, said he thought Preston was the killer. He thought it was a prosecutable case. He would never actually say that. He thought he was guilty. Lindell was nervous. They'd come so far. They had the insurance policy, but that too just created suspicion, not certainty. Lindell needed something more than inference and suspicion, or else these months of investigation could be a waste. Lindell contemplated, in her mind, there is one person who knows everything.
27:00 Speaker 01 She calls him.
27:01 Speaker 03 Totally conned him.
27:03 Speaker 01 And Preston agrees to meet her at a diner. She's going to lunch with a man who may be a killer.
27:23 Speaker 01 For Lindell, Tom Preston is the face of evil. She wants justice for Sabrina and by proxy for herself. So her hope is to entice Preston to divulge information that could be used against him.
27:39 Speaker 03 I wanted to hear what he had to say. The first time I spoke to him was on the phone to see if he'd actually meet with me to talk to me. And he was just charming on the phone.
27:52 Speaker 01 Lindell could do charm too.
27:54 Speaker 03 Wow, you poor man, this is awful. You've, you've put this, this girl up and, and you've given her so much support. And here she goes and runs away and that must be awful for you. You know, we're doing this story on, on runaway teens in America. And that's what he thought. He had no idea.
28:16 Speaker 01 She had no intention of doing a story on runaway teens. Meanwhile, back at the Current Affair offices, Dan hears about Lindell's plan to meet Preston and loses it.
28:28 Speaker 06 I was, I was frightened for her.
28:30 Speaker 01 He was by now, her husband as well as her news editor.
28:35 Speaker 06 I mean, here's a guy that might have murdered Sabrina. You know, I just thought it was too dangerous.
28:43 Speaker 01 So Dan gets Lindell on the phone in Las Vegas, just as the crew is wiring her. A tiny mic is hidden under her lapel, which is covered by her hair.
28:54 Speaker 06 Under no circumstances are you to talk to Preston without other people around.
28:59 Speaker 01 Is he talking to his husband or boss? Lindell doesn't care.
29:03 Speaker 03 I'm gonna be wired, the crew's gonna be right there.
29:06 Speaker 06 I said, okay.
29:09 Speaker 06 But I want the crew in there with you.
29:10 Speaker 03 They're gonna be around the corner, they're gonna hear what's going on.
29:13 Speaker 01 Dan gets angry.
29:16 Speaker 06 I do not want you alone with a murderer.
29:18 Speaker 03 I'm doing it, it's too late.
29:21 Speaker 03 Gotta go.
29:23 Speaker 01 Click. Lindell's not going to give up this interview. In a way, her life since a teenager has led up to this. She didn't confront her own attacker. She's going to confront the person she believes to be Sabrina's.
29:40 Speaker 03 I'm a, you know, I'm a lone wolf. I go out there, I do the story, I get the story. No one's gonna tell me not to put a microphone on and go and ambush a killer. I'm sorry. No one's gonna tell me not to do that.
29:53 Speaker 01 But Dan's not done. He calls the crew, which has now moved to a rooftop across from the diner.
30:00 Speaker 06 Get your fucking asses in there right now. And they're, and they hung up on me.
30:05 Speaker 01 Lindell gets ready to head into the diner as planned. She's wired. The crew stays across the street.
30:15 Speaker 03 It's high tension, high, high adrenaline. I was very aware.
30:23 Speaker 01 Lindell straightens her blazer, checks her mic, testing one, two, three.
30:28 Speaker 03 It was the Peppermill Diner on the Strip in Las Vegas.
30:32 Speaker 01 Elvis and Tarantino both ate there. To Lindell, the diner looks dingy and dark. Preston got there early.
30:41 Speaker 03 He'd chosen a booth in the deepest corner of this diner. I was shocked when I first laid eyes on him. He was this very big man, very large man. And I walked up to him and of course I had to shake his pudgy hand and that kind of made me feel sick.
31:07 Speaker 01 But Preston isn't what Lindell expected.
31:10 Speaker 03 So sweet and seeming like so innocent. And he sat there like this big oversized cuddly little teddy bear. And he cared for Sabrina. He didn't know where she went. I mean, it was easy to believe that he genuinely cared.
31:30 Speaker 01 He's convincing. So is Lindell. She talks about her missing children's story with emotion, a story that doesn't exist.
31:41 Speaker 03 I had to play the game of being sweet and cordial and respectful and lovely to meet you and thank you for your time. What I was hoping, I think, was that he might actually say something about what he thought might have happened to Sabrina.
31:58 Speaker 01 Suddenly Preston freezes. His expression changes. He realizes this luncheon date isn't as described.
32:07 Speaker 03 I probably asked one too many questions about Sabrina and his relationship with her. He just said, "I'm done," and he walked out. Oh, man, this is just going pear-shaped.
32:19 Speaker 01 Lyndle's on her feet now and shouting into her mic to the crew.
32:23 Speaker 03 So I'm following him out. And I'm now saying to the crew, who were waiting on the top of a building opposite, "Get down now, come and get a shot of him, get down now." He's on to me. They rush down and just as they turn the corner and with a moment to spare, I was able to say, "Mr. Preston, can you tell me what happened to Sabrina? There are a few people that have told me things about Sabrina, I'd like your comment."
32:53 Speaker 01 Preston looks stunned as he gets into his car. Lyndle didn't get the information she wanted, but she's happy. Preston looks guilty of something.
33:04 Speaker 03 And he just sped off.
33:08 Speaker 01 Lyndle would never know that just a year earlier, Jim Bixel, Sabrina's old boyfriend, got a mysterious phone call from his best childhood friend, who just happened to be the son of Tom Preston.
33:25 Speaker 01 He goes, "I need to talk to you now." And I said, "What's this about?" And he says, "This is about my fucking dad." He goes, "He's a fucking asshole, Jimmy," he says, "and I'm in trouble, I need to talk to you." That's next time on Killer Story. Holy crap, you know? And I'm like, "What is going on?" He had something to do with Sabrina's disappearance, 100%.
33:50 Speaker 00 When he gets up there and he says he's never lied, now I know, but isn't that... I mean, I've been around a lot of the lies that he's told.
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34:41 Speaker 01 Killer Story is a production of Orbit Media in association with Signal Company Number One. Creator and host is me, Steve Fishman. Executive producers, Arlindo Marx, Kevin Wardis, and Jonathan Hirsch from Sony Music Entertainment. Producers, Jackie Pauly, Hannah Beal, and Austin Smith. Production coordinator, Austin Smith. Series consultant, Emile Klein. Sound designer, Britt Spangler. Fact check, Ryan Alderman. Our lawyers are at Clarus Law. Special thanks to Emily Rassik, Steve Ackerman, Catherine St. Louis, Sammy Allison, Allison Haney, Fisher Stevens, and the glamorous Rhea Julian. We also thank our agents at WME, Evan Krassik, Marissa Hurwitz, Ben Davis.
35:26 Speaker 01 And a special thanks to Shelley Shinoi for voiceover casting. Our voice actor for this episode is Lindsey Smart for Bobby Sumay. And a special, special thanks to the inimitable Emile Klein.
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