Killer Story | 2. Why a Nurse?

Lyndal’s reason for wanting to find Sabrina is revealed, and more details about Sabrina emerge. Binge all episodes of Killer Story ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge Cases on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access. From serial killer nurses to psychic scammers – The Binge is your home for true crime stories that pull you in and never let go. Join our free newsletter at Patreon.com/TheBinge. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. Killer Story is brought to you by Sony Music Entertainment and Orbit Media. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Into the wild, the Caltier Panther encounters a shimmering crocodile, a lonely lovebird, a breathless zebra, and a restless tiger.

• 0:15Speaker 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.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Previously on Killer Story.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  And I'm sitting there one day and the phone rings and I pick it up. And this woman tells me that her niece is missing.

• 1:00Speaker 03

  And I said, "We don't do missing persons."

• 1:02Speaker 02

  I'm thinking, "There is something going on here. This just doesn't sound right."

• 1:06Speaker 04

  We waited 24 hours and then we went to the police. We said, "She's missing. Something happened." They just didn't believe us.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  An unidentified body has no name, no history, no touch points with the world, with one exception: the system that processes the dead.

• 1:43Speaker 05

  It was September of 1987.

• 1:47Speaker 05

  These boaters saw this body floating in the river and pulled her into Arizona's side of the water and then called the sheriffs.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  This body was Sabrina, though at the moment it was unidentified and unclaimed. A cold body drifting into the hands of the state. A local investigator explains.

• 2:11Speaker 05

  It was a little young girl. It appeared she had been in the water for a while. Water does awful things to people. She was placed in a secured body bag for transport to the morgue. And so a doctor did the autopsy the next day.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Every body, known or unknown, must be cataloged.

• 2:39Speaker 05

  What takes place in an autopsy, you have to cut like around the area of your sternocleidomastoid muscle up here in your neck. And they slit down diagonally from one part of your neck and shoulder area to other side of your neck and shoulder area, your sternum. And then they do a long, vertical line down your chest.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  As the medical examiner sliced open Sabrina's body, he went about assessing the cause of death. She was found in a river. But did she drown?

• 3:12Speaker 05

  When you drown, you inhale all the water. And then your lungs become like pink and spongy and watery. You know, you can squeeze them and but she didn't, you know, she had dry lungs. Her irises were occluded.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Sabrina's eyes were cloudy.

• 3:31Speaker 05

  So they couldn't even tell what eye color she was. The blood flow causes the vessels to pop as a result of the water and the blood in her eye.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  The medical examiners preserve body parts that might someday allow a body like this one to be identified.

• 3:53Speaker 05

  It was common to cut off the hands and send them to the lab. And the doctor just took a saw, cut off her hands right above her wrists.

• 4:07Speaker 05

  To get readable prints from the hands, you just place the applicable finger, dip it in ink, put it in that little square, and you start from one side of the finger and you just roll it to the other side and hope you get good whirls and ridges. Then they would have sent those prints out everywhere. They were sent to Las Vegas. They were sent to California, all the surrounding areas, to see if they had some young woman who fit her descriptors, but they couldn't find a family member to claim her.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  What would it take to connect Sabrina with those disembodied hands? And why would it be so important to a journalist to make sure that happens? Journalists have backstories, too. This is Killer Story. I'm Steve Fishman. Episode two, Why a Nurse?

• 5:19Speaker 00

  In deepest jungle, Cartier's panther spies a wandering bird that circles the skies. A lovebird, lost and missing his mate, is far from his path in lonely state. Dry your tears, now there's a start. Follow my steps to heal your heart. Panther stalks through the leaves with silent grace. Through the power of scent, she finds the trace. Behold, two lovers reunite in the skies, a most precious thrill sparkling in their eyes. Together forever, they shine each day, bound by the beauty of Cartier.

• 6:05Speaker 06

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• 6:36Speaker 01

  There's a reason Lyndal immediately felt connected to the mother and aunt, who called about their missing girl, Sabrina Kidd, and a reason she thought she was the one to find her. To find that reason, we need to start with Lyndal's career. Lyndal Marks had an extraordinary TV news pedigree. Straight out of university in Sydney, Australia, Lyndal had landed a job at Australian 60 Minutes, the most prestigious news weekly in Australia. Five years later, she was recruited to the big show, CBS 60 Minutes, one of the most prestigious TV news shows in the world.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  It was a wonderful, welcoming, warm, sophisticated, civilized centre for the best journalism I've ever experienced.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  60 Minutes did important stories about the world's most important people. Lyndal reported from war zones, rubbed shoulders with world leaders.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  There's so much respect for this show. You literally had to pick up a phone and say, "Hi, I'm from CBS 60 Minutes", and it was like, whoa. You had credibility.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  As you're probably gathering, Lyndal enjoyed being part of the esteemed club. She admired its celebrated members. She deeply respected its journalism. But admiration, respect? Something was missing. Lyndal was in her twenties. She had places she wanted to go, and go quickly.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I'm ambitious. I think ambition's great. I think ambition equals passion and energy and, you know, love for what you're doing. I'm gonna be ambitious till the day I die.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  For Lindell, ambition meant being in front of the camera. At 60 Minutes, she'd been a producer, which she sometimes thought meant doing all the work and giving the on-camera correspondents most of the credit.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  I really would love the experience of being on camera.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  She would have loved to have that experience at 60 Minutes.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Oh, no. I didn't think they would ever even consider me.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  And so, when a recruiter called Lindell out of the blue, she was primed to listen, even though he was from a very different kind of journalistic outlet.

• 9:08Speaker 07

  Lights, camera, scandal. Look out, Hollywood. A current affair is in town. It's a Hollywood affair.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  At that moment, A Current Affair was just four years old, but already a smash hit. For world affairs was a bit ho-hum for A Current Affair. It was the leader in the new TV genre, the tabloid. And that genre lived off celebrity scandal, crime, gossip, strange diseases, psychics. In other words, our secret pleasures. At A Current Affair, news was also entertainment.

• 9:43Speaker 08

  The wealthy weight loss man who may be leading a scandalous, secret life. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

• 9:49Speaker 09

  Thou shall not lie, thou shall not steal, thou shall not kill thy neighbor's daughter.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Lindell did some obligatory hand-wringing. There had to be some whispering in the hallowed 60-minute halls, along the lines of, is she thinking of leaving the New York City Ballet for a three-ring circus? That kind of thing.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  There was a lot of angst.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Sure, there was, but the recruiter said he wanted Lindell on camera, going out to 30 million viewers a week. The same audience size, by the way, as 60 Minutes. He wanted to know, Lindell, what would it take?

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Oh, I just, you can double my salary. He goes, okay. And I went, oh, wha- what? Okay, that was it.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  So Lindell was ready to take on a new challenge, but was she ready for A Current Affair?

• 10:54Speaker 01

  It's 1991 and Lindell has just pushed the up button on an elevator in a Manhattan office building. She's about to enter her new workplace. No turning back now.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  As the elevator opened, there was suddenly this, you're hit with this noise, this chaos. Lots of swearing, lots of doors slamming. I'm like, wait, what? And there are people screaming, fuck you, well, fuck you too, and slamming the doors. It was kind of a lot of anger and excitement and all these emotions mixed up in one.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Hey Lindell, welcome to A Current Affair.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  It's a zoo. It's a crazy ass zoo. And I thought, have I made a huge mistake? Is this gonna be not my people? Is this not gonna be my world?

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Lindell, with her splashy degree, was probably a bit more sophisticated than the average Current Affair reporter. But guess what? Lindell soon realized she loved the zoo professionally and temperamentally. For one thing, she loved the action. At A Current Affair, there was nothing but. Lindell would juggle five, six stories at a time. A Current Affair put two dozen segments on the air every week with just half a dozen reporters. And so the pace was relentless. Lindell said it was like being on a treadmill. But she quickly went from complaining about the doors they were slamming

• 12:38Speaker 01

  and the fuck yous they were screaming to the doors we were slamming and the fuck yous we were screaming.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm Australian, of course I curse. I love to swear.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  The girl was shaken off the shackles of her pedigree.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  The Current Affair was a madhouse of all of us vying for stories and... Everyone in that room, everyone that worked on that show was ambitious. We were cutthroat. We wanted to get the story and get it first. And if that meant yelling and screaming at each other and swearing and slamming doors, okay.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  You found you loved it?

• 13:17Speaker 02

  I did, I loved it. I loved it. Oh my God, of course I loved it.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  The most respected journalism outlets are religious about ethics. You can't pay for stories, you can't mislead, you can't threaten. The zoo, though, was not particularly pious. There was no guardrails, none. That's Dan Meehan again, Lindell's news editor. Part of his job was to negotiate the fees paid to sources. The current affair ethos was simple. Get the story no matter what.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  And so what did Lindell think when she wanted to investigate the disappearance of Sabrina Kidd and Dan told her to stand down?

• 14:04Speaker 02

  You know what? I'm gonna do my own thing. I am gonna tell a story, whatever story I want it to tell. I don't care what anyone says. This is the story. This is how it rolls.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Why is she so attached to this story? Well, there is a reason. Lindell has a secret in her past, something she never talks about but can't escape. This secret gives her a special interest in finding out what happened to Sabrina. It will drive her beyond reason.

• 14:45Speaker 10

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• 15:08Speaker 10

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• 15:17Speaker 00

  In deepest jungle, Cartier's panther spies a wandering bird that circles the skies. A lovebird, lost and missing his mate, is far from his path in lonely state. Dry your tears, now bears a start. Follow my steps to heal your heart. Panther stalks through the leaves with silent grace. Through the power of scent, she finds the trace. Behold, two lovers reunite in the skies, a most precious thrill sparkling in their eyes. Together forever, they shine each day, bound by the beauty of Cartier.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  We started at uni. I was doing a BA dip ed and Lindell was doing communications and journalism.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  This is Annie. Back in Australia, she and Lindell were at university together, where they became fast friends. Annie experimented with fashion, Lindell with stories and performing.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  She was so into drama club, anything to do with drama.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Annie's the friend we all want. She's game, happy to engage with her friends' interests. So for a while, she tried acting class too.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  And I've got to be honest, I hated every minute. I was so glad when it was over.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  But for Lindell, acting was a passion. And there was another benefit. Through acting, she met a boy she liked.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  He was older and able to, I think, really entice me with being more mature, more sophisticated than the guys my age. I loved his intellect. I love to be intellectually challenged.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  And she liked his attitude. He had a strong personality, stood up for himself.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  I love someone who doesn't let me take control in a relationship. I went, oh, that's pretty cool. We had a great start to the relationship. He was strong. He was very strong, very stocky and strong. And I think that was his way of showing off.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Annie was not a fan.

• 17:37Speaker 11

  To me, I found him quite shallow, a know all. You know, he knew everything.

• 17:44Speaker 11

  But I think Lyndle was in love with him.

• 17:49Speaker 11

  I guess she saw in him, oh my God, he's a kindred spirit.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Annie, good friend that she was, kept her criticism to herself.

• 17:58Speaker 11

  It's a funny thing to say, but she was more girly, I think, around him.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Lyndle was 19 at the time, and relationships at that age are auditions. This one failed. Soon Lyndle was disenamored.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  Quite quickly, he started being unfaithful and dating other girls. You know, and then I just called it off because things just weren't gelling.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  That was it.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Curtains on that personal drama, but drama on the stage? Lyndle's still enamored of that. One weekend, she and other actors are practicing a play at their drama professor's place in the Sydney suburbs.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  So we all went to his place and we had the play rehearsal and the kids were asleep. And then it was maybe 10 o'clock at night or something and everyone was leaving. And I was on the front steps of this house.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  I was the last to leave and I'm about to go, but we're just chatting. And then we turn around and there's this car with its headlights off and its engine off and it's just coming down, creepy, so creepy, coming down the street. The street had a gradient, so it's just rolling down the street. And I looked, I went, what the hell?

• 19:29Speaker 02

  That's, that's my ex-boyfriend.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  And it pulls over.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  And he comes up the stairs really fast. And you could almost smell the alcohol. And he goes for this professor and he pins him against a wall. And I screamed out, I said, stop, what are you doing? And he turns around and he literally, full fist, punches me in the face a couple of times, right on the bridge of my nose.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  The ex-boyfriend disappears as suddenly as he arrived.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  No, I didn't know what was going on. All I could, my face, I looked and literally my nose was all over my face. There was blood everywhere.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  And my, my hands started shaking. I'm like, what? Your body's just going to, what, what's going on?

• 20:29Speaker 02

  The professor, he grabs the kids, throws them into his car. He takes me up to the hospital into, into emergency. It happened so fast. There was no conversation. There was no, what are you doing? There was no, oh, like, why? Why did this guy feel the need just to, just to attack? Why? Because he was drunk? Because he just, you know, he wanted to be with me? Because he was angry that we'd split up? But no, he had the need just to, to smash my nose into my face.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  I ended up in hospital. And I had to have surgery. They needed photos of when I was a little girl to show them what I actually looked like. Because it was such a bad hit. My, my bed was covered by a curtain because I didn't want anyone to see me. They didn't have mirrors there because they didn't want me to see myself.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  A friend of mine came to visit me and she just walked in and I remember the shock on her face.

• 21:33Speaker 11

  A terrible, terrible shock to see what was left of her face.

• 21:39Speaker 11

  You couldn't really see much because the severity affected everything, all the upper, her eyes couldn't open properly, um, just bruising and a battering. Hideous, absolutely awful.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  She's like, "Oh, hey, you know, you'll be okay." I'm like, "No, this is not okay. This is not okay."

• 22:07Speaker 11

  I felt an incredible sadness because I could feel that it was going to have an impact on her for the rest of her life and not in a good way.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Annie left, Lindo was alone.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  And I remember this doctor, young doctor, who came in and I'll never forget his face, I'll never forget him, he was just literally, I was sitting on my own at night and I was in tears and I was like, "What is going on?" And he came in and he opened the curtain, he just sat on my bed, he said, "Hey, can we talk?"

• 22:42Speaker 02

  And he took my hand and he said, "You're gonna go on, you're gonna do great things, you're gonna be okay, you are not a victim. Don't let this shape who you are." And I think it's that experience that made me realise that I can do two things. I can roll up into a fetal position and just give up, no, and be depressed and just go, "I'm, I'm obviously not worthy." And I decided not. And I just went, "I am going to give a voice to people whose lives can take a turn that

• 23:25Speaker 02

  they never had any say in, that is not fair."

• 23:41Speaker 01

  But the trauma of the attack wasn't over yet.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  As I was in the hospital, my father called the police and filed a report.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  And then it was incumbent on me to continue that, to say, right, yep, I want to take this guy into court. I am going to file a case against him. And I just went, I can't, I can't, I cannot do this. I just want it to go away. I pushed it aside because I didn't want to be the victim then.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  The assault did have a profound impact on Lindell's life. She'd have difficulty trusting men. Instead, Lindell invested in her career. "Head down and work," she said. So Lindell won't let the attack define her, but it will shape her.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  I'm in a position where I can do something because I'm a reporter. I want to hold out my hand and grab that story and grab that situation and say, I'm going to give a voice to this. Because you know what? I didn't even give myself a voice until now.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Until this podcast, I think you can hear the emotion in Lindell's voice, the sadness, the anger. Lindell saw herself in Sabrina. She sensed that something had happened to Sabrina, that she'd been victimized by something or someone. And certainly by a system that seemed indifferent to her fate.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  With Sabrina, this young girl, something was not right. I completely connected to what happened to me. I was beaten up, beaten to a pulp with an unrecognizable face.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Lindell had let her own assailant skate free. She wasn't going to let Sabrina's story go. She was dead set on finding out what happened to Sabrina. And in doing so, get her own revenge, if only by proxy. All she had to do now was figure out how to get her editor, Dan, on board.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Dan was clear about Sabrina's story, or non-story. A teenager who went missing in Las Vegas four years earlier? Hard no. Dan had bosses too, and they expected him to assign stories that had a good chance of getting on TV. So, OK, Lyndle, your heart's in the right place. Kudos. Now, get me a story I can put on the air. Lyndle understands.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  I was feeling unsure about the story because there was no proof. I had nothing. I had feelings, but I had no proof. I had no qualitative proof that I could take to the police or take to our lawyers and take to Dan and say, here, here is the proof.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  It was not a good feeling.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  You feel like you're chasing ghosts. You don't want to chase ghosts.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Lyndle, those are your ghosts. Other people can't see them. Even Dan doesn't know about Lyndle's past. Whatever was propelling her, ghosts or a sense of duty to the defenseless, Lyndle made a decision.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Screw it, I need to do this story. I really feel something's wrong. Something's wrong. Something's happened to this kid.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  I asked one of Lyndle's colleagues from back then if this story was a good career move.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  If this wouldn't have worked for Lyndle, her career at a current affair may have come to a dead end.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Dan had other ideas for where Lyndle should invest her energies. He had a lot of story slots to fill every week.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  Couple of reporters on the staff that used to talk up a big story and always be that one interview away from getting it.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  Meaning, he's never gonna fucking get it, okay? Whereas Lindell had almost 100%. If she went out on a story, she came back with a story.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Whatever the assignment.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  The pastor told her she was possessed by demons. Yeah, there were alien stories too. I did a story on crop circles. Some say it's magnetic fields, and then of course, there are those who are convinced it's the work of visitors from another planet.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Dan and Lindell became quite a team. Lindell knew how to get a story, and Dan knew exactly what worked on television.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  My job was to get in there at 5:15 in the morning. USA Today used to have, in every state, they had these little stories in the back, right? I used to go through that with a magnifying glass. And I find this little story, and it's that this guy had been arrested for having sex outside his house. And then the final line was the guy saying, "I half expect a Current Affair to be knocking on my door, and I'll tell him to go to hell." And so I called up Lindell. I said, "Get your ass over to this address as soon as you possibly can. Knock on the door and say hi, I'm from Current Affair." It was perfect for television.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Out of this professional partnership, something else was developing.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  Dan and I just struck up a great relationship. I hadn't had any relationship with anyone for many, many years.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Neither Dan nor Lindell was a big drinker or partier. At the after-work watering hole, they might sit off to the side talking shop, reviewing possible Current Affair stories.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  In a crazy office like a Current Affair, Dan was someone I felt I could connect with. Dan was someone who I could talk to. He would actually stop and talk to me and cared for me.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  He was safe. He felt safe.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  In the rom com version, imagine a Meg Ryan vehicle here. Lyndle's an outsider, intrepid but isolated, cautious. The camera catches her and Dan at the bar, off to the side, one staring at the other. In another scene, they're screening a segment, crowding around the same monitor, shoulder brushing against shoulder, agreeing on the camera work. He admires her spunk, she appreciates his grit, even when he scoffs at her best idea. And then it dawns on her.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  And unbeknownst to me at the time, he liked me. When I realized that actually he liked me and I went, well, actually I like him too. And we had this beautiful friendship, which evolved very, very quickly. Dan doesn't do things half heartedly. He goes all in, very fast.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Our first date was the Macy's Day Balloons, the parade.

• 31:26Speaker 03

  Listen, if you're taking a girl on a first date, you can't do any better than that. We watched the balloons being blown up right by Museum of Natural History. They lay out Superman or Snoopy and they blow them up there.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  They ready them for the parade the next day. It's kind of magic. Those flattened cartoon characters are spread out on the street like colorful rubbery puddles. Then the helium goes in and they rise little by little, emerging from the sidewalk like a new life form.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  And I'm going, wow, this city's insane and these balloons are crazy and...

• 32:05Speaker 01

  When Lyndle's not intense, she's bubbly, talking and fun.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  I just, it was very nice and we were, we just had a really, really good time. We really did.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  In the chaos of a new city and a punishing news cycle, Lyndle had found her people, or her person.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  I never thought any guy was interested in me. I honestly just...

• 32:32Speaker 02

  I just honestly didn't think I was someone that guys wanted to be with. I was the career girl. And I was the career girl by choice. And that choice was made back when I was attacked. This is the path I was on. So to have this gorgeous, handsome New Yorker paying attention to me and wooing me and buying me little gifts and making me dinner and introducing me to chicken wings that were too spicy for me. And he'd introduce me to cute little restaurants and bars. And we'd be walking through Times Square. And it was just, the whole thing was living a dream. I did get swept up in it.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Soon Dan and Lindle were mostly living together. He was her boyfriend and also her boss. And as her boss, he still wouldn't OK her Sabrina project.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  I had one thing going for me. I could get his ear privately on the pillow. And I used that.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  She told Dan she just wanted to get more facts.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Yes, there was me trying to cajole him into letting me get to Las Vegas.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Dan still won't authorize a trip to Vegas, not on a current affairs tab. But, well, maybe there is a workaround.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Then there was the idea that maybe I needed to find another way.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  If Lindle can find a story out of Las Vegas, one that Dan can actually put on TV, sure, then he can pay for the trip. And if then Lindle took an extra day for some extracurricular research, he'd be none the wiser.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  I scoured the Las Vegas press to try and find some sexy stories because I knew that those sexy stories would drive the viewers.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  And then there it was. Joanna Steele, the woman voted the prettiest showgirl on the famed Las Vegas Strip, had a secret, and she was prepared to go national with it. Lindle, what are you waiting for? Get your ass to Vegas. Cue the sound of a jet taking off.

• 34:53Speaker 09

  Just about everybody in Las Vegas knows showgirl Jana Steele. She packs 'em in with her nightclub act, and she found more fame when she won a local beauty title. Lyndal Marks went to the gambling capital of America for this exclusive report. Luck be a laddie tonight.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Lyndal had talked Jana into telling America her secret.

• 35:20Speaker 12

  I was born a male, a little boy.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Perfect for TV, yeah. And a perfect cover for Lyndal, who now turns to her real interest, Sabrina. Lyndal calls Sabrina's two great girlfriends, Jennifer and Crystal. She'd gotten their names from Sabrina's aunt and mother. Lyndal is eager to meet them. Maybe they can provide a clue to Sabrina's whereabouts.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Jennifer takes Lyndal through the details of their meeting with the police four years earlier. They'd gone to report a missing person, their friend, Sabrina.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  We had to go downtown. We'd wait. We had to go in the office. It was like a white room with like a little table, and you sat down, and they asked you questions. They had their notes, and they took the notes.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  The officers wrote a report. The girl signed the report.

• 36:17Speaker 04

  And nothing came of that, yeah.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Lyndal figured she knew what happened.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  These are young girls, and these are kind of party girls, and they're very pretty girls. And I don't think that they were... that their stories were given any credibility.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  From the cops' perspective, here were two 17-year-olds saying that a girl they'd met at a party a few months earlier had gone missing. Probably one more runaway in a city full of runaways, don't you think? Four years later, when Lyndal meets them, Crystal and Jennifer are no longer teenagers. They're 21 years old, and they are still concerned about their missing friend.

• 37:01Speaker 04

  I was glad somebody was investigating it. And I remember being glad somebody believed us.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  From Jennifer, Lindal gets a clue. Jennifer mentions offhandedly what seems like a non sequitur. But the more Lindal thinks about it, the more provocative it appears. It's something Sabrina told Jennifer in the weeks before her disappearance.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  She said something about a nurse went to see her. Was she sick?

• 37:34Speaker 01

  Not that Jennifer knew.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Why would a nurse go and see her? She said, well, she said a nurse came and she didn't stay very long. She just did a physical. And then I'm thinking, I'm like, what? Wait, what?

• 37:48Speaker 01

  It was strange. And it seems stranger when just a few days after a nurse administered a brief physical exam, Sabrina disappeared. Lindal had to learn more about that nurse.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Next time on Killer Story.

• 38:11Speaker 02

  Bobby Sue actually spoke to them and they did say, yes, we, we think we might have something with the name Sabrina Kidd. Then I looked at it, I went, what the hell?

• 38:27Speaker 13

  What's it take to be a mentor with big brothers, big sisters? It takes 30 minutes and a cup of coffee, a video game, best two out of three. It takes sharing thumbs up emojis, clapping emojis, and loaded nachos at halftime. That's how you make an impact on a young kid's life. So go on, share a few hours a month because mentorship may sound huge. But the truth is, it takes little to be big. To learn more, volunteer or donate, go to bbignow.org.

• 39:06Speaker 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 are Lyndon 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 Claris 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

• 39:47Speaker 01

  our agents at WME, Evan Krassik, Marissa Herwitz, Ben Davis. And a special thanks to Shelley Shinoi for voiceover casting. And a special, special thanks to the inimitable Emile Klein.

• 40:11Speaker 14

  Get this. When you're with Xfinity, you're already a member. No sign up, no cost. Score epic experiences from our family at NBC Universal. Plus movie tickets, discounts on streaming, mobile, and more. Check the Xfinity app every Thursday for exclusive perks and experiences only with Xfinity. Now that's the way to start a weekend. Let the magic begin. Restrictions apply. Visit Xfinity.com/membership to learn more.