Part 1

It was a windy Sunday night, October 6, 1974. I was a young MP (Military Police) officer stationed out near the dense forests of Washington state. The air was cold, biting at my neck, the kind of chill that settles deep in your bones and warns you that something isn’t right. We got a call from a camp caretaker up in the hills. He was rattled. Said the peace of the night had been shattered by a sound no one ever wants to hear.

My partner and I drove up those winding, forested roads, the high beams cutting through the towering pines. When we killed the engine to listen, the silence was heavy. And then, we heard it.

Blood-curdling screams.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. In all my training, in all the drills, nothing prepares you for the raw, primal sound of human terror. It wasn’t just one voice; the pitch told me there were at least two women out there, screaming for their lives. The wind was whipping around the valley, distorting the sound. One minute it seemed to come from the ridge, the next from the deep woods.

We spent 40 agonizing minutes driving up and down that range, stopping, listening, shouting into the dark. We were desperate to find them. But the woods kept their secret. Eventually, the screams stopped. The silence that followed was worse than the noise.

Those screams belonged to Lorraine and Wendy. They weren’t just random hikers; they were our own. Army nurses. Dedicated, compassionate young women who had joined up to help others. Lorraine was a farm girl from the Midwest, tough and kind. Wendy was a city girl, smart and sharp. They were best friends, the kind of duo that finishes each other’s sentences.

They had been on leave, taking a road trip before their next shift at the base hospital. Their car, a little Volkswagen Beetle, had broken down miles back. Running low on cash and needing to get back for duty, they made a choice that changed everything: they decided to hitchhike.

Their families back home felt it before we knew it. Lorraine’s mother said she felt it in her bones—a cold dread that her baby wasn’t coming home. When they didn’t show up for their shift on Thursday, we knew. They were listed as AWOL initially, but I knew better. Those screams I heard… they haunted me.

We searched. God, we searched. But it was like looking for a needle in a 900-mile haystack of American wilderness. We didn’t know then that the monsters were hiding in plain sight, and that the worst part of this tragedy wasn’t just the crime… it was the people who saw it happen and did absolutely nothing.

Part 2

The silence that followed that night in the woods was heavy, a suffocating blanket that settled over the entire district. For the first few days, we operated on hope. You have to. In this line of work, if you don’t have hope, you have nothing.

Lorraine Wilson and Wendy Evans weren’t just names on a missing persons report. To their families, they were the world. Lorraine’s parents, stoic farming folk from out in the Midwest, refused to sit idle. They drove their truck all the way out here, retracing the 800-mile journey their daughter had taken.

They stopped at every gas station, every diner, every roadside motel along the interstate. They held up grainy black-and-white photos of two smiling young women, asking the same question until their voices went hoarse: “Have you seen them? Please, have you seen our girls?”

But the highway is long, and it keeps its secrets well.

We learned the timeline. We knew they had broken down. We knew they were short on cash. We knew they made that fateful decision to stick out their thumbs on the side of the road. It was the 70s. People did that then. It wasn’t seen as a death sentence; it was just a way to get from Point A to Point B. They were trusting. They were nurses. They spent their lives helping people, so they assumed people would help them.

Weeks turned into months. The leads dried up. The phone stopped ringing. The case files started to gather dust on my desk, buried under the fresh misery of new crimes. But I couldn’t shake it. Every time I drove past that stretch of the foothills at night, I remembered the screams. I knew they were out there.

Twenty-one months. That’s how long the earth held onto them.

It was June 1976. A scorching hot summer day. An elderly couple had driven out to a remote area called Murphy’s Creek—a rugged, isolated patch of wilderness about 20 miles from the nearest town. It was the kind of place locals went to dump trash or teenagers went to drink beer where the cops wouldn’t bug them.

The couple was chasing a deer they’d spotted, hiking up a dry, dusty ridge through the pines. They climbed over a barbed-wire fence, trespassing onto private grazing land. They walked into a small clearing, hidden by a cluster of scrub oaks.

At first, the man thought he was looking at a garbage dump. It was a mess. Clothes, bags, cosmetics scattered in the dirt. But as he stepped closer to inspect an old camera lying in the leaves, his wife let out a gasp that echoed through the canyon.

Lying there, bleached white by the harsh sun, was a human skull.

They scrambled back to their car, terrifyingly shaken, and flagged down a patrol unit on the highway. I was on duty when the call came in. “Possible human remains found at Murphy’s Creek.” My stomach dropped. I knew. Before I even put the car in gear, I knew.

We taped off the area. It wasn’t just a dump site; it was a graveyard.

We found two skulls. We found the bones scattered by coyotes. And amongst the debris of two lives cut short, we found a small transistor radio. Scratched into the plastic on the back was a name: Lorraine Wilson.

It was the confirmation we had dreaded for nearly two years.

The crime scene technicians—guys who had seen everything—were quiet that day. The brutality of it was evident even in the bones. Lorraine had been struck on the back of the head. But Wendy… God, Wendy had been put through hell. Her skull showed signs of massive, repeated trauma. The forensic report would later say her face had been “destroyed.”

We found remnants of cord. It wasn’t standard rope. It was a thin, synthetic loop, the kind used in industrial packing. They had been hog-tied.

But there was something else. A clue that didn’t belong to the girls.

While scanning the dirt with a metal detector, an army tech got a hit. Buried slightly in the dry earth was a man’s silver ring. It was a large, gaudy thing with a green stone. It wasn’t Lorraine’s. It wasn’t Wendy’s. It belonged to a man with big fingers. It belonged to a killer.

We stood there in the heat, the smell of pine and dust in the air, looking at the scattered pieces of these two promising lives. They had been dragged over a fence, deep into the woods, to a place where no one could hear them.

Except I had heard them. And that guilt hit me like a physical blow.

We had the bodies. We had a ring. We had a specific type of cord. But we had no suspects. The killer had left them there to rot, confident that the wilderness would erase the evidence.

As we bagged the evidence, I looked at the timeline. The day they went missing matched the night of the screams perfectly. They were killed the same night they were taken.

We started looking at other cases. The “Highway Murders.” Seven young women, all hitchhiking, all found dead in the woods along the coast over a span of three years. Was this the work of a serial killer? The “Highway Phantom”?

We offered a reward. The biggest in the state’s history at the time—$100,000. We hoped money would talk. We hoped greed would override fear.

But in a small town, fear is a powerful silencer.

Part 3

The breakthrough didn’t come from forensics. It came from ghosts.

Years went by. The case went cold, then hot, then ice cold again. An inquest was held in 1985, but it was a farce. No one talked. The coroner ruled it “homicide by person or persons unknown.” It felt like a final insult to the Wilson and Evans families.

But secrets are like rot; eventually, the smell gets out.

In 1988, a detective named Paul, a bulldog of an investigator who hated unfinished business, got a tip from a prison inmate. The inmate said he’d heard two guys bragging about the “nurses job” years ago. He dropped two names: The Hilton brothers.

The Hiltons (not their real names, but let’s call them the “Hanson” crew for this story) were local legends for all the wrong reasons. They were a clan of cousins and brothers who treated the law like a suggestion. They were violent, heavy drinkers, known for brawling in every bar in the county. They worked at the local meatpacking plant.

The meatpacking plant.

Detective Paul remembered the cord found on the bodies. He took the evidence to the factory. The foreman took one look at it and nodded. “Yeah, that’s what we use to hang the bacon sides.”

The pieces started clicking together. One of the Hanson boys, Wayne, worked at that plant. He had access to the cord. He had a reputation for violence. And he drove a distinctive car: a light green Chevy Nova with a white roof.

We started digging into the files, looking for anything we missed. And that’s when the true horror of this story revealed itself. It wasn’t just about the men who did the killing. It was about the people who watched it happen.

We found witness statements that had been buried, ignored, or dismissed by lazy police work in the 70s.

A bus driver had seen the girls get into a green Chevy with a white roof.

A musician saw that same car parked at Murphy’s Creek every weekend, hidden in the brush.

But the most damning statements came from regular citizens. People with families. People who considered themselves “good folks.”

There was Anthony. He was at a hotel pub that Sunday afternoon. He saw the girls. He saw them arguing. Wendy, the smaller one, didn’t want to get in the car. She had a bad feeling. Lorraine, trying to be brave, convinced her. “It’s just a ride,” she probably said. Anthony saw the driver—a man with a “silly grin” and wild eyes. He saw the car peel out. He called the cops back then, but the sergeant on duty blew him off. “They probably went south,” he was told.

Then there were Brian and Velma.

This couple was driving down the mountain road at dusk. They saw a green car pulled over. They saw a man throttling a woman against the hood. They saw another man marching a second girl toward the trunk. The girl looked right at them.

She screamed. She looked Velma in the eye and screamed, “Help me! Oh God, help me!”

Velma told her husband to stop. But Brian looked at the men, looked at the violence, and then looked at his own toddler in the back seat. Fear took the wheel. He sped up. He drove right past them. They didn’t stop at the next payphone. They didn’t go to the station immediately. They went home.

But the story that broke me, the one that keeps me awake at night even now, is Norma’s story.

Norma lived in a small house tucked away in the foothills, miles from the nearest neighbor. That Sunday night, she was in her kitchen making dinner when she heard a frantic pounding on her back door.

She opened it to find a young woman—Lorraine. She was breathless, terrified, her eyes wide with panic. She told Norma, “I was at a party with these guys… I need to get away. They have my friend. They’re going to hurt her.”

Norma didn’t know what to do. Her husband was due home any second. She was scared of these strangers. She told the girl, “You can wait inside, but my husband won’t like it.”

Lorraine was frantic. “I can’t stay,” she said. “If I don’t go back, they’ll k*ll her. They’ll find me.”

Norma offered to call the police. Lorraine refused, terrified that the sirens would trigger the men to execute Wendy right there. “I better go,” she whispered.

She turned around. She walked back out into the dark to try and save her best friend.

Norma went to her window. She watched as a car screeched up. She saw a man with long, dark hair grab Lorraine. He struck her across the face, a brutal, heavy blow. He shoved her into the back seat. Norma saw another girl inside, fighting, trying to claw her way out.

Norma’s husband pulled into the driveway right then. He saw the struggle. He saw the car speed off.

He walked inside, took off his coat, and looked at his trembling wife. “It was probably just a domestic,” he said. “Don’t get involved.”

They ate dinner. They went to bed.

Two weeks later, Norma saw the missing persons poster in the paper. She knew. She told her parents. They told her, “Listen to your husband. Don’t get involved. You don’t want those men coming back for you.”

So, for years, she said nothing.

We had a town full of people who saw pieces of a double murder. People who saw the abduction, the struggle, the escape, and the recapture. And every single one of them turned away.

Why? Was it fear? Was it apathy? Or was it that uniquely American disease of “mind your own business”?

When Detective Paul finally brought the Hanson crew in for questioning, the arrogance was palpable. “Shorty” Hanson, the wildest of the bunch, came into the station. When we asked him about the nurses, this grown man, this terrifying thug, started hyperventilating. He threw himself on the floor, foaming at the mouth, screaming, “I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!”

It was an act. A performance to avoid questioning. And it worked. His lawyer got him out. The investigation stalled again.

But the truth has a way of haunting you.

Part 4

It wasn’t until 2013—nearly forty years after the screams faded—that we finally got the full picture. A new coroner, a man with a backbone, ordered a second inquest. He wanted to clear the ledger.

The courtroom was packed. The families, now gray-haired and frail, sat in the front row. Lorraine’s father had passed away from dementia, never knowing the truth. Her mother died just days before the inquest was announced, falling in her garden. She died with a broken heart. Only Eric, Lorraine’s brother, was left to carry the torch.

We paraded the suspects through the court. The Hanson boys were old men now. Gray, pot-bellied, leaning on canes. They didn’t look like monsters anymore. They looked like grandfathers. But their eyes… the eyes were the same. Cold. Dead.

They denied everything. “Never met ’em.” “Wasn’t me.” “Don’t recall.”

But then, a woman named Kim took the stand. She was in a wheelchair, her body broken by years of hardship. She was a relic of that rough crowd from the 70s. She claimed she didn’t remember much due to her medication, but the police had her old statement—a statement she gave years ago about a conversation with a woman named “Ellen.”

Ellen had been in the car. A girlfriend of one of the gang members.

According to the statement, the gang had picked the nurses up, promising a ride. They tried to put the moves on them. The girls refused. They called the girls “stuck up.” The egos of these fragile, violent men couldn’t handle the rejection.

The plan was to “teach them a lesson.”

When the girls realized they weren’t being taken home, panic set in. Lorraine tried to fight from the front seat. The driver—identified as Wayne Hanson—started hitting her. A passenger in the back grabbed a tire iron.

One blow. That’s all it took. Lorraine slumped forward.

Wendy started screaming. That’s when the panic hit the gang. They had a body. They had a witness. They drove to Murphy’s Creek. They dumped Lorraine. Wendy, terrified and adrenaline-fueled, managed to slip away into the dark.

She ran. God, how she ran.

But the men grabbed flashlights. They treated it like a hunt. They chased her down in the scrub. And when they caught her… they made sure she would never tell anyone.

The coroner didn’t mince words in his final report. He looked out at the courtroom, at the old men shifting uncomfortably in their seats.

He named Wayne Hanson as the primary killer. He confirmed the involvement of the gang. He validated the testimony of the witnesses who had stayed silent for so long.

“The lives of these two fine young women,” the Coroner said, his voice trembling with suppressed rage, “were shattered by a unprovoked, violent attack mounted to satiate the perverse desires of a despicable gang of thugs.”

But here is the tragedy of justice delayed: Wayne Hanson, the ringleader, the man who struck the fatal blow? He died in a car wreck in 1986. He never spent a day in a cell for what he did.

The others? There wasn’t enough physical evidence left after 40 years to charge them with murder beyond a reasonable doubt. The cord had been lost. The ring had been misplaced in an evidence locker decades ago.

They walked free.

They walked out of that courthouse, into the sunshine, and went back to their lives.

Lorraine’s brother, Eric, stood on the courthouse steps. He didn’t scream. He didn’t rage. He just looked tired. “The mountain of fear that sat on my shoulders,” he said, “can sit on theirs now. Everyone knows who they are.”

He tried to get a memorial plaque put up in the town park. Just a small stone to say, These women mattered. This happened here.

The town council denied it. They said it would be “too negative.” They wanted to forget. They wanted to erase the stain on their town’s history. They preferred the silence.

But a plaque was eventually placed at the hospital where Lorraine and Wendy trained. It stands there today, a testament to two soldiers of mercy who never made it home.

As for me? I’m retired now. I don’t wear the badge anymore. But on windy nights in October, when the air gets cold and the leaves rattle across the pavement, I find myself listening.

I think about Norma standing at her back door. I think about the couple in the car who drove past. I think about how easy it is to do nothing.

We tell ourselves we would be the heroes. We tell ourselves we would stop the car. We would open the door. We would make the call. But until you are staring into the dark, you don’t know.

Lorraine Wilson had a chance to live. She was safe in Norma’s kitchen. She could have hidden. But she went back into the dark for her friend. She died because she refused to leave Wendy alone.

That is the difference between a hero and a bystander. One runs toward the scream, and the other pretends they didn’t hear it.

Don’t be the one who drives past.