Part 1Cold Open
March 2009. The west edge of Oklahoma City, where the North Canadian River slows down and spreads out before it runs into Lake Overholser. There's a wildlife refuge out there. Stinchcomb. Trees and water and mud. The kind of place kids go to get away from grownups. And that spring, some kids went down into a creek out there and found a skull.
Just the skull. A woman's experts would decide. Nobody could say whose. A year or so later, the phone rang at the police department in Bethany, a small city just up the road from that refuge. The caller was family, and they didn't want their name used. They had one question. Had anybody ever found bones out at Stinchcomb that matched the girls?
The girls. The detective that question landed on would say later that he had never heard of them. Not their names. Not the case. Not one thing. So he went looking.
Part 2Show Introduction
Hello everyone and welcome to Okie Investigations, I'm Trevor Shelby. Oklahoma Cases. The ones that made a paragraph, or didn't make the paper at all, and then got left behind. Close to home. And this one is about as close to home as it gets for me, because it's where this show started. Back in 2020, the very first episode I ever made was this case. Two sisters from Bethany. So I'm going back to it, with everything I've been able to find since. Here's what I can promise you and what I can't. I can't tell you who was waiting for those girls. Nobody can. Not yet. But I can tell you why, for a very long time, almost nobody went looking. And when I found out why, it changed how I heard every other part of this story.
A few words before we start, the way we always do. This is a true story, built from the record. The newspapers, the TV reports, the public databases. Where the record argues with itself, I'll tell you it's arguing. The opinions you hear are mine. And this is still an open case. The police file is closed to people like me, so what you'll hear is everything that's out in the open. This one is about two girls who never came home, and their family is still here. There's also an allegation of abuse in this story, and I'll keep it brief. Listener discretion. If this isn't one you want to sit with today, that's alright. Everything I worked from is up at section29.com. Go look for yourself. I'd rather tell you the story than read you the footnotes. And if you want to help the show, subscribe and leave a review wherever you're listening. Now let's get on with the show.
Part 3The Report
The detective's name was Austin Warfield, Bethany Police, and before he could answer that question on the phone, he had to find out what his own department had ever known. Not what the family remembered, not what people said, what was written down. So he went to the paperwork, and he found a report, two names, sisters, Rozlin Abell and Fawn Abell. Rozlin was 18, Fawn was 15, an address in the 7000 block of Northwest Fifty-Ninth Terrace in Bethany, and the family hadn't lived there long, they'd only just moved in. Now if you don't know Bethany, it sits on the west side of the Oklahoma City Metro, its own little city, with its own police department, its own schools, its own churches, neighborhoods and the woods of small brick houses, the kind of place people move to when they want things a little quieter. The date on the case was July of 1985, Thursday the 25th. That afternoon, according to what the family told police, the girls went out to look for jobs. That's it, that's the whole plan as anybody knew it. They didn't say where they were going, they didn't say what kind of jobs, they just went, and they didn't come home. So, a missing persons report was filed in Bethany. Here's what that report did not have. It did not have a crime. In 1985, as far as the police could see, there was no evidence of foul play. No scene, no struggle, no witness to anything but two girls leaving a house in the middle of the day. And as time went on, the case settled into the shape the paperwork gave it. Fawn was considered a runaway. Rozlin, being of legal age, was listed as missing when her parents reported they hadn't heard from her. And that was the file.
Think about what a detective has in his hands at that point. Two names, two ages, an address the family had barely unpacked in, a date 25 years gone, and a reason for leaving, looking for jobs, that could mean a restaurant down the road or a bus ticket to another state. There's no car in it. There's no friend's name. There's no last place anybody saw them. There's nobody who said, I dropped them off. And here's the thing about a report like that. It doesn't look like a mystery. It looks like a problem that solved itself. Two girls left. Girls leave. Maybe they'll call. Except by the time it landed on this detective's desk, nobody had called. Not once. Not in 25 years. He would say, years later, there had been few clues. That's putting it gently. What he had was a report that told him when the girls left and almost nothing about why and nothing at all about who they left with.
For that, he needed somebody who'd been there. Somebody who'd seen them go out that door. And there was somebody.
Part 4Waiting Down the Street
The girls had a brother, his name is Otto, and he's a big part of why any of this was ever opened back up. When the detective talked about this case later, he said he hadn't heard of it, until the girl's brother asked about it. Otto had been there that day, not for long, just a minute really, but he was there.
It's the afternoon, Thursday, July 25th, 1985, summer in Oklahoma, which means it's hot, and it's going to stay hot. He comes home, and his sisters are on their way out, Rozlin, 18, Fawn, 15, heading for the door, talking to each other the way sisters do when they're running late for something, and one of them says it, Hurry up, they're waiting for us down the street!
That's what he remembers, and then they're gone. Out the door, into the afternoon, down the street, toward whoever was waiting, and that is the last time anyone in that family saw them. Now, I want you to sit with that sentence for a second, because it's the most important thing anybody has ever said about this case, and it's nine words long. They're waiting for us. Not I'm going, not we'll be back.
Plural, maybe, or maybe just the way people talk. Somebody was out there. Somebody the girls knew well enough, or trusted enough, or at least expected. Down the street. Not in the driveway, not at the curb, down the street, out of sight of the house. So who was it? A friend? A boyfriend? Somebody from work, from the old neighborhood? Somebody with a car? Was it one person, or three? Did they honk? Did anyone glance out the window?
Nobody, in anything that's ever been made public, has said. And here's something else. Years later, when this story finally made the news, one TV report said the girls had left with friends. With friends. That's a different sentence. With friends means somebody knew who. It means a name, or a face, or at least a phone number. They're waiting for us down the street doesn't mean any of that. It means somebody was out there, and the brother in the doorway never saw them. Maybe those two accounts come from the same place and just got told two ways. Maybe one of them is the family's memory, and the other is a reporter's shorthand. I don't know. Nobody said. But they are not the same thing. And this story has been told so many times by so many people that it matters which one you start from.
This one starts with the brother. With what he heard. And you'd think a sentence like that would be the first thing anybody chased. Who was waiting? Go knock on doors. Ask the neighbors. Find the friends. But go back to what that report said. Two girls going to look for jobs. No evidence of foul play. One a runaway, one an adult. That's not a sentence anybody chases. That's a sentence that just sits there for a very long time.
Part 5The Spitfire and the Mellow One
A report gives you heights and ages. It doesn't give you people. For that, you need somebody who knew them. And the person who did the most over the years to keep these girls from being forgotten was a family friend named Michelle Caudle. She'd lived with the Abells for a while when the kids were growing up in South Oklahoma City, so she didn't know them from a photograph. She knew them from the kitchen table. And when she talked about them, she talked about them like they were still a little bit in the room.
Rozlin first, the older one. Rozlin was small, 4'11", about 90 pounds. You could have picked her up. But Michelle called her a spitfire. She said Rozlin was tiny, but she had an attitude, a temper. And honestly, you can hear it. The girl who's 4'11", and has decided that's nobody's business but hers.
She'd gone to U.S. Grant High School on the south side, and she'd dropped out. Michelle had too, and she said so, plainly, like it was just one more thing the two of them had in common. And Rozlin had a job at a Del Rancho restaurant down on the south side of the city. So that's Rozlin, 18, working, small and loud and not interested in being told what to do.
And then Fawn. Fawn was 15, a little taller, about 5'1", about 100 pounds. And Michelle's description of her was three words. Fawn was more mellow. That's it. That's all anybody's ever put on the record about her personality. More mellow. The younger sister, the quieter one, probably used to standing slightly behind the loud one. Both of them had brownish blonde hair. In their school pictures, you can see the 80s all over them. The feathered hair, the careful smiles.
And there's one more thing everybody agreed on. The family, and the friend, and eventually, the police. These two hitchhiked. A lot. The detective put it plainly. The girls were known to hitchhike frequently. Michelle said the same. They were frequent hitchhikers. Now, before anybody judges that, remember when this is.
1985. A family that had just moved across the metro, from the south side to the northwest, without, as far as anyone has said, much money. Two girls whose lives, whose job, whose friends were still mostly back on the south side. Bethany to a Del Rancho on the south side is a long way when you don't have a car. So you stick your thumb out. Plenty of kids did.
There's one more person this part needs. The girls had an older sister, too. Her name is Loreile. She was grown and out of the house by then. And she has said that about two weeks before July 25th, she got a phone call from Rozlin. She was moving into a new apartment out of town, and Rozlin told her she might be turning up on her doorstep soon. And Loreile, by her own account, told her that would be great. Give it a couple of weeks. The apartment would be ready.
Two weeks later, Rozlin and Fawn walked out the door. Loreile never saw either of them again.
Part 6Every Answer
So here's where things stood. A brother's memory, a friend's descriptions, a sister's phone call, and a report with almost nothing in it. Out of that, over the years, people have built answers. Four of them, really. And before we go any further, let's put every one of them on the table, because the family has lived with all of them.
The first answer is the simplest one. Two girls who hitchhiked all the time. Somebody waiting down the street. A ride. That's what Michelle Caudle believed. She said she thought the girls were out hitchhiking, and they ran into foul play. And she wasn't alone. The detective said that while there was no evidence of foul play back in 1985, some members of the family believed the girls had been the victims of a crime. It fits. That's the thing about it. It fits everything we know. Two girls on a roadside, or in a stranger's back seat, or in the car of somebody they thought they knew, in a year when nobody thought twice about any of it. And the problem with this answer is that it's also the hardest one to ever prove. A ride leaves nothing behind. No ticket, no record, no witness who knew what they were looking at.
The second answer is the one the report had already settled on. They left. Rozlin was 18. She'd just been invited to stay at her older sister's new place. She told her she might be turning up soon. So maybe she did exactly what she said she was going to do, and she took her little sister with her. People do leave. They start over. Some of them never call. But here's the problem. They never got there. Loreile has said she never saw either of them again. If two girls set out for their sister's apartment, they never arrived at it. So wherever they were going that afternoon, it wasn't there. Or they didn't make it.
The third answer is the hardest one to say out loud. And it comes from inside the family. Years later, in an interview, that same older sister, Loreile, made serious allegations about the girl's father. She alleged that he had abused members of the family, including her. And she said she suspected he knew more about what happened to her sisters than he ever said. Those are her words and her allegations. No police agency has ever named him as a suspect in this case. Nothing in the public record ties him to that day. And he has since died. He can't answer any of it. But she said it. She lived in that family. And that's what she believes. And it's part of this story, whether anybody likes it or not.
And then there's the fourth answer. The one the internet came up with. When people online went digging through Oklahoma cases, some of them landed on a man named Royal Russell Long, a truck driver and fair worker who'd been charged in the disappearance of two girls from the Oklahoma State Fair in 1981.
Two girls, the state fair, a man who'd done this kind of thing. It looked like it fit. It doesn't. By May of 1985, two months before Rozlin and Fawn walked out that door, Long was already sitting in a prison in Wyoming. He couldn't have been waiting down that street.
So that's the table. A ride that went wrong, two girls who left on purpose, a family member's suspicion, and a myth. And sitting right in the middle of all of them, there's the detective, the man who pulled the file. And what he said when people asked him was not a theory at all. He said, we don't know if the girls are still alive. That's all. Not where, not who, not even whether.
So if you're going to choose between those answers, and people have for years, you'd want to know what the systems could tell you. The ones that are supposed to notice when a person stops existing on paper. And that's where the detective went next.
Part 7What the Systems Said
So the detective did what you do when the trail is 25 years cold. He went to the systems. The ones that are supposed to notice when a person stops existing on paper. And the first one is the one that never lies about being quiet. Social Security. If you're alive in this country and you're working or renting or getting paid by anybody, sooner or later your number moves. It shows up somewhere.
There had been no activity on Rozlin Abell's Social Security number since July of 1985. Not a paycheck. Not an apartment. Not a hospital bill. Nothing. The girl with the job at the Del Rancho, the girl with an attitude and a temper, stopped existing on paper the same month she walked out that door. Remember the second answer? They left. People who leave still need jobs. And for 25 years, Rozlin's number had never once been used.
So he put them into the systems that hadn't existed in 1985. There's a national database now called NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Person System. Missing people go in on one side, unidentified remains go in on the other, and it tries to match them. In the spring of 2010, both girls went in. Rozlin and Fawn. Two case numbers, side by side. Then, that fall, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children made new pictures of them. Age progressions. An artist taking two teenage school photos and asking, what would these girls look like now? And the answer was two grown women. Fawn, who would have been in her early 40s by then, with short hair and a soft, careful smile. Rozlin, a little older, with her hair cut at her shoulders and earrings in. Two women nobody had ever met.
And then, the last piece. The one that tells you what he thought the answer probably was. He collected DNA from family members. Reference samples. Something to compare against. As he put it himself, Hopefully we'll be able to get a match on some bones or human remains.
Bones. Remains. That's what you collect family DNA for. You don't do that because you think two girls are living under new names in California. You do it because you think, someday, somebody might find them. And you want to be able to tell their mother.
Now, there's something else that should be in this part, and it isn't. And you deserve to know that. When two girls disappear from a city, there's usually a newspaper story. A photo. A paragraph asking anybody who's seen them to call. For Rozlin and Fawn, nobody has ever found one. Not in 1985. Not that summer. Not that fall. As far as anyone has been able to find, the disappearance of these two girls never made the paper. Which means, for 25 years, there was no story to remember. There was a report in a file in Bethany, and a family who couldn't stop thinking about it. And that's it.
So, by now, the detective has a report. A brother's memory. A friend's descriptions. A sister's phone call. A social security number that went silent. Two girls in a national database. Two age progressions. And DNA on file, waiting for bones. What he doesn't have is the answer to the simplest question of all. How do two girls walk out of a house in 1985, and nobody comes looking for 25 years?
Part 8Sixteen and Under
Here's something nobody said out loud in 2013. Not the detective, not the newspaper, not the TV station. It isn't in any of the stories about these girls. It's in the law. In May of 1983, two years before Rozlin and Fawn walked out that door, the state of Oklahoma passed a law about missing children. It's short, one sentence, and it says this. It is the duty of any sheriff, chief of police, city marshal, constable, or any other law enforcement officer, upon notification of a report of a missing child 16, 16 years and under, to immediately initiate an investigation into the disappearance of said child. 16 and under. Now go back to that report, the first thing it told us, the thing nobody stopped on. Rozlin was 18, Fawn was 15, two sisters, same house, same afternoon, same door, same reason for going, and the law of Oklahoma drew a line right between them. Fawn, at 15, was a child. Under that law, the police had a duty to start investigating immediately. Rozlin, at 18, wasn't a child at all. She was an adult who'd left home, and no law said anybody had to go looking for her right away. And remember how the file came out? Fawn considered a runaway, Rozlin, of legal age, listed as missing when her parents said they hadn't heard from her. On the day it was written, that sounded like paperwork. It was a sorting machine. Oklahoma had just started counting these kids. In the spring of 1985, a few months before the Abells, the state's first full count found hundreds of children still missing, and the great majority of them were listed as runaways. Not taken, not lost, runaways. Kids who'd chosen to go, and would turn up when they felt like it. That was the box Fawn went into. And Rozlin went into the plainest box there is. A grown woman, missing. Nobody's emergency. Now, to be fair, and this matters, nobody has ever said whether that law was applied in this case. Whether anybody in Bethany in 1985 read it, or followed it, or decided it didn't fit. That file is closed, and it's going to stay closed while the case is open, so nobody can tell you what was done. What can be told is what the law asked for, and what the law didn't ask for. And it didn't get better for a long time. In 1990, five years too late for Fawn, Congress said police couldn't make families wait anymore. Missing children under 18 had to go into the national system immediately.
Under 18. It took until 2003, 18 years after Rozlin walked out that door, for the federal rule to reach somebody her age. And then there's the skull. The one the children found in the creek at Stinchcomb in 2009. The one that was still out there, in the cold open, waiting for a name. When the experts looked at it, they put that woman's age somewhere between 25 and 40. And they put her death somewhere between 1990 and 2008.
1990 at the earliest. Five years at least after the Abell girls were last seen. So if Rozlin and Fawn died that summer, that skull was never one of them. The only way it could have been is if one of those girls had lived on. Five years or more. Never seen. Never heard from. Never once using her own name. And then died a few miles from the house she walked out of. And nobody has ever said it was. No match. As the detective put it, no bones matching the girls have ever been reported. And yet it was a question about bones out at that refuge, from a family member who didn't want their name used, that came in to Bethany police in 2010. And it was in 2010 that the case was opened back up.
25 years. One sister on the wrong side of a line drawn at 16. The other in a box marked runaway. And what finally got somebody to pull the file was a question about bones that as far as anyone has ever shown belonged to somebody else.
Part 9To This Day
February 2013, nearly three years after that phone call and almost 28 years after the girls walked out the door, the story finally went public. First on television, Channel 9 on the 10 o'clock news, a segment about two sisters missing since 1985 and a family still looking. And for the first time, people heard the brother. Otto Abell sat down in front of a camera, a grown man now, and he said the thing that every family in a case like this ends up saying, to this day, we still don't know what happened to them.
He said he believed something bad had happened to them. He didn't say what. He didn't need to. The detective was on that broadcast too. He talked about the DNA, the samples from the family, the hope of matching them someday to bones nobody had found yet.
Three days later, it was in the newspaper, the front page, and there were the girls, their school pictures, side by side, and next to them, the age progressions, the two women they'd never gotten to be. That's where the detective said the things we've already heard, that there had been few clues, that they didn't know if the girls were still alive. And he said something else. He said the chances were slim that the sisters, if they were still alive, would get in touch with their family now, after all this time, to explain where they'd been. And then, simply, the family wants closure, like anyone would. That same story is where Michelle Caudle told the world about the Spitfire and the Mellow one. And it's where she talked about what she'd built, a Facebook page, Find Rozlin and Fawn, photos, the age progressions, a number to call, a place for anybody, anywhere, who might know something. And people did write in. A few of them told her they thought they'd spotted the women, recently, somewhere. It wasn't the Abells. And, because it's the internet, one message came from a psychic, who said Rozlin was dead and Fawn was living in California. Which is not a lead. It's just the kind of thing that happens when you put your grief on the internet and leave the door open.
But here's the thing Michelle said, at the end of that story, that stays with you. I loved them. I want to know what happened. That's it. That's the whole case, really. Not a theory. Not a suspect. Somebody who loved two girls and wants to know. The page stayed up. Years later, it was still there. Still the age progressions. Still the phone number. Still waiting for one message that's actually about them. And as far as anyone has ever made public, that message hasn't come.
Part 10Closing and Sign-Off
So, where does that leave us? On a Thursday afternoon in July of 1985, two sisters walked out of a house on Northwest Fifty-Ninth Terrace in Bethany, on their way to somebody who was waiting down the street. And they have not been seen since.
That's the case. Forty-one years later, that's still the whole case. I told you at the top that I couldn't tell you who was waiting for those girls. And I can't. Nobody can. Not on the record that's out in the open. I'm not going to make up an answer for you just so this ends neatly. But I promised you the why. And I think we found it. Why did nobody go looking? Because almost nothing in 1985 told anybody they had to. A report with no crime in it. A fifteen-year-old filed as a runaway. An eighteen-year-old who, under the law of Oklahoma that summer, wasn't a missing child at all. Just a grown woman who'd left home. No newspaper story anybody's ever found. No federal rule that reached her age for another eighteen years. The system did exactly what it was built to do in 1985. And what it was built to do was wait.
So, here's my honest read. And I want to be clear that it's a read. I think Michelle Caudle was right. I think those two girls went down the street to a ride. And something happened on the other end of it. It's the plainest reading of everything that survives. The hitchhiking, the waiting car or whatever it was. A social security number that went silent the same month. A sister's apartment they never reached. I could be wrong. Their older sister believes something very different. And she lived in that family. I can't dismiss that. And I won't pretend to.
But here's what still keeps me up. Who was down the street? Was it somebody the girls knew? Or just somebody they were willing to get in a car with? Did anyone in 1985 ask that question out loud? Knock on a door on 59th Terrace. Call the Del Rancho. Was there a car? Did a neighbor see it and never think about it again? And why did it take a question about somebody else's bones twenty-five years later for anybody to pull the file?
And there are things I couldn't find. If you can help with any of them, I would love to hear from you. If you knew Rozlin or Fawn in 1985, from the South Side, from U.S. Grant, from the Del Rancho, from Bethany. If you ever gave two girls a ride out of that neighborhood that summer. If you have a newspaper clipping from 1985 about these girls, I have never been able to find one. And if you know anything at all about what happened to them, please don't call me first. Call the Bethany Police Department at 405-789-2323. The case is still open.
Somebody was waiting for Rozlin and Fawn down the street that day. Their family has been waiting ever since. Thank you all for listening to this episode of Okie Investigations and Forgotten True Crime. If it meant something to you, share it with somebody. That's how cases like this one stay alive. Everything I worked from, the newspaper pages, the TV report, the law, and the timeline is up at section29.com. Until next time, I'm Trevor. Stay safe out there. Just know you are unique, you are special, and you are loved.