Louise Freeman wrote on Friday about a likely real-world model for Janice Beattie, Poisoner Granny and Troubled Blood’s nurse with a secret. The Giggling Granny Serial Poisoner also included as an introduction the several times the real world has had representation in Strike mysteries, almost all of which instances I think Professor Freeman discovered and in one case predicted.
Today I want to share a ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ news story here in Oklahoma that could not have been a model for the Troubled Blood story line, a missing person cold case that is forty years old, but for which story Strike5 might have been inspiration.
In brief, a family of three disappeared forty years ago in Texas. All were presumed dead but no bodies were ever found. The parents and their one year old daughter, Holly, had vanished without a trace.
Except they hadn’t. Two bodies that were found in 1981 were identified in 2021 by Identifinders International as Tina Gail Linn Clouse and Harold Dean Clouse Jr., the parents. The Texas Attorney General’s Office Cold Case and Missing Persons Unit used the DNA from this find to search for the Clouse’s daughter Holly — and found her in Oklahoma, the forty-two year old mother of five children. She has been in phone contact with her biological relations and will soon be meeting her grandmother, aunt, and extended family. Call her ‘The Girl Who Lived.’
Read the whole story, to include the religious cult members implicated in the Clouse murders, at New Texas Cold Case Unit Locates Woman Missing For More Than 40 Years, A baby who went missing after her parents’ death over 40 years ago is found alive, and Missing Daughter of Texas Murder Victims Found After 40 Years: Holly Marie Clouse Reunited with Extended Family Thanks to Texas Attorney General’s New Cold Case and Missing Persons Unit.
The real-world story isn’t as complicated as Troubled Blood, at least with respect to the finding of the missing person, though the murder mystery itself may be much stranger than Strike5’s occult backdrops and hauntings. What I find most, well, striking about the two stories is that the non-fiction piece is the one that has what seems to be the contrived ‘happy ending.’ Hats off to the Texas Attorney General’s Cold Case Unit and Identifinders International for solving a disappearance which everyone but the families had forgotten!
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