Watch Now. Listen on Apple. Listen on Spotify.
Non-family, stranger abductions are the rarest of the five case types of missing children & account for only 1% of the missing children cases reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). According to the NCMEC, the majority of child abductions occur when a child is on their way to or from school or a school-related activity. The most common times of an abduction happen before & after school & after dinnertime between 7-9 am, 3-4 pm & 6-7 pm on school days. These most often occur on the street where children are walking or playing.
According to investigators, a double abduction is extremely rare within the United States & between 1973-2011, there had only been fifteen cases.
Yet in this case, two young cousins headed out for an innocent bike ride on a hot, summer day in 2012, never to return again.
8-year-old Elizabeth Collins & 10-year-old Lyric Cook may have been cousins, but they were as close as sisters & did everything together. The girls’ moms, Heather & Misty, were sisters & they lived in the small town of Evansdale, Iowa with a population of less than 5,000. The girls loved playing outside together, singing, creating dance routines & dressing up. Being a small town, Evansdale was tight knit & residents felt safe to leave their doors unlocked & allow their children to roam free. But what happened on a summer Friday in 2012 changed everyone’s sense of safety.
Elizabeth June Marie Collins was born on July 31, 2003 to parents Drew & Heather Collins. She was a student at Poyner Elementary where her playful, bubbly personality brought joy to those around her. She loved life & all that it had to give to her & she was rarely seen without a huge smile across her face.
8-year-old Elizabeth loved to get her hair & nails done as much as she loved to play sports & explore nature. She had a strong-willed personality & loved playing with her three siblings & ordering them around. She loved spending time with her family, going shopping with her mom & having family movie night with popcorn. Elizabeth was exceptionally social & her third grade teacher reflected that she was always the last to finish her lunch since she was so busy talking.
Lyric Cook was born on October 2, 2001 to parents & high school sweethearts Daniel & Misty Cook-Morrissey. She loved playing video games with her brother, Dillin, spending time outdoors, fishing with her dad & swimming off the dock at her great grandma’s house. During the winter, Lyric would rush out on a snowy day to go sledding & like Elizabeth, she loved to have fun with her family. The 10-year-old was a gentle, loving girl who was also fearless & tough.
On Friday, July 13, 2012, Drew got up for work at about 6:30 am & Elizabeth crawled into her parent’s bed for snuggles with her mom as she so often did. Since it was summer break, she was off of school & home for the day & looked forward to spending time with her cousin that day.
Lyric’s parents were separated at the time & she & her mom were staying at her grandma’s house, Wylma Collins. Since Misty had to work that day, Wylma headed over to Drew & Heather’s house to watch the girls so they could play together while their parents worked. Heather remembers saying goodbye to Elizabeth, who was still in her pajamas, as she headed out the door. Tragically, this would be the last time she ever saw her daughter alive.
Right around noon, Wylma was gearing up to make the girls lunch when at about 12:15 pm, Elizabeth & Lyric asked their grandma if they could go out on a bike ride. Wylma said that would be fine but asked the girls not to be gone long since Misty was coming back soon to pick Lyric up. The girls assured their grandma that they would be back soon & Wylma watched as they pedaled away.
Misty got off of work at 1 pm & planned to swing by Heather’s to pick Lyric up so they could go to the local pool together. However, by this time the girls had been gone for about 45 minutes & they still hadn’t come back from their bike ride so Wylma began to worry. When Heather came home from work & the girls still weren’t home, she immediately believed that something was terribly wrong.
When Drew came home, he recalls seeing how concerned Heather was as she told him about the girls’ bike ride & the fact that despite hours passing, they still hadn’t come back. He tried to assume the best & suggested that maybe the girls had stopped by a friend’s house. The family began driving all around town, but there was no sign of the girls anywhere.
With a growing fear & sick feeling inside, Heather headed into the local police station a little before 3 pm to report the girls missing. The day was exceptionally hot, so investigators theorized that maybe they’d stopped into a friend’s house to escape the heat.
At about 5 pm, when the girls had been missing for close to four hours, investigators found their bikes by Meyers Lake, a little over a mile away from Elizabeth’s house. It was a place that Elizabeth had been before, but never without an adult & Heather didn’t think her daughter would have remembered how to get there.
The bikes were located at the southeast corner of the lake at a gated entrance to the overflow which was a little peninsula that runs off the lake. The gate was found open & investigators worried that maybe the girls had gone into the lake to cool off & drowned. After divers did a quick, preliminary search, they felt confident that the girls were not in the lake.
The area around Meyers Lake was surrounded by eight foot fences & Elizabeth’s Hannah Montana purse was found discarded over the other side of the fence with her cellphone inside as if someone had tossed it there. As soon as Drew sent Heather a picture of the discarded purse, she immediately knew in her heart that the girls were gone.
As days went by, volunteers came in droves to help search for the two little girls who seemed to have vanished into thin air. The Sheriff’s Office was assisted by the FBI as well as the Department of Criminal Investigations.
Three days after the girls disappeared, when Meyers Lake was drained, the FBI sent their divers into the deeper underwater pockets of the lake & they were able to determine definitively that the girls hadn’t drowned. Aerial searches were conducted & investigators also interviewed local sex offenders to eliminate them as suspects.
Investigators also analyzed the family’s computers to eliminate the possibility that the girls could have been talking to someone online. The family members were eliminated as suspects as well. At the time that Lyric disappeared, Misty & Dan were separated & had each spent time in prison for felony drug convictions. Misty spent three years behind bars & Dan was actively awaiting trial on charges for making & dealing meth. He had only just turned down a plea deal one day before the girls vanished.
Because of their pasts, investigators focused on the couple & the possibility that their nefarious backgrounds could have introduced a troubled person into their lives that may have retaliated against them by harming the girls. Dan was actively using drugs at the time of Lyric’s disappearance while Misty was clean. Both of their polygraph tests came back as inconclusive while Dan insisted this was the case because he was under the influence. At this point in time, they stopped communicating with law enforcement, which to investigators, was a red flag.
The situation caused a lot of animosity & divide between the family members in an already horrifically stressful time. Dan went on to retake the polygraph test three days later when he was drug free & he passed.
Surveillance video was reviewed from a local business that depicted the girls riding by on their bikes shortly after noon on the day they vanished which was the last time they’d been seen. Eye witnesses also saw them at various locations around Evansdale that helped establish a timeline or potential evidence.
One woman recalled seeing a man standing near a no outlet sign with two little girls. One girl was on his shoulders while the other was next to him & the girl on his shoulders appeared to be fighting him. The woman made the assumption that the little girl was mad at her dad for taking her away from playing. She also noticed a white van parked across the street where this was happening. The day after the abduction, investigators received two or three tips involving a white van.
Candlelight vigils & press conferences were held to bring attention to the case in hopes that Elizabeth & Lyric would return home safely. However, time continued to tick by & there was no sign of them.
Drew remembers that through his immense grief, he recognized that he still needed to put food on the table while he felt he was trapped inside of a nightmare. He would push himself through the days until he broke, allow himself to completely fall apart & then get back up & do it all over again. The families met with investigators daily during the week for debriefings & investigators were holding out hope that Lyric & Elizabeth were still alive somewhere.
On December 5, 2012, after five gut wrenching months went by with no sign of the girls, the families were contacted by their minister & asked to come down to city hall since there was a major break in the case. When they arrived, they were given the devastating news that Elizabeth & Lyric’s bodies had been found.
It was the last day of the deer hunting season & the weather was on the warmer side of what was typical when hunters out in rural Bremer County at the Seven Bridges Wildlife area, a location about twenty miles northeast from where the girls were last seen, saw a pink cloth on the ground. As they pulled the cloth away, they were shocked to find a human skull. As they looked more closely, they noticed another nearby skull & shoe, the remains scattered around the area.
The residents of Evansdale felt shocked to the core as if they’d been hit by an atomic bomb. It was likely that the killer was familiar with the park because of how remote it was & investigators turned their focus on individuals that might know the location.
When investigators processed the scene for evidence, they found that the entirety of the girl’s clothing & shoes were present. Because the location was a distance from any area of parking, it’s likely that their killer walked them to the spot where they were murdered.
Moving forward to ten months after Elizabeth & Lyric were abducted, it was Monday, May 20, 2013, when investigators in Dayton, Iowa received a frantic 911 call from 12-year-old Dezi Hughes. Dezi was hysterical as she told the dispatcher that a man had abducted her & her 15-year-old friend, Kathlynn Shepard. She had managed to escape, but the man still had Kathlynn.
After Dezi & Kathlynn had gotten off their school bus, they were less than a block away from their homes when a man in a red truck pulled alongside them as they walked. He asked if they were interested in making some money by helping him mow lawns in the area. The girls told them they were close to home & they would need to quickly ask their parents if it was okay. He offered them a ride & the girls climbed into his truck as he shook their hands & told them his name was Michael. Dezi recalled that he was a large man weighing anywhere between 250-280#.
As Michael began driving in the opposite direction of where they lived, Dezi reminded him that they needed to ask for permission before going off to help him. He explained that they would be able to use the phone at the house they were going to. Soon, he drove out of Dayton & began taking the back roads & as time passed, the girls became more & more unsettled with the situation.
Michael eventually stopped at a rural hog confinement & pointed the girls in the direction of the lawnmowers. After they turned around, he pointed a gun at Dezi & Kathlynn & ordered them to lay on the ground on their stomachs. He zip tied their hands behind their backs & he told them that if they did what they were told, he would allow them to go. Dezi recalls crying out in pain as the man stepped on her leg, he apologized & rubbed her leg & she wondered why he was being sympathetic at the same moment he was holding them against their will.
After he set the gun down, he pulled out a knife & the girls begged him to let them go. The man grew angry at Kathlynn for talking so he ripped her up from off the ground by her arm & pulled her in a direction around the corner. As Kathlynn began to move out of Dezi’s view, she yelled out her friend’s name.
With the man now out of sight, Dezi took her opportunity & quickly manipulated her hands so they were in front of her. She grabbed the gun & ran into the woods as quickly as she could. When Dezi stopped to catch her breath, now in the safety amongst the trees, she checked the gun & noted that it was a hog tranquilizer that was empty.
Dezi suddenly heard the sounds of the man screaming out in anger during the moment he realized she’d gotten away. He jumped into his truck while she further concealed herself in the woods. Dezi ran through the thick brush of the woods in shorts & a t-shirt, her shoes & socks pulled off her feet as she ran through the thick mud that coated the ground. The thorns from the raspberry bushes tore at the flesh of her legs & feet & despite the blood that poured down her legs, she felt no pain at the time. Adrenaline coursed through her body as she continued to run, still able to hear the sounds of the man’s truck in the distance, fully aware that he was searching for her.
As she continued to rush through the dense woods Dezi suddenly heard the sounds of voices as she came upon a farm. She was frantic as she tried to tell the owners what was going on & they handed her a phone to call 911. Dezi handed the phone back to the farmers so they could calmly tell the dispatcher where she could be located.
Dezi tearfully explained that her friend was still at the hog confinement & she needed help immediately. A friend of the farmer’s went to the hog confinement with a gun & came back shortly after, explaining that there was a large area of blood on the ground, but there was no man, no teenage girl & no truck.
When investigators responded to the hog confinement, they were told by the property owner that his son-in-law, 42-year-old Michael Klunder, drove a red Toyota Tundra truck. Not only that, but Klunder was a convicted sex offender with multiple convictions for violent felonies.
After Dezi was transferred to the hospital, detectives arrived & showed her a photo of Klunder & she was able to quickly confirm that this was the man who abducted her & Kathlynn. When detectives arrived at his house, no one was home until his wife returned. She indicated that she’d received a strange text from him that read something to the effect of, I love you, I’m so sorry.
Investigators began pinging Klunder’s phone as his father-in-law headed to check his other properties. Investigators were soon notified that Klunder had hung himself in a machine shed on one of the farms. The pickup truck was present with blood on the tailgate, but there was no sign of Kathlynn.
Searchers began combing the area with horses, ATVs & on foot, in hopes of finding the teen alive. Meanwhile, Dezi was frustrated that she wasn’t allowed to help search for her best friend. Investigators were able to track Klunder’s movements once he left the hog confinement as his cell phone was tracked over a forty mile area as he drove aimlessly around, likely in a panic, trying to find a place to go. This made finding Kathlynn much more difficult.
One day after the girls were abducted, Dezi & Kathlynn’s backpacks were recovered in the town of Frazier in a ditch on the side of the road, likely thrown from Klunder’s truck. Investigators assume he was following the river as he drove so they turned their attention to the river & teams began to search.
Weeks passed & there was still no sign of Kathlynn until June 7, 2013, eighteen days after she was abducted, a fisherman found her body wrapped in plastic in the Des Moines River, twenty miles south of the hog farm. It was determined that she died from multiple sharp blunt force injuries after she had been stabbed 27 times & her throat had been slashed. She’d also been beaten about her head. The medical examiner’s office has never revealed to the public if Kathlynn had been sexually assaulted.
Dezi was heartbroken when she learned the devastating details of her friend’s murder & couldn’t wrap her head around how someone could do that to another person. Kathlynn was described as innocent, fun-loving & caring.
After her friend’s death, Dezi spiraled into self-hatred for being unable to save her best friend in the world while investigators assure her that she would have likely been murdered had she not run away, which would have allowed Klunder to continue on with his destruction.
Investigators could not help but notice the similarities in what happened to Elizabeth & Lyric in Evansdale & Dezi & Kathlynn in Dayton. Both crimes happened in the middle of the day, less than one year apart, one hundred miles & less than a two hour drive from one another. Investigators felt that it was very possible that Klunder could have been the person responsible for abducting & murdering Elizabeth & Lyric.
Throughout many of his teenage years, Michae Klunder had been in juvenile detention centers for violent offenses. At age fifteen, he beat a girl in a bathroom so viciously that she was near death. For this, he was sentenced to sex offender treatment & served nearly two years behind bars in 1989.
In 1991, he followed a 21-year-old woman in his car & flashed his headlights at her, signaling for her to pull over in the pretense that her tail light was out. After she climbed out of her car, he threw her to the ground & threatened her with a knife, wrestling her into his car. Thankfully, she was able to wave out his window to an oncoming car & she was able to escape.
The very next day, he abducted two 3-year-old girls from an apartment complex, put them in the trunk of his car & drove them to a state park. He’d been angry at the mother of one of the children. Thankfully, they were found alive in a secluded dumpster where he’d left them to die. A doctor later determined that the children had been choked. This was his first double abduction & in 1992 he was sentenced to 41 years in prison.
In 2011, Klunder was released from prison after serving only twenty years, less than half of his sentence. This was seventeen months before Elizabeth & Lyric were abducted & 25 months before Dezi & Kathlynn were abducted.
Lyric & Elizabeth’s double abductions were the 16th case in the United states since 1973 & Dezi & Kathylnn’s was number 17. There have been three total cases in Iowa & Michael Klunder was knowingly responsible for two of these three cases, the other involving the 3-year-old girls.
Investigators began searching for evidence that Klunder was responsible for Elizabeth & Lyric’s murders & tried to find a connection between Klunder & Evansdale & the girls. They realized that when Kluder was a teenager & in a detention center, he escaped & hid out in Seven Bridges where the girl’s bodies had been found which proved that this was a location he was familiar with.
They desperately hoped to connect Kluder to Elizabeth & Lyric’s murders which would give residents of Evansdale comfort, knowing their killer was gone. However, after one year of looking into Klunder, in May 2014, investigators officially ruled him out as a suspect in the case after they determined he hadn’t been in Evansdale on the day of the murder.
Despite this, many people remained convinced that Klunder could have still been responsible, questioning if maybe he’d just left his cell phone behind on the day he traveled to Evansdale.
Some wondered if Richard Allen, who was responsible for murdering Abby Williams & Libby German in 2017 in the small town of Delphi, Indiana, 400 miles (a six hour drive) from Evansdale, could be Elizabeth & Lyric’s killer. This is a case we covered in episode one 179 which was released on February 2, 2025.
13-year-old Abby & 14-year-old Libby vanished on February 13, 2017 after they went out for a hike along the Delphi Historic Trail. When their bodies were found the following day, Libby’s phone showed that she had filmed a video minutes before her murder. The video depicted Abby walking across the Monon High Bridge & in the background, a man could be seen following. As the video ended, experts were able to enhance audio & the man could be heard saying, Guys, down the hill. The man, who wore blue jeans, a navy blue coat & a brown winter hat, came to be known as Bridge Guy.
Despite the concrete video as well as witness recollections from those who had been on the trail that day who had seen both Bridge Guy & Libby & Abby & the fact that investigators believed that he was local to Delphi, Richard Allen wasn’t arrested until October 2022, more than 5.5 years later. However, there was no reason to believe that these two cases were connected despite their similarities.
The FBI’s behavioral analysis unit created a profile of the person responsible for Elizabeth & Lyric’s murders. The person was likely local to Evansdale & familiar with both the location where they’d been abducted at Meyers Lake as well as the area where their bodies were located at Seven Bridges Wildlife Area. It’s likely that they altered their physical appearance after the murders, maybe changing their hairstyle or facial hair. The appearance of their car may have also been altered. The person responsible may have previously attempted to abduct children or adults in the past as it’s highly unlikely that this had been their first time.
In 2017, five years after they lost Elizabeth, Drew & Heather went on to divorce after 25 years together as a result of the stress & grief from their loss. Since they each grieved differently, it ended up driving them apart.
The investigation also focused on Jeff Altmayer, who tried to entice children into his van by offering them $100 while he was working as a traveling automobile damage field inspector.
Since Lyric & Elizabeth’s murders, Meyers Lake has since been renamed Angels Park in honor of the girls. In 2022, which marked the ten year anniversary of their deaths, a 10-mile ride & drive was held to raise money for Crime Stoppers.
The Elizabeth Collins Foundation was created which partners with Cedar Valley Crime Stoppers to bring awareness to cold cases in hopes of generating new tips & leads. Their mission, in addition to helping families associated with missing individuals, is to educate the community on prevention of abduction, sexual abuse & trafficking.`
Despite the passage of nearly thirteen years, the grief remains raw for Lyric & Elizabeth’s families as they remain hopeful that one day, their case will be solved & their killer will be brought to justice.
There is a reward that is now more than $100,000 to help find the person who murdered Lyric & Elizabeth. If you have any information about this case, please email the Division of Criminal Investigation at dciinfo@dps.state.ia.us or call the Cedar Valley Crime Stoppers at 855-300-8477.
References:
- Daily Beast: The double abduction & murder that confounded police
- The Seattle Times: Man who kidnapped 2 Iowa girls had long record
- COMINGSOON.NET: Taken Together: What happened to Lyric & Elizabeth
- Max: Taken Together – Who Killed Lyric & Elizabeth
- KCCI Des Moines: Case of murdered Evansdale cousins still unsolved 12 years after girls’ bodies were found
- Elizabeth Collins Foundation
- National Center for Missing & Exploited Children: Non-family abductions & attempts
- Independent: The unsolved 2012 murders of two young Iowa cousins still haunts this town
