After a Halloween party at a country club, a wife and mother of four vanishes. Nearly a decade later, a private investigator claims to uncover chilling new clues that turn the town upside down. Keith Morrison reports.Keith Morrison and Blayne Alexander go behind the scenes of the making of this episode in ‘Talking Dateline’:Listen on Apple: https://apple.co/41AGQqKListen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5OkrIjRixwEuU24FrNIean
Chapter 1: What happened to Karen Swift after the Halloween party?
David Swift reported they found a car on the side of the road.
Everybody was pointing fingers at David.
He came in on crutches and said he had a knee injury.
Anything I can do to help. He couldn't have done this to her. I just don't think he could have.
I came in and I stirred up the hornet's nest. There's a huge swinger community here. People involved are in some pretty high positions.
She came right out and said your family was responsible.
Yeah, crazy.
I remember feeling very emotional. I'm having to testify. I'm sorry.
It's all right.
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Chapter 2: What clues did investigators find about her disappearance?
It was a who's who of Dyersburg gathered for a Halloween party. Jason Creasy, a locally prominent lawyer and judge, was one of the hosts.
Where was it? It was at the Farms, which is a country club in Dyersburg, and almost everyone was in costume.
Including a woman named Karen Swift. Charismatic Karen. Life of the party, usually. What was she wearing?
She was wearing a black skirt with tights, and then she had on kind of like a Mardi Gras mask. She didn't win the best costume of the night.
She didn't have much fun, either. Wasn't the Karen who loved to sing and dance. She was the plus one of another couple and felt like a third wheel. So she called her friend Jenny Gurian.
She just said she wasn't having a good time. And I told her, just go sit at the bar. And I said, just get you a drink. And she said, Jenny, I just don't want to be here.
But Karen stuck it out. It was late when she left the party with the couple who had taken her, Bill and Kathy Bona. They stopped at a McDonald's for some fries. And then they went to the Bona's house, where Karen planned to spend the night. She would rejoin her own family in the morning. But after midnight, Karen got a call from her nine-year-old daughter, Ashley.
I was at a friend's house, and I wanted to come home.
You were at a sleepover, and there were like three girls there, and they were kind of making you feel like the one left out, right?
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Chapter 3: How did the community react to Karen's vanishing?
Including all kinds of mischief. She even joined her kids with a supply of toilet paper to do some decorating at Robin's house a few days before Halloween.
She called me and said, the girls want to do something fun, and they thought it would be fun to go and roll your house.
So you gave them toilet paper all over the trees, yeah?
That's correct, yes. And we had a good laugh about that.
Me and my sister both were equally attached to her hip, but I was their first girl and that was all they wanted.
David had a good job as a manager in a factory that made gas pipelines, shared a deep sense of faith with Karen, and was devoted to his children.
He was a good dad. He loved his kids very, very much and had good relationships with them.
Karen told friends how much she wanted her kids to live in a happy home, something she said she didn't have growing up.
She said, all I want is a white house and a white picket fence and to go to church. That's all I want.
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Chapter 4: What were the rumors surrounding Karen's relationships?
That's what everyone said they wanted. The local news was all over the story. Spoke to the friend Karen went to the costume party with, Kathy Bona.
We're just very concerned about Karen right now. We want her safe return.
Investigators were talking to everyone. Eager to learn all they could, it helps to know your missing person. And David, it turned out, had shared a lot.
When we first moved over there, and that's when Karen really started changing and doing this, all kinds of stuff.
Stuff, he said, was worrying him. Like how Karen had recently started leaving the house at all hours of the night, said David.
It was about 9.30 one night and Karen was sneaking out of the door. He went outside and said, Karen, where are you going?
He said most of it happened with Karen's friends, the Bonas. They had a hot tub and liked to host parties. And one night,
I could see Karen was in the bed here. I went over there to the covers and I pulled them back. She did have a towel, but she was totally naked.
I asked her, why aren't you in bed naked with Kathy?
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Chapter 5: Who were the key suspects in Karen's case?
I was scared because I knew the type of mother she was. I know even though she had her priorities kind of messed up at that time, there would be nothing that would keep her from taking her girls trick-or-treating.
Before they knew it, it was Thanksgiving.
I cried for hours thinking, what if Karen is out there? She has no way to communicate to anybody on where she is at.
December. Winter descended, damp and cold. Outside, around Dyersburg, the kudzu vine shrank to wait for spring. And then, six weeks after it began, the search was finally over. A caretaker walking the grounds of a nearby cemetery saw something under a steel cross in a patch of withering kudzu.
You know, at the time she came up missing in October, you know, we probably had waist-high kudzu vines. And when December the 10th, as it got colder, the kudzu had subsided. So it made her body visible.
She's there with just on her underclothes. Who are we talking about in the fall of the year, in October? Sure. So you wouldn't think the mother walked out of the house like that.
Jenny's husband gave her the news.
I could kind of see it on his face. He just looked at me and he said, Jenny... They found her. So that was a tough night.
Do you remember hearing when they found your mother's body?
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Chapter 6: What new evidence emerged years later?
Totally innocent, she said. But David's reaction was over the top.
He accused her of lots of things, sleeping with me, being a whore, being drunk, lots of things, was very angry.
Bill Bona also testified. He said Karen was their good friend, nothing more.
Did you have a romantic relationship with Ms. Swift? No.
And the night Robin saw him with Karen after she stumbled out of the hot tub, he testified he was just trying to help.
And at that point in time, one of her friends was coming in from behind me, and I said, wait, you know, let me get you a towel.
Jason Creasy was also Karen's divorce lawyer that divorced the state content that David didn't want and couldn't afford.
We were asking for her to get half of that house sold and for her to have half the equity. And it came out where he would have to pay $1,408 per month in child support.
Prosecutors played David's interviews with police to show how he talked about his missing wife.
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