On July 24, 1997, 24-year-old Amy Wroe Bechtel set out for what should have been an ordinary afternoon near Lander, Wyoming. A rising athlete with Olympic dreams, Amy was in the middle of mapping the course for a 10K race she was organizing. By the end of the day, her white Toyota station wagon sat abandoned, her to-do list unfinished, and Amy herself was nowhere to be found. Despite a massive search effort that involved hundreds of people, cadaver dogs, and aircraft, no trace of Amy was ever recovered.

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In late August 2016, the Tromp family of Silvan, Victoria—Mark, Jacoba, and their three adult children—suddenly fled their successful berry farm and thriving businesses without phones, wallets, or passports. Over the next week, their strange journey would stretch hundreds of miles across Australia, leaving behind a trail of abandoned cars, disoriented wanderings, and desperate pleas for help. What could drive a close-knit, hardworking family to believe they were being hunted? Was it paranoia, environmental toxins, or a rare psychological condition known as folie à deux—shared psychosis? The case gripped the nation of Australia, making headlines worldwide, and even now it leaves more questions than answers. Why did some family members resist the delusion while others collapsed under its weight? And most haunting of all—could something like this happen to any of us?

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On March 2, 1996, 25-year-old Alicia Showalter Reynolds set out before breakfast, pointing her white Mercury south from Baltimore toward Charlottesville for a shopping day with her mom. Somewhere along U.S. Route 29 in Central Virginia—near Culpeper—that ordinary drive met an extraordinary danger, the kind that hides in plain sight on the shoulder of a busy highway.

By nightfall, Alicia hadn’t arrived. Her car was found on the roadside; witnesses remembered a clean-cut man in a dark pickup offering “help.” In this episode, we walk the Route 29 corridor minute by minute, piecing together what Alicia saw, what bystanders noticed, and how a roadside “good Samaritan” ruse may have masked a predator.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Virginia State Police Culpeper Division toll-free at 1-800-572-2260, the Bureau of Criminal Investigation toll-free at 1-888-300-0156, or you can also email them at bci-culpeper@vsp.virginia.gov.

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