Chapter 1 - Pt 1: March 4th, 2001

It's March weather in Tennessee, which means the transition from cold and dreary to little popsa spring begins. Wild yellow daffodils begin to peek through the ground everywhere you turn, just waiting for young child's whimsical smile and giggle to pull one from the ground and run back to their mother flower and their hands, smile on their face and innocence in their heart. That's how Bethany should have spent March fourth, two thousand and one, But instead it's on March fourth, two thousand and one. Not Bethany Leanne Markowski will never be seen or heard from again. Born February first, nineteen ninety to father Lawrence Joe and mother Johnny Carter, eleven year old Caucasian, Bethany Markowski, full of life and spunk with dark brown hair and blue eyes with a greenish tint depending on the day, was to be headed home on Sunday, March fourth, to her mother after her second court ordered unsupervised visitation weekend with her father, Larry Joe Markowski. Larry and Johnny were in the midst of a contentious separation and just a few months prior, Johnny and Bethany had fled from Larry and the home they shared in gleaes And, Tennessee, to escape to a safe place, her sister Laurie's home in Nashville, Tennessee. Johnny was relying on her sister Laurie to help facilitate custody exchange drop offs with Larry. Since Johnny had a cord order of protection active and in place against Larry, he was not allowed to be anywhere near her, and yet he was still given unsupervised weekend visits with Bethany. This particular visit is just the second court ordered sanctioned unsupervised weekend since Johnny had escaped with Bethany, and it will be the last for everyone. Just a few days prior, on Friday evening March second, two thousand and one, Bethany's aunt Laurie met with Larry, Bethany's father at the midway point between Gleason and Nashville, an exit with the McDonald's in the town called Waverley, and it's at that exchange on March second, two thousand and one, which would begin a seventy two hour nightmare and would ultimately become Johnny Carter's living nightmare twenty five years in the making of searching for her missing little girl. This is Missing in Hushtown Season two, Bethany Markowski. Welcome to Bethany's Brigade. I'm your host, Jules. This is Chapter one, Part one. Let's go through the events of March fourth, two thousand and one chronologically, and then throughout the duration of this podcast, we will take you through each pivotal event which led to the devastating truth a young girl has been missing for twenty five years. March fourth begins with Bethany making a call to her mother Johnny, from inside the home they used to share with Larry Markowski and Gleeson, Tennessee. Now. Gleeson is a small town just two point three square miles situated in western Tennessee and Weekly County. According to the two thousand and twenty United States Census, in the year two thousand, there was a population of just one thousand, four hundred and sixty three people. So we're talking about a town where everybody knows everybody. We're talking about a hush town perhaps, And so it's from that tiny town that Bethany calls Johnny. The tiny town where Bethany knew as home, and in the home where Bethany had a room once filled with things she loved, but her mother wasn't there and she was missing her. And it's because of this callogue that we can now have an official timestamp and location of Bethany and Larry. On March fourth, two thousand and one, nine thirty eight am, Larry and Bethany are in their home in Gleeson, Tennessee. And then the next thing we know, on Sunday morning, we get a call and we know it's from their house because the caller ID had their phone number pop up, and it was like at nine something in the morning. This is Laurie Jackson, Johnny's sister, Bethany's aunt, who was doing the visitation exchange. We'll referred to her throughout the podcast as Aunt Laurie. And then there was a whole conversation, you know about daddy knows you have boyfriend, There's all that crazy stuff that and him yelling in the background, and Johnny was like, it's fine, she said, and she was like, I'll see you at five at Waverley, right, Mama, And she that's kind of interesting because Bethany knew she wasn't coming. Could it be Bethany trying to signal to Johnny that she wanted her mom to be a pickup right at five and not a moment later. Or was she just being a young girl in the middle of a horrible marital dissolution who didn't fully understand why her mother wasn't going to be the one at the Waverley exit to get her. Now we know you caught that one line, Laurie said, you know the line about Larry accusing Johnny of having a boyfriend. For US producers, this was a conversation that we could not believe Larry was having with his own daughter about her mother. We all agreed that this was incredibly inappropriate, and we were all left to wonder what was his goal here. Johnny and Larry are separated, going through a divorce. She has an order of protection against him. She's done with this marriage, as proven by the court divorce filing paperwork. Could this just be a man who was so in love with his wife that his world was crumbling even thinking about moving on with someone else. But why involve your daughter, Larry, your eleven year old daughter, whom you only have seventy two hours with we are going to put a pin in this boyfriend talk, but we are coming to it later, because, as you may have already guessed, it's important. The next law enforcement corroborated event of March fourth is when Larry and Bethany stop by Bethany's friend's home. A young girl Bethany was close to whom she hadn't seen in a while because her and Johnny had moved to Nashville. This young girl, whom we will call Amy, confirmed with authorities that yes, Bethany and Larry did come to her aunt's home in Glease in Tennessee, where she was living at the time, but they only stayed a little while. And get this, Amy tells authorities that Bethany shows her a cell phone, but not just any cell phone. Amy alleges that Bethany said her father had purchased her a cell phone of her own. I won't make you wait until subsequent episodes before we dive into this a little bit more so I will tell you this that cell phone was never recovered. We have no idea if this is true, if Amy was misremembering, or if Bethany perhaps told Amy that Larry's phone was hers. What we do believe is this Amy had no reason to lie. She loved Bethany and wanted Bethany home. But the cell phone, it never shows up on any calls, It never shows up on any phone records. Could it have been a track phone? You know those pay as you go untraced phones you see at big box stores or gas stations or track stops. Perhaps was this a phone given to a daughter by a father who just wanted a way to communicate with her while she was away with her mother. The team and I sat on this piece of information for a while. This is important. Phones are traceable, even the untraceable ones. Could we find this phone and then find Bethany or are we chasing a lead that was nothing more than a simple misunderstanding. And since the only report of Bethany having a new cell phone of her own case from Amy, we have nowhere to go to follow this lead except to just keep going forward. We'll chuck this piece of information in the back of our minds and bring it out later to see if it fits into the full picture of this puzzle. As we continue on. Larry claims that between the nine thirty eight phone call and the next pinged location at twelve twelve that Bethany and he won eight McDonald's two sat outside Johnny's ex employer's house in Milan, Tennessee, and three began traveling toward Jackson. I know, we just threw a bunch of cities at you, and there will be some more timelines and locations as we go on. So if you want a visual like we do here, make sure to follow our Instagram at missing in Hushtown to see maps and photos in our posts, but also comprehensive photos and lists on our website missing in hushtown dot com. We will have a blog post for every chapter of this podcast which will have documents, maps, and other resources for you to go check out more information as well. Now let's go back to that morning timeline we started at nine thirty eight in Gleason and of course we have to talk about Larry sitting in front of Johnny's ex employer's house in Milan, Tennessee with Bethany in the car. Remember that pin. Well, here is where that comes into play. The new boyfriend that Larry had been inappropriately talking to his eleven year old daughter about, well, allegedly it was Johnny's ex employer. Now This is taking it even farther than just telling your daughter her mother has a boyfriend. This is negligent of Bethany's mental well being. What is he doing? We said that this information came from Larry. We don't have any primary sources like police reports, our news articles that Larry says this himself. But we do have Johnny Carter and her sisters who recall the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation relaying what Larry told them, And it goes hand in hand with what Johnny heard from Bethany herself on that phone call it nine thirty eight that morning. Recall Bethany's saying that Larry told our mom has a new boyfriend. Could it be that, since Johnny denied and tried to squash it right then and there, that Larry then decided to drive Bethany to the house himself to make her a believer. And what then was he expecting to find Johnny there because he didn't. If this account is in fact true, could it be that Larry is more concerned about Johnny than the well being of his daughter. This brings us to the next corroborated time stamp location, a place called natchis Tray State Park. At some point time undetermined, Larry and Bethany drive to Tray State Park, Tennessee, which is a beautiful state protected area which offers camping, hiking, canoeing, and cabins basically anything outdoors it offers it within its forty eight thousand acres. It's important to note that Larry never told well anybody as far as we could confirm that he ever stopped at Natchis Trace. Unlike today, where cell phone towers are everywhere and can track a phone's traveling locations, there were just a few cell towers back in two thousand and one, and the one that Larry's phone does ping off of is likely near Exit one point sixteen on Interstate forty per the location of the cell towers in two thousand and one, and if it wasn't for Bethany's sister Jenny, nobody would know that Larry and Bethany were at the Natchez Trace State Park area that day. Larry never told anybody this information, Bethany didn't mention it on the phone with Jenny, but the cell phone tower pinged his phone there, and so we have our next timestamp and confirmation of life for Bethany LeAnn Markowski on March fourth, twenty and one, at twelve twelve pm, a phone call between sisters, which should sadly be nineteen year old Jenny's last time talking with her little sister, Bethany. Here's Jenny when you talked with her on the phone. She called you from Larry's cell phone. Correct. I called her when I got off of work that day to talk to her before he took her back, because I didn't know when I would get to talk to her again. Can you walk me through you recall that phone call? Well, back then, cell phone reception wasn't great. She just told me that they were on the way to the mall and Jackson and he was going to let her spend some money she had. I told her I would talk to her on the next visit, and that we both told each other we love each other, And she said she was going to put him back on the phone because she couldn't hear very well. Producer Rachel and myself were talking one afternoon about Jackson and how Bethany had told Jenny on the phone that Larry was taking her to the Jackson Mall, thus making Jenny a witness to Larry's plan of events for that day. But let's look at the map. To go from Gleeson to Natchis Trace is about forty six miles, roughly taking about fifty two minutes, give or take ten minutes. But then to go from Natchis Trace to the Jackson Mall is an additional forty minutes. Larry Markowski was a long haul truck driver by profession at that time, so this wasn't actually very odd to me when I read this information, and the fact that it would add an additional forty minutes to his day. He has an eleven year old girl and she liked them all, so it actually didn't spike my suspicions. If say, he was to go from Gleeson straight to Old Hickory mal and Jackson, it would have been just an hour. We don't know why he was a Natchist Trace area. We have no answers, not in any reports which we cannot access as it's an open case. Nor will Larry answer all of our questions either, although he did respectfully decline an interview for this podcast despite me telling him he would be asked about every single thing we would be discussing in this podcast. And yes, I did talk to him on the phone for about forty five minutes, and it was a respectful exchange. He verbalized to me that it didn't matter whether he came on or not, that people won't believe him either way. He still declined even when I said he could have copies of our interviews raw and then edited, and it would be a chance to address every hole in his story. If he wasn't involved in Bethany's disappearance, then let's lay all the cards on the table and settle this so the focus can shift to the true direction, pending he was not involved. I do, however, have statements from him via his wife Valerie, and I will be reading those for you with their permission in future episodes. I will say that after my call with Larry, I immediately hopped on a video chat with Rachel and we recorded it. So here's part of our conversation. The big picture is he is thinking about coming onto interview. He's thinking about allowing me to come interview him in person. I did tell him, I said, you know, I want to be very transparent, truthfully. I want to give him the space to say and re refew anything he wants to I think that's only ethical and fair. Yeah, And I said, listen, if we're all searching this one theory and if it's not true, he goes, you mean that I did it. He goes, you can just say it. I said, yeah, if you have nothing to do with this, then everyone is wasting time because we don't know it from you. And that's the truth. I said. All I have right now is what everyone's saying about you and for you. But I don't have you. And I tell Johnny too, I give. I want to give Larry the space, as hard as it may be. He has a chance to give it all too, and she's known that too, and she wants that too. It's hard, but like you're coming from a spot of there's pieces of the puzzle missing, Johnny has gone above and beyond in her attempts and what she is doing. And when you see that, you have every single piece of you that it says, I'm standing with her. What she says is there, It is real, it is fact. It is what I need to believe in because of what she's doing. So when you have another parent who doesn't put that effort, it's so easy to not feel that way about him. And what a parent I'm missing child who had nothing to do with it, get pissed off at law enforcement so bad that they just give up? Or would they attack law enforcement for defamation, for slander, for mishandling a case. That's my question too, like, oh, you call me a child, minister, I'm never going to talk to you ever again. I think that also depends, because I mean I could see it where it happens, and he's like, all I'm doing right now is digging my own grave. The more I say, the more they pin it on me, so I better shut up. For the last few decades, the public has been led to go off of Larry mckowski's word of accounts for everything except that nine thirty eight am call from Gleason. In that twelve twelve phone call from Natchez Trace, Bethany's sister Jenny didn't know it that day, but she was giving Bethany a gift, an actual location of her last confirmed coordinates, and don't forget she left Bethany with one last I Love you, okay Bethany's brigade. Everything from this point and beyond is according to Larry what he told Belize, what he told friends and family and what he told reporters. So Larry says he arrives at the Jackson Mall around three o'clock that day, on March fourth, two thousand and one. Now, we already know that it takes forty minutes to drive from Natchez Trace Park to Old Hickory Mall and Jackson. But if his last pink call was at twelve twelve, then what are they doing in that chunk of time that leaves a minimum of two hours unaccounted for? Correct? But what if I told you this? An eyewitness tells the TBI agent assigned to the case at that time, Special Agent Trout, that they talked with Larry at a stop in a small town called Parker's Crossroads at about two thirty pm that day. And it gets weirder. This source also claims that they did not see Bethany with Larry. In fact, Larry allegedly tells this source that he had just dropped Bethany off with her mother in Nashville. Johnny had only been in Nashville for two months up to this point, you guys, So are we off base to assume this source actually knew Larry, Maybe even New Johnny or knew him enough to know that his wife had left him. One piece of the witness's account solidifies that this is a true account in my mind. And is this The source calls Larry by his truck driver handle name, which is common amongst truck drivers to have a handle when they call each other over the CC radio, and the name was this Pushrod. To further add to our belief that this sighting was legitimate, as this to drive from Exit one away our Parker's Crossroads to the old Hickory Maull and Jackson it would take approximately thirty minutes, putting Larry at the mall at three pm, which is exactly when Larry said he arrived. It was related to Johnny through the TBI that the source was deemed unreliable, but I may have disagreed with that information pending those details which we just can't seem to shake. Barring any other corroborations about Larry's whereabouts between twelve twelve and five forty five, no cell tower pings, could we at least check his transaction history. While Larry was known to pay for mostly everything with cash and not use the bank cards, if he was in Parker's Crossroads, at two point thirty. Wouldn't this give credibility to that source? Okay, was he buying snacks? What kinds were there? Drinks? What kind of drinks? All these answers to these questions could help indicate if a child was truly with him at that moment. Was Bethany actually with him at the moment? However, there are no records of Larry on camera at Parker's Crossroads, nor records of him getting gas. If he did, he likely paid cash, as he was known to do so. So what did the cashier say when asked if Larry was there? We won't know because they were not asked, or maybe they were asked and it was not relayed to the family. Remember, this is considered an open investigation, so we are not privy to every detail. But we do have a lot of questions, especially since it's confirmed to us through our research and interview process that this sighting at Parker's Crossroads has not been corroborated. Throughout our research efforts, I formed an unlikely cordial texting relationship with Larry's current wife, Miss Valerie. I had sent her a message on Facebook Messenger introducing myself in the purpose for this podcast, and I've asked her questions off and on throughout this process, and to her credit, she's tried to answer them all. She gave me written permission to share our messages minus a few about individuals who are not involved directly in this case, and I'm going to honor that request. Now. This was our recent exchange, Jules. I'm working on the podcast, and I have a question. There was the alleged sighting of Larry at Parker's Crossroads around two pm on March fourth. Did Larry ever say that he was there or not? Valerie, Larry said that he went into Parker's Crossroads to hang up flyers after Beth and he went missing. Said he hung them from there to Knoxville, Jules, but not on March fourth. I think the records we have show his cell phone pinged at twelve near Natchis Trace, and then the phone is off until five forty five. That's the biggest hole we can't explain or figure out, to be honest. And there was the alleged sighting of him in Parker's Crossroads that day around two There are these gaps that nobody can explain. I have so many specific questions that he could help answer. If he has changed his mind to chat on the phone, I can give them to him ahead of time and ask only those ones. A week goes by and I still receive no further reply. But my inference from that exchange is that no, Larry does not confirm that he was at Parker's Crossroads on March fourth, two thousand and one. Now back to the timeline, we have the cell phone records, corroborated time stamp at and around natchis Trace State Park. Then we have the uncorroborated witness at Parker's Crossroads, a stop that would also make sense as he continues his journey over to Jackson. But here's the thing. The Natches Trace ping at twelve twelve and the likely Parker's Crossroad siding at two thirty would only be about eight miles apart, which means there's still a large chunk of time unaccounted for. Where did they go and what did they do from twelve twelve to two thirty? And if the witness did not see Bethany with Larry, where was she and why would Larry seemingly lie about having dropped Bethany off with her mother in Nashville moving on in the timeline from March four, two thousand and one, and now we're at the Old Hickory Mall in Jackson, Tennessee, around three to three thirty according to Larry. Remember, Aunt Laurie is supposed to meet Larry in Waverley, Tennessee, the midway point between Gleason and Nashville, at five pm. Per the court paperwork and custody agreement. The distance from the mall to the meeting point is between seventy to ninety miles. Now, depending on the route, the fastest route will be just over an hour, meaning Bethany and Larry would have just an hour at the mall before they turn around and drive to Waverley to get there by five pm. To ensure they arrived on time, Larry would actually need to leave no later than three forty five. So tell me this. Why did he decide to park at the mall, send his eleven year old daughter into the mall alone and take a nap? And why is his phone off from the last call with Jenny at twelve twelve pm until five forty three pm when Larry finally answers Aunt Laurie's call, demanding to know this Where the hell is Bethany Markowski. Missing? In Hushtown? Season two is executive produced in partnership by five fire Eyes Media LLCs Jules Thorpe and John Rivera, as well as Mom Cast Productions Rachel Holloway and Heather Northcraft. The script is written by Jules Thorpe and edited by Heather Northcraft. Project lead is Rachel Holloway and master editing and audio production is done by John Rivera. Jeels Thorpe is your host. Fire Eyes Media Mom has Weird raising voices while raising kids.